One approach to understanding model-based reasoning in science is to examine how it develops during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The way in which thinking changes sometimes provides clues to its nature. This paper examines cognitive developmental aspects of modeling practices and discusses how a developmental perspective can enrich the study of model-based scientific reasoning in adults. The paper begins with issues concerning developmental change, followed by a model of model-based reasoning. The rest of the paper describes how several key concepts (...) from recent developmental work could contribute to current work on model-based reasoning. Specifically, developmental research shows that (a) social processes are involved in model-based reasoning and scientific discovery, (b) the development of a theory of mind contributes to the development of scientific reasoning, (c) changes in scientific reasoning are characterized by cognitive variability, and (d) microgenetic methods could clarify conceptual change during model-based reasoning. (shrink)

Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations brings together new essays by leading literary scholars of the British and European middle ages and early modern period who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The contributors evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in critical debates including those of nationalism, formal analysis, and literary careerism.

In this paper we set out to explore the claims that corporate social responsibility (CSR) itself is little more than a complementary extension of the project of coloniality initiated by the Enlightenment (e.g. Banerjee 2019). We will not dispute that claim. Rather we will develop three points. First, we will apply a non-linear, systems approach to demonstrate how we all, of any color, ethnic origin or historical location are all part of an interconnected interrelated sets of systems—what some thinkers call (...) a complex adaptive system or systems (e.g., Miller and Page 2007) so that dismissing or degrading any particular ethnic, gender, or racial group is dismissing part of our history and origin. Secondly, we will argue that Enlightenment, coloniality, as well as neo-coloniality, and decoloniality sprung up from the Enlightenment projects themselves. Thus, the very critiques of Enlightenment, accurate as they may be, evolved from that perspective and have to be taken into account even in those critiques. Third, what appears to be an “either-or” – that is, that commerce should stick to business and not engage in political activities (forms of neocolonialism) or accept these business-political activities despite critiques – is not a simple choice. Rather, conceding that commerce and political systems cannot be nicely separated, we will provide some principles or ways to evaluate these activities, seemingly ubiquitous particularly in emerging economies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Legacy of Parmenides, Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought by Patricia CurdMitchell MillerPatricia Curd. The Legacy of Parmenides, Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 280. Cloth, $45.00.Curd confronts a puzzle in early Greek philosophy. Parmenides’ teaching is traditionally understood as “numerical monism”: “there is only one thing or item in the universe” (66). But his successors, though accepting (...) his key claims that “what-is-not” is not to be thought and becoming must therefore be denied, begin straightaway, without argument, from a plurality of ultimate entities—Anaxagoras from the chremata, Empedocles from his four roots and Love and Strife, Leucippus and Democritus from atoms and the void. Did they peremptorily reject Parmenides’ monism? Did they simply fail to understand it? Curd proposes, instead, that Parmenides was not a “numerical monist” in the first place. Recasting Mourelatos’ notion of speculative predication, she offers accounts of the Aletheia- and the Doxa-sections of the poem in which Parmenides emerges as a “predicational monist.” In the Aletheia, Curd’s Parmenides subjects to critique the predications by which inquiry arrives at the “nature” of something; the “signs” of B8 are the criteria that, in accord with his rejection of negative predications as uninformative, each “nature” must meet. It is not the “universe” but rather each “nature” by itself that must be “a whole of a single kind” (B8.3), “all together one, cohesive” (B8.5–6), and “not divisible” (B8.22)—how many such “natures” a theory may posit is simply not at issue. In the Doxa, Curd’s Parmenides has a twofold purpose: by the “deceptive order of [the goddess’] words” Parmenides poses a test, challenging his hearers to recognize that since “Light” and “Night” are “enantiomorphic opposites” with each in its very “nature” not the other, they fail to meet the criteria of B8; at the same time, he provides a model that we can use to assess or construct cosmological theories. By this interpretation of Parmenides Curd clears the ground for her account of his “legacy.” In her final chapters she offers pointed readings of Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the Atomists, Philolaus, Diogenes of Apollonia, and early Plato, arguing that each adopts Parmenides’ “predicational monism,” affirming the indivisibly one and unchanging character of each of the “natures” fundamental to the sensible world.This major new proposal will be of compelling interest to all scholars of the presocratics. Some possible limitations and basic questions to consider:1. There are significant regions of the proem, of presocratic thought, and of modern commentary yet to be examined. B9, crucial to interpreting the error of mortals at B8.53–54, and the orienting symbolism in the proem are only cursorily treated. Hesiod gets barely a mention in Curd’s otherwise valuable survey of the appeals to opposites in pre-Parmenidean thought. In taking the early Owen’s existential reading of Parmenides’ [End Page 157] esti and her own notion of the “is” of “informative identity” as the two fundamental alternatives, she leaves undiscussed the so-called “fused” predicative-existential reading.2. How narrowly focused does Curd’s reading require us to keep Parmenides’ esti? When she discusses B8, she speaks of “what-is” and “what-is-not.” But if we approach B8 in light of her reading of B2 and read to eon in the context of a speculative predication of the form “x is F,” shouldn’t we speak of it as “what x is”—and of the corresponding negation as “what x is not”? Does Curd seek to preserve the veridical-existential implication of “x is F,” namely, that as the nature that defines x, it is F that truly or most fully exists? Clarification of this issue need not require an either/or choice between senses of “is.” It may well be that to appreciate fully Parmenides’ krisis, “is or is not,” and his paradoxical notion of “nothing,” we need to recover an interplay between speculative-predicative, existential, and veridical nuances—especially if, with Curd, we open ourselves to an unfolding history of perspectives extending all the way to Plato.3. To construe Parmenides as only a “predicational monist” requires... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”Patricia B. PhillippyApproaches to Teaching Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” edited by David Lee Miller and Alexander Dunlop; ix & 207 pp. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994, $37.50.In many respects, the teaching of Spenser’s Faerie Queene is an experience that most completely encapsulates both the challenges and the rewards of introducing students to the literature of the early modern period. (...) As a work whose length, complex narratives, substantial cast of characters, and polyvocal allegories are often daunting to undergraduates, Spenser’s epic can easily appear as a riddle to be solved rather than a work to be appreciated, let alone enjoyed. Too frequently the constraints of the syllabus and the resistance of students result in a one-dimensional rendering of the text, which permits students to feel that they have “learned something” about Spenser, and about literature generally, by seeing simple, point-by-point allegorizations (Archimago as the Pope, Duessa as Catholicism) as the work’s whole meaning. However, if these difficulties can be surmounted, few other works can equal the great opportunities available in The Faerie Queene to enrich students’ understanding of Elizabethan aesthetic, ethical, social, and political climates, and, perhaps more significantly, to impress upon them the fact that literature, as the most self-conscious of written works, seeks to elicit a multiplicity of meanings from its readers. Thus the task of critical reading appropriately moves toward expansiveness rather than inclusiveness, toward calling forth a plethora of meanings rather than eliminating all but the one “right” reading.Valuable help in overcoming the problems posed by Spenser’s work in the classroom is found in Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” The collection includes six essays that suggest various strategies for introducing the text to students, and nine essays devoted to more advanced study of the poem. The majority of essays in the former group concentrate on Book 1, and negotiate the practical difficulties of incorporating The Faerie Queene into undergraduate survey courses by suggesting methods to help students to bridge the gap between the work’s cultural context and their own, while also stressing the need to appreciate the text’s distinctiveness.The “special topics” essays treat individual books and themes within a variety of methodological frameworks and in light of cultural touchstones, such as the Renaissance association of painting and poetry (aided by the volume’s eight illustrations), Elizabethan colonial and imperial attitudes about Ireland, and early modern treatises and conduct books describing women’s character. A “Materials” section includes a descriptive bibliography of texts for classroom use and for students’ assigned readings, a wonderfully inclusive bibliography describing editions, reference works, background reading, and critical interpretations for the instructor’s use, and an outline of aids to teaching, such as portraits, films, and music. Even the experienced teacher of Spenser will find this a useful summary of the available materials. [End Page 278]While rooted in practical pedagogy, the essays in this collection also, for the most part, offer provocative comments on Spenser’s poem that are of scholarly interest beyond the classroom as well. Julia M. Walker’s discussion of Britomart alongside Elizabethan portraiture and Dorothy Stephens’ reading of the “feminine” in Book 4 are abridgments of longer articles from Modern Philology and ELH, respectively, and Theresa M. Krier’s provocative comments on the gendering of Spenserian symbol and allegory point toward her work in progress. Overall, the collection recommends numerous innovative techniques to energize and enliven one’s teaching of the poem and to enhance students’ experiences of it. While teachers’ awareness of the demographics and dynamics of their own students may preclude the adoption of specific approaches suggested in this volume, its essays dramatically illustrate the need to avoid reductive readings of The Faerie Queene and, at the same time, offer worthwhile guidance to prevent students from wandering endlessly through the woods of semiotic indeterminacy, error, and despair.Patricia B. PhillippyTexas A&M UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

A review of Patricia Curd's Legacy of Parmenides, with a stress on her seminal recognition of the implications of his immediate successors' apparent acceptance of plurality within the unity of being.

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other (...) with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the... (shrink)

After much of the 20th Century, when morals were widely considered little more than mere emotional responses, a range of writers, such as Haidt, Prinz, and Patricia Churchland, have been restoring the emotions’ respectable roles in human cognition and morality. Nussbaum in her Upheavals of Thought showed how important emotions are for human cognitive life, so there is no clear distinction between their “irrationality” and the cerebral cortex’s supposed “rationality.” In Political Emotions, Nussbaum asks readers to look into how (...) pivotally emotions affect political life, especially how we may best gear our emotions for political liberalism. As she convincingly urges, politics depend upon our emotions; we neglect them to our detriment lest demagogues commandeer them. She argues a hazardous case, and by the end anyone who cares about liberal democracy should accede to emotions’ centrality in it.Nussbaum builds her case upon what she deems partially failed models for a civic religion as pro .. (shrink)

This review describes central difficulties in the interdisciplinary study of dreaming, summarizes Jouvet's account of his role in the history of modern dream science, queries his positive speculations on the semantics of dreaming, and suggests work for historians of neuroscience.

In Emotions and Reasons, Patricia Greenspan offers an evaluative theory of emotion that assigns emotion a role of its own in the justification of action. She analyzes emotions as states of object-directed affect with evaluative propositional content possibly falling short of belief and held in mind by generalized comfort or discomfort.

During the first two years of human life a common neural substrate underlies the hierarchical organization of elements in the development of speech as well as the capacity to combine objects manually, including tool use. Subsequent cortical differentiation, beginning at age two, creates distinct, relatively modularized capacities for linguistic grammar and more complex combination of objects. An evolutionary homologue of the neural substrate for language production and manual action is hypothesized to have provided a foundation for the evolution of language (...) before the divergence of the hominids and the great apes. Support comes from the discovery of a Broca's area homologue and related neural circuits in contemporary primates. In addition, chimpanzees have an identical constraint on hierarchical complexity in both tool use and symbol combination. Their performance matches that of the two-year-old child who has not yet developed the neural circuits for complex grammar and complex manual combination of objects. (shrink)

Introduction A book with this title, dealing as it does with the political machinery and political education appropriate to a democratic society, ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” (...) as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

1993: GE’s NBC News unit issues an on-air apology to General Motors for staging a misleading simulated crash test. NBC agrees to pay GM’s estimated $1 million legal and investigation expenses.February 1994: The Justice Department brought a criminal antitrust case against General Electric, accusing it of conspiring with an arm of the South African DeBeers diamond cartel to fix prices in the $600 million world market for industrial diamonds. General Electric denied wrongdoing...

In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a ...

This book explains how P4C can facilitate young people's exploration of key ethical concerns of our time, such as sustainability, justice and intercultural and ...

In this chapter, I defend a pluralistic approach to intertheoretic reduction, in which reduction is not understood in terms of a single philosophical “generalized model”, but rather as a family of models that can help achieve certain epistemic and ontological goals. I will argue then that the reductive model (or combination of models) that best suits to a particular case study depends on the specific goals that motivate the reduction in the intended case study.

In this dissertation, I argue that Heidegger offers a philosophy of science by explicating that philosophy of science. The following chapter presents Heidegger's early analysis of modern science, from 1916 to the mid-1930s. During these years Heidegger maintains two theses: that the essence of science is the mathematical projection of nature; and that metaphysics is the science of being. As the latter thesis becomes more problematic, Heidegger turns from metaphysics as a science, to the sciences. ;The pivot for this turn (...) is the experiment. Chapter 3 is an analysis of three specific issues surrounding the experiment. I raise the question of whether a single experimental result is enough to overturn a theory, the problem of the theory-loadedness of observation, and the question of representation. ;These issues serve to explicate Heidegger's claim that the essence of science is research, and to show that Heidegger's philosophy of science shares issues with contemporary analytic philosophy of science. Further, I take Heidegger's claim that the essence of science is the ground from out of which the essence of the modern epoch can be shown, as proof that his consideration of science is not secondary in his thinking but rather is the basis from which his critique of the modern epoch is made. ;Chapter 4 is an account of Heidegger's view of the role of science in the university. Heidegger's vision is that the German university can serve to guide historical destiny. His complete disillusionment with that vision comes with his realization that, whereas he calls for a renewal of science for the sake of the sciences in their service of the people, the Nazi call for a renewal of the sciences is toward their own political ends. What little I have to say about Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis is found in this chapter. ;Chapter 5 considers Heidegger's view of ancient science. It lays out Aristotle's distinction between physis and techne under Heidegger's reading. In Chapter 6, I argue that the ancient distinction between physis and techne is not sustained in the modern epoch under Heidegger's account. ;I close with a brief account of Heidegger on quantum theory. (shrink)

Psychopaths are agents who lack the normal capacity to feel moral emotions (e.g. guilt based on empathy with the victims of their actions). Evidence for attributing psychopathy at least in some cases to genetic or early childhood causes suggests that psychopaths lack free will. However, the paper defends a sense in which psychopaths still may be construed as responsible for their actions, even if their degree of responsibility is less than that of normal agents. Responsibility is understood in Strawsonian terms, (...) as a question of our appropriate reactive attitudes toward an agent for what she does, and as distinct from the question of the agent's own motivating attitudes, which lead him to do what he does. The latter is the question more directly relevant to free will, though moral motivation normally depends on the capacity in early childhood to pick up motivating attitudes from others' reactive attitudes. Reactive attitudes based on hatred rather than anger (e.g. disgust or contempt) count as alternative forms of blame that may be appropriately directed toward agents manifesting bad qualities of will, even as a matter of motivational impairment. So psychopaths may still be said to deserve blame, even if they are incapable of modifying their behavior in response to blame. (shrink)

Empirically minded philosophers have raised questions about judgments and theories based on moral intuitions such as Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium. But they work from the notion of intuitions assumed in empirical work, according to which intuitions are immediate assessments, as in psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s definition. Haidt himself regards such intuitions as an appropriate basis for moral judgment, arguing that normal agents do not reason prior to forming a judgment and afterwards just “confabulate” reasons in its defense. I argue, first, (...) that the notion of “considered intuitive judgment” that Rawls spells out when he first presents his method is pre-theoretical, but not at all pre-reflective, in the way Haidt’s definition supposes; it may rest on various forms of reasoning short of systematic derivation from theoretical principles. I go on to take issue with Haidt’s dismissal of ex post facto moral reasoning, arguing that it can play both a causal role in an individual’s later intuitions or judgments and a legitimate normative role, as required by moral competence in judging non-taboo cases. I suggest that the move from intuition to judgment and thence to ex post facto reasoning makes sense as a justificatory version of Peircean abduction, or what is now mainly called “inference to the best explanation.”. (shrink)

I use a version of the case in "sophie's choice" as an example of the strongest sort of dilemma, With all options seriously wrong, And no permissible way of choosing one of them. This is worse, I argue, Than a choice between conflicting obligations, Where the agent has an overriding obligation "to choose", And does nothing wrong, Once the choice is made, By ignoring one of his prior obligations. Here, "contra" marcus, Guilt seems inappropriate.

This paper updates, modifies, and extends an account of psychopaths’ responsibility and blameworthiness that depends on behavioral control rather than moral knowledge. Philosophers mainly focus on whether psychopaths can be said to grasp moral rules as such, whereas it seems to be important to their blameworthiness that typical psychopaths are hampered by impulsivity and other barriers to exercising self-control. I begin by discussing an atypical case, for contrast, of a young man who was diagnosed as a psychopath at one point (...) but who lacks the element of impulsivity. He exhibits the usual deficits of empathy and related moral emotions, but by now he has developed effective alternative means of conforming to moral rules, essentially on the basis of self-interest. I think it does seem reasonable to hold him morally responsible if he should violate a rule, despite his refusal to acknowledge any specifically moral reasons. I then turn to more typical cases, arguing that blameworthiness is mitigated by the difficulty of learning alternative means of self-control. In a departure from my earlier work, I do not take responsibility to have degrees. But since both blameworthiness and freedom to do otherwise have degrees that depend on the same factors, I go on to explain how it can be reasonable to blame a typical psychopath for an act he may not have been free to avoid. More generally, my suggestion is that notions commonly conflated in philosophers’ treatments of responsibility should be prized apart. (shrink)