This paper began with the simple object of finding an account that allowed us to compare incompatible false theories. This we achieved with ρ. But that relation is language — or interest — dependent. ρ' is free from this limitation; though thus liberated it is perhaps rather unconcerned about what is true, and further fails to deliver certain intuitive comparisons. Whether ρ is to be preferred to ρ' or vice versa, seems to me a largely fruitless question: In fact it (...) might be that as we seek to free the idea of verisimilitude from any dependence on language, interests or problems, so we gradually collapse it to nothing more than logical power. (shrink)

Insurance is not well understood by most UK purchasers and many feel unease about it. Could this be partly due to the structure of the products on offer, and partly to the difficulties in obtaining good quality impartial advice? The author is Professor of Statistics, and a former Principal, at London Business School, Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, and a past President of the Institute of Actuaries.

Insurance is not well understood by most UK purchasers and many feel unease about it. Could this be partly due to the structure of the products on offer, and partly to the difficulties in obtaining good quality impartial advice? The author is Professor of Statistics, and a former Principal, at London Business School, Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, and a past President of the Institute of Actuaries.

The British National Lottery has now been running for almost three years and it arouses social and ethical misgivings in several quarters, whether in its contribution to the British gambling scene or in the size and distribution of its prizes or in its contributions to the good causes which it was introduced to benefit. Bringing wide experience and an expert eye to analyse and comment on the lottery, Dr Moore, DSc PhD FIA, is Emeritus Professor of Decision Sciences at London (...) Business School, Sussex Place, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4SA. (shrink)

The British National Lottery has now been running for almost three years and it arouses social and ethical misgivings in several quarters, whether in its contribution to the British gambling scene or in the size and distribution of its prizes or in its contributions to the good causes which it was introduced to benefit. Bringing wide experience and an expert eye to analyse and comment on the lottery, Dr Moore, DSc PhD FIA, is Emeritus Professor of Decision Sciences at London (...) Business School, Sussex Place, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4SA. (shrink)

In this article, I try to embark on an understanding of the work that the concept of freedom does, by distinguishing it from the concept of power. When we are interested in our power, we are interested in what we are able to do; it is plausible to think that when we are interested in freedom, we are interested in something else. The article is largely concerned with looking for this 'something else'. I suggest that freedom differs from power in (...) focusing on the constraints that we are under. When we are interested in freedom, the importance of these constraints is not particularly that they stop us doing things, because that is covered by considering our powers. I suggest that the constraints are important - if they are important at all - because some constraints insult our dignity. This suggests an alternative approach to the current focus on freedom as a property of actions: that of freedom as a property of persons. This idea is explored and defended. In a final section on republican freedom, I argue, against Pettit, that there is no distinctive concept of republican freedom ; but that there is a different - and a highly attractive - political theory present in republicanism. (shrink)

In 135b.c., unable to endure the treatment of their master Damophilus, a group of slaves, urged on by the wonder-worker Eunus, captured the city of Enna in Eastern Sicily in a night-time raid. The subsequent war, according to our sources the largest of its kind in antiquity, raged for three years, destroying the armies of Roman praetors, and engaging three consecutive consuls in its eventual suppression. The success of the rebels in holding out for years against a progression of Roman (...) armies indicates the importance of the event, and the capabilities of their leaders. One expects the man capable of leading such a revolt to have been exceptional, and in this respect the ancient accounts do not disappoint: in a narrative replete with larger-than-life characters, ranging from the depraved slave-owner Damophilus (Diod. Sic. 34/5.2.10, 35–8) to the restrained Roman consul Calpurnius Piso (Val. Max. 4.3.10), one figure stands out in Diodorus Siculus' depiction: the leader of the slaves. This man, Eunus, whom Diodorus describes as the leader of the event he calls the (first) Sicilian Slave War, has been variously interpreted in modern scholarship. Analyses have fallen into two (not mutually exclusive) categories. On the one hand, the hostile and outlandish account of Diodorus is accepted uncritically, with the details of Eunus' character understood as faithful, historical representations. On the other hand, the negative facets of Eunus' character are reinterpreted in a positive historical context, thereby outlining his suitability and capability to lead such a large and successful insurgency against Rome. Indeed, Urbainczyk recently argued that despite the difficulties in saying anything definite about the leaders of the so-called Sicilian Slave Wars ‘[Diodorus] attributed to [Eunus] all the powers, abilities, wisdom, and cunning that challenges to the status quo had to have in order to succeed’. (shrink)

Since 1990 it has been illegal in Britain to create human/animal hybrids. But what is the objection to hybrids? A proposal based on a fear of blurring conceptual boundaries is offered; this fear also seems to underlie several other of our deep-seated taboos, such as incest and bestiality, which are often explained in other, quite inappropriate, ways. The new law shows that the boundary between the human and the animal is still thought of as crucial and untransgressable in modern Britain, (...) yet it is not clear why; the world-views that in the past justified protecting this particular boundary are usually thought of as having been abandoned centuries ago. Thus it would seem that within our culture there are firmly entrenched taboos that are not readily justifiable from within that culture; the taboo against blurring the human/animal boundary is one such. This raises the question whether this human/animal boundary is one we should still want to protect in this way. (shrink)

The problematique addressed by the article is the growth of a dominant discourse in early childhood education and care, which has a strong effect on policy and practice, paralleled by an increasing number of other discourses which problematise most of the values, assumptions and understandings of the former. Yet there is very little engagement between these discourses, in large part because they are situated within different paradigms—modernity in the former case, postfoundationalism in the latter. The author argues that the absence (...) of dialogue and debate impoverishes early childhood and weakens democratic practice. The article considers whether and in what conditions the concept of agonistic pluralism might provide a framework for political engagement among at least some on either side of the paradigmatic divide, and takes evaluation as one example of a subject for an agonistic politics of early childhood. (shrink)

This chapter examines whether religion is adaptive: if it changes from one generation to another, from a specific culture to another, and how other domains of culture influence changes in a certain religion. It begins by providing the basics of evolution, including adaptation and selection of characteristics at multiple levels. It explains how religion promotes cooperation, and which elements of religion contribute to this and how effective they are. Also, it explores how established churches depend and select a certain frequency (...) of believers, as in the same community, same culture, etc. The chapter concludes that even in the presence of biological and cultural complexity and diversity, religions are unlikely to support generalizations about adaptation versus maladaptation. (shrink)

A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind is designed both to provide a selection of core readings on the subject and to make those readings accessible by providing commentaries to guide the reader through initially intimidating material. Each commentary explains technical concepts and provides background on obscure arguments as they arise, setting them in the historical and intellectual milieu from which they emerged. The readings concentrate on providing the student with a solid grounding in the theories of representative figures (...) of the major philosophical movements, from Plato and Aristotle to important recent figures such as Fodor and Dennett. A glossary of key terms is also included. (shrink)

"How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses and making inferences? According to the model of 'inference to the Best explanation', we work out what to inter from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves." (...) "The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contractive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and incudes a new bibliography."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

The perception of the Weimar Republic as the high-point of ‘classical modernity’ in which all areas of society were permeated by a fatal sense of crisis has been revised as an explanatory model in recent historiography. Historians have returned to this period with a new sense of the openness of the crisis environment, particularly in areas of social and cultural history. Male homosexuality emerged as a central theme of Weimar social and cultural crisis as it became possible for homosexual men (...) to imagine an identity and a ‘life’ for the first time. These men began to understand their lives as a continuum in terms of their sexuality and to express their lives in writing. The discourse of masculinist homosexuality, which emerged during the first decades of the 20th century, was used by some homosexuals as a means to self-identification and self-validation in the open environment of post-war early Weimar. However, this speculative framework of masculine comradeship and warrior ethos became less and less tenable as the internal contradictions as well as the socio-political pressures of the Republic increased. The paper explores the internal tensions between homosexuality and masculinist identity in two literary works from the Weimar Republic, Max René Hesse’s Partenau and Thomas Mann’s ‘Mario and the Magician’. (shrink)

In this series of articles, several new hypotheses on sleep and dreaming are presented. In each case, we feel the data do not adequately support the hypothesis. In their lengthy discourse, Hobson et al. represent to us the familiar reciprocal interaction model dressed in new clothes, but expanded beyond reasonable testability. Vertes & Eastman have proposed that REM sleep is not involved in memory consolidation. However, we do not find their arguments persuasive in that limited differences in activity in REM (...) and waking do not lend credence to the idea that memory consolidation occurs in one state and not the other. Solms makes an argument that dreams are generated from the dopaminergic forebrain based largely on pathological lesion studies in humans. We recognize that this argument has some intuitive appeal and agree with some of the tenets but we do not feel that the arguments are completely convincing due to the lack of anatomical controls, including symmetry and laterality. On the whole, there are interesting arguments put forward in these target articles but the evidence does not convince us that new vistas are opened. No Holy Grail of sleep here! [Hobson et al.; Solms; Vertes & Eastman]. (shrink)

I contend that s. Haack's proposed definition of fallibilism is unsatisfactory being equivalent to the assertion that we can believe anything. I say that fallibilism is best conceived as the doctrine that all our theories are false.

A basic theme of Winograd and Flores (1986) is that the principal function of language is to co-ordinate social activity. It is, they claim, from this function that meaning itself arises. They criticise approaches that try to understand meaning through the mechanisms of reference, the Rationalist Tradition as they call it. To seek to ground meaning in social practice is not new, but the approach is presently attractive because of difficulties encountered with the notion of reference. Without taking a view (...) on whether these are insuperable, the present paper accepts Winograd and Flores'' challenge and attempts to lay aside reference and to base a conception of meaning directly in terms of co-ordination and consensus within a linguistic community. (shrink)

The issues involved in decision making about the aggressiveness of future medical care for older persons are explored. They are related to population trends, the heterogeneity of older persons and a variety of factors involved in individual preferences. Case studies are presented to illustrate these points, as well as a review of pertinent literature. The argument is offered that, considering these many factors, a system of flexible, individualized care by informed patient preference, is more rational than the rationing of technological (...) services by age. (shrink)

The Earth is facing pressing societal grand challenges that require urgent managerial action. Responsible management learning has emerged as a discipline to prepare managers to act as responsible leaders that can effectively address such pressing challenges. This article aims to extend current knowledge on RML in the domain of corporate sustainability through the application of threshold concepts, novel ideas which provide a doorway to new knowledge and transform a learner’s mindset. Specifically, after conducting a systematic review of the management literature, (...) we identify 33 CS threshold concepts that are useful for mainstream managers and practitioners in their RML process. We group them into six CS threshold concept themes that can help managers understand the complexities and interconnectedness that characterize CS. Finally, we map CS threshold concepts with key competences for effective RML. Therefore, our contribution relies on translating existing CS theoretical frameworks into transformative, specific, understandable and applicable pieces of knowledge that might help mainstream managers to embed CS principles in their daily management practices. (shrink)

The Earth is facing pressing societal grand challenges that require urgent managerial action. Responsible management learning has emerged as a discipline to prepare managers to act as responsible leaders that can effectively address such pressing challenges. This article aims to extend current knowledge on RML in the domain of corporate sustainability through the application of threshold concepts, novel ideas which provide a doorway to new knowledge and transform a learner’s mindset. Specifically, after conducting a systematic review of the management literature, (...) we identify 33 CS threshold concepts that are useful for mainstream managers and practitioners in their RML process. We group them into six CS threshold concept themes that can help managers understand the complexities and interconnectedness that characterize CS. Finally, we map CS threshold concepts with key competences for effective RML. Therefore, our contribution relies on translating existing CS theoretical frameworks into transformative, specific, understandable and applicable pieces of knowledge that might help mainstream managers to embed CS principles in their daily management practices. (shrink)

Peter Pagin Is the principle of semantic compositionality compatible with the principle of semantic holism? The question is of interest, since both principles have a lot that speaks for them, and since they do seem to be in conflict. The view that natural languages have compositional structure is almost unavoidable, since linguistic communication by means of new combinations of words would be virtually incomprehensible otherwise. And holism too seems generally plausible, since the meaning of an expression is directly connected (...) with the way that expression interacts with other. (shrink)

The Trompenaars database (1993) updated with Hampden-Turner (1998) has been assembled to help managers structure their cross cultural experiences in order to develop their competence for doing business and managing across the world. The database comprises more than 50,000 cases from over 100 countries and is one of the world's richest sources of social constructs. Woolliams and Trompenaars (1998) review the analysis undertaken by the authors in the last five years to develop the methodological approach underpinning the work. Recently Trompenaars (...) with Hampden-Turner (Trompenaars and Woolliams, 1999) have extended the concepts into a new model on dilemma reconciliation of cultural differences. This paper reviews these latest updates in relation to dilemmas of cross-cultural business ethics. The paper asserts that knowledge in relation to business ethics is culturally specific; and that ethnocentrism is not easy to avoid. Too great an emphasis on rational-analytic conceptions of reality may mean that syntheses, emotion, and intuition, are not adequately developed. This presents implications for doing business and managing across cultures and for resolving ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of Essay Concerning Human Understanding by P. H. Nidditch. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.