"Annual General Meeting Members Lunch." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (202), pp. 17.

Philosophers of mathematics often rely on the historical progress of mathematics in support of mathematical realism. These histories typically build on formal semantic tools to evaluate the changes in mathematics, and on these bases present later mathematical concepts as refined versions of earlier concepts which are taken to be vague. Claiming that this view does not apply to mathematical concepts in general, we present a case-study concerning projective geometry, for which we apply the tools of cognitive linguistics to analyse the (...) developmental trajectory of the domain. On the basis of this analysis, we argue for the existence of two conceptually incompatible inferential structures, occurring at distinct moments in history, both of which yield the same projective geometric theorems; the first invoked by the French mathematicians Girard Desargues (1591–1661) and Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788–1867), and the second characterising a specific modern mode. We demonstrate that neither of these inferential structures can be considered as a refinement of the other. This case of conceptual development presents an issue to the standard account of progress and its bearing on mathematical realism. Our analysis suggests that the features that distinguish the underlying conceptually incompatible inferential structures are invisible to the standard application of the tools of formal semantics. Thus this case-study stands as an example of the manner and necessity of linguistics—specifically cognitive linguistics—to inform the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Traces the development of recursive functions from their origins in the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s, with particular emphasis on the work and influence of Kurt Gödel.

The West has created categories of property, including intellectual property, which divides peoples and things according to the same colonizing discourses of possessive individualism that historically disentitled and disenfranchised Native peoples in North America. These categories are often presented as one or both of neutral and natural, and often racialized. The commodification and removal of land from people’s social relations which inform Western valuations of cultural value and human beings living in communities represents only one particular, partial way of categorizing (...) the world. Legal and cultural manifestations of authorship, culture, and property are contingent upon Enlightenment and Romantic notions built upon a colonial foundation. I will argue that the law rips apart what First Nations peoples view as integrally and relationally joined, but traditional Western understandings of culture, identity, and property are provoked, challenged, and undermined by the concept of Aboriginal Title in a fashion that is both necessary and long overdue. (shrink)

In Part 1 the reader is introduced to some standard systems of modal logic and encouraged through a series of exercises to become proficient in manipulating these logics. The emphasis is on possible world semantics for modal logics and the semantic emphasis is carried into the formal method, Jeffrey-style truth-trees. Standard truth-trees are extended in a simple and transparent way to take possible worlds into account. Part 2 systematically explores the applications of modal logic to philosophical issues such as truth, (...) time, processes, knowledge and belief, obligation and permission. Accessible, authoritative, and assured, Modal Logics and Philosophy requires no more background than the completion of a standard introductory logic course. It will be welcomed not only by students looking for a bridge between introductory logic texts and the high-level technical literature but as a guide to, and exploration of, work at the forefront of logic and philosophy. (shrink)

The first edition, published by Acumen in 2000, became a prescribed textbook on modal logic courses. The second edition has been fully revised in response to readers' suggestions, including two new chapters on conditional logic, which was not covered in the first edition. "Modal Logics and Philosophy" is a fully comprehensive introduction to modal logics and their application suitable for course use. Unlike most modal logic textbooks, which are both forbidding mathematically and short on philosophical discussion, "Modal Logics and Philosophy" (...) places its emphasis firmly on showing how useful modal logic can be as a tool for formal philosophical analysis. In part 1 of the book, the reader is introduced to some standard systems of modal logic and encouraged through a series of exercises to become proficient in manipulating these logics. The emphasis is on possible world semantics for modal logics and the semantic emphasis is carried into the formal method, Jeffrey-style truth-trees. Standard truth-trees are extended in a simple and transparent way to take possible worlds into account. Part 2 systematically explores the applications of modal logic to philosophical issues such as truth, time, processes, knowledge and belief, obligation and permission. (shrink)

Siopis has always engaged in a critical and controversial way with the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in South Africa. For politically sensitive artists whose work has involved confronting the injustices of apartheid, the current post-apartheid situation has forced a reassessment of their practice and the terms on which they might engage with the fundamental changes which are now affecting all of South African society. Where mythologies of race and ethnicity have been strategically foregrounded in the art of any engaged (...) artist, to the exclusion of many other concerns, the demise of apartheid offers the possibility of exploring other dimensions of lived experience in South Africa. For feminists, this is potentially a very positive moment when questions of gender – so long subordinated to the structural issue of ‘race’ under apartheid – can now be explored. Penny Siopis’ work has long been concerned with the lived and historical relations between black and white women in South Africa. The discussion focuses on the ambivalent and dependent relationships formed between white middle-class women and black domestic labour during apartheid. Siopis’ work engages with how the appropriation of black women's time, lives, labour and bodies has shaped her ‘own’ history. (shrink)

The essays in this book range over the fields of environmental ethics, business ethics, professional ethics, and bio-medical ethics. In each of the essays a significant question in the field of applied ethics is treated in a way that is methodologically revealing and provides some sense of new directions and preoccupations in the field. Among the questions discussed are: How should we conceive of the relations between theoretical ethics and practical ethics? What is the nature of responsible moral reasoning and (...) deliberation? To what extent is rationality ultimately the same in morality and science? Is applied ethics inherently conventional or conservative in its deliberations and results? Can or should specialists in applied ethics claim moral expertise in relation to problems in a given domain? TO what extent is the personal history of persons working in the field opf applied ethics relevant to assessing their work? While the contributors appear to agree on the answers to some of these questions, there is spirited disagreement concerning others. (shrink)

Robert I. Soare, Automorphisms of the Lattice of Recursively Enumerable Sets. Part I: Maximal Sets.Manuel Lerman, Robert I. Soare, $d$-Simple Sets, Small Sets, and Degree Classes.Peter Cholak, Automorphisms of the Lattice of Recursively Enumerable Sets.Leo Harrington, Robert I. Soare, The $\Delta^0_3$-Automorphism Method and Noninvariant Classes of Degrees.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the myths of the ancient world to the Middle Ages to Darwin and beyond, Preece captures the most telling and fascinating accounts of humankind's ...

Construed broadly as interpretation theory, hermeneutics could be understood to encompass all modes of interpretation (textual or otherwise), including any kind of literary criticism, from Aristotle's poetics to the New Criticism of the 1950s, as well as the French tradition of structuralism and even perhaps Derridean poststructural thought. Although Gadamer and Ricoeur both recognize the poetic work or, at least, lyric poetry, as belonging to a special class of literature, they do display somewhat different attitudes toward it. For Gadamer, one (...) of the hallmarks of the eminent text is its un‐translatability. That is, all literary works resist translation to one degree or another, but lyric poetry defies it altogether. In Part I of Truth and Method, Gadamer lays out the history of aesthetics and takes issue with the kind of “aesthetic consciousness” that takes the work of art as an object of study. (shrink)

Ever since Saul Kripke and others developed a semantic interpretation for modal logic, 'possible worlds' has been a much debated issue in contemporary metaphysics. To propose the idea of a possible world that differs in some way from our actual world - for example a world where the grass is red or where no people exist - can help us to analyse and understand a wide range of philosophical concepts, such as counterfactuals, properties, modality, and of course, the notions of (...) possibility and necessity. This book examines the ways in which possible worlds have been used as a framework for considering problems in logic and argument analysis. The book begins with a non-technical introduction to the basic ideas of modal logic in terms of Kripke's possible worlds and then moves on to a discussion of 'possible for' and 'possible that'. The central chapters examine questions of meaning, epistemic possibility, temporal logic, metaphysics, and impossibility. Girle also investigates how the idea of a possible world can be put to use in different areas of philosophy, the problems it may raise, and the benefits that can be gained. (shrink)

Ever since Saul Kripke and others developed a semantic interpretation for modal logic, 'possible worlds' has been a much debated issue in contemporary metaphysics. To propose the idea of a possible world that differs in some way from our actual world - for example a world where the grass is red or where no people exist - can help us to analyse and understand a wide range of philosophical concepts, such as counterfactuals, properties, modality, and of course, the notions of (...) possibility and necessity. This book examines the ways in which possible worlds have been used as a framework for considering problems in logic and argument analysis. The book begins with a non-technical introduction to the basic ideas of modal logic in terms of Kripke's possible worlds and then moves on to a discussion of 'possible for' and 'possible that'. The central chapters examine questions of meaning, epistemic possibility, temporal logic, metaphysics, and impossibility. Girle also investigates how the idea of a possible world can be put to use in different areas of philosophy, the problems it may raise, and the benefits that can be gained. (shrink)

A critique of ‘beyond left and right’ ideologies, from red Toryism to techno-libertarianism.

We argue that the Soros account of reflexivity does not provide a clear-cut distinction between a social science such as economics and the physical sciences. It is pointed out that the participants who attempt to learn from refutations of conjectures in the Soros world are likely to be haunted by the Duhem–Quine problem of conjointness of hypotheses and unfocused refutation. On a more constructive note, we argue that models of inductive learning, in which participants form conjectures on the basis of (...) strictly limited information sets, can capture the basic thrust of the Soros position. The conjectures are in motion, as the participants attempt to avoid those that are systematically wrong, and there is something vague and uncertain about what can be learned from experience and refutations. The only notion of market efficiency in this world is one contingent on the strictly limited and varied information sets in play. Finally we present a mathematical model and numerical simulations that help justify the causal relationship between reflexivity and far-from-equilibrium dynamics postulated by Soros. (shrink)

In their book, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Depew and Weber (1995) argued for the need to address the relationship between self-organization and natural selection in evolutionary theory, and focused on seven “visions” for doing so. Recently, Batten et al. (2008) in a paper in this journal, entitled “Visions of evolution: self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes,” picked up the issue with the work of Depew and Weber as a starting point. While the efforts of (...) both sets of authors are to be commended, there are substantive errors in both the presentations of my work and of my work with colleagues (one of the “visions” discussed) that undermine theirs. My purpose here is to correct the errors in question, thereby removing the undermining effects and in so doing reassert the position my colleagues and I first advanced more than two decades ago, and that I still stand by and argue for today. The central points are as follows: (1) Self-organization or spontaneous ordering is a process of selection; (2) this selection process is governed by a “physical selection principle”; (3) this principle is the law of maximum entropy production; and (4) natural selection is a special case where the components are replicating. (shrink)

We construct a $\Delta^0_2$ degree which fails to be computably enumerable in any computably enumerable set strictly below $\emptyset'$.

We classify the asymptotic densities of the sets according to their level in the Ershov hierarchy. In particular, it is shown that for, a real is the density of an n‐c.e. set if and only if it is a difference of left‐ reals. Further, we show that the densities of the ω‐c.e. sets coincide with the densities of the sets, and there are ω‐c.e. sets whose density is not the density of an n‐c.e. set for any.

In their book, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Depew and Weber argued for the need to address the relationship between self-organization and natural selection in evolutionary theory, and focused on seven “visions” for doing so. Recently, Batten et al. in a paper in this journal, entitled “Visions of evolution: self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes,” picked up the issue with the work of Depew and Weber as a starting point. While the efforts of both sets (...) of authors are to be commended, there are substantive errors in both the presentations of my work and of my work with colleagues that undermine theirs. My purpose here is to correct the errors in question, thereby removing the undermining effects and in so doing reassert the position my colleagues and I first advanced more than two decades ago, and that I still stand by and argue for today. The central points are as follows: Self-organization or spontaneous ordering is a process of selection; this selection process is governed by a “physical selection principle”; this principle is the law of maximum entropy production; and natural selection is a special case where the components are replicating. (shrink)

This paper attempts to undermine Michael McKinsey’s Important objections to Kripke’s attempts to refute cluster versions of description theories of name reference. McKinsey argues that Kripke Ignores descriptions to which a clustser theorist might appeal In constructing his counterexamples, but that these same descriptions are what guide our intuitions In evaluating the examples. I argue that the descriptions McKinsey offers are question-begging, and thus of no help to a cluster theorist. In a second brief section, I offer an argument designed (...) to show that even If McKinsey*s descriptions were legitimate, the views Kripke endorses in "Naming and Necessity" would be supported rather than vitiated. (shrink)

Social entrepreneurship activity continues to surge tremendously in market and economic systems around the world. Yet, social entrepreneurship theory and understanding lag far behind its practice. For instance, the nature of the entrepreneurial discovery phenomenon, a critical area of inquiry in general entrepreneurship theory, receives no attention in the specific context of social entrepreneurship. To address the gap, we conceptualize social entrepreneurial discovery based on an extension of corporate social responsibility into social entrepreneurship contexts. We develop a model that emphasizes (...) mobilization and timing as underpinnings of social entrepreneurial discovery and offer distinct conceptual aspects and theoretic propositions instrumental to future social entrepreneurship research. (shrink)

The usual treatment of a dinner table utterance of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is that it involves an indirect request to pass the salt as well as a direct question about the hearer’s ability to do so: an indirect speech act. These are held to involve two illocutionary forces and two illocutionary acts. Rod Bertolet has raised doubts about whether consideration of such examples warrants the postulation of indirect speech acts and illocutionary forces other than the literal ones. In (...) a recent article, Mary Kate McGowan, Shan Shan Tam, and Margaret Hall claim to show that these doubts are unfounded. The purpose of this paper is to show that they have not established this. (shrink)