This study sought to identify content on the federal budget, national debt, and budget deficit in the 12 most commonly used high school and college-leveleconomics textbooks. Our systematic review of these sources leads to two key findings: (1) Textbooks are similar in how they represent fiscal policy yet treatthe federal budget, deficit, and debt differently across the sample, and (2) Textbooks treat the federal budget, budget deficit, and national debt as theoretical, without an examination of values and systemic electoral and (...) budgetary politics. These findings lead us to argue that curriculum is needed that will permit a careful examination of how everyday citizens can gain knowledge, acknowledge values, and work towards a reasoned and realitybased view of what is at stake with regard to these issues in the 21st Century. (shrink)

"The legendary Cava di Gioia quarry in Carrara, Italy, was the source of the luminous white marble used by Michelangelo, Bernini, Henry Moore, and other renowned sculptors.... Wylie is the first photographer to extensively document Cava di Gioia since Ilario Besi.... For six years, Wylie photographed the changing landscape of the quarry, and his images capture the intense physical scale of the site, the dramatic setting, and the character of the stonecutters, or cavatori, who have worked the quarry (...) for generations."--book jacket flap. (shrink)

In organizing a plenary session to mark the Quincentennial at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, our aim was not to provide a summary or review of archaeological research bearing on our understanding of "Columbian consequences." Rather, we sought speakers who could raise forward-looking questions about the sociopolitical entanglements and consequences of archaeology considered as, itself, part of the legacy of contact. The papers that follow, by Vine Deloria, Jalil Sued-Badillo, and Brackette F. Williams, all take (...) up these issues and draw out implications for future practice; this introduction provides something of a rationale for the session that brought these authors together. (shrink)

Ethicists and social scientists alike have advocated for the inclusion of vulnerable populations in research and decision-making on climate engineering. Unfortunately, there have been few efforts to do so. The research presented in this paper was designed to build knowledge about how vulnerable populations think about climate engineering. The goal of this manuscript is to bring the ethics literature on climate engineering into dialogue with emerging social science data documenting the perspectives of vulnerable populations. The results indicate some concerns among (...) vulnerable populations may resemble those outlined by ethicists. However, the perspectives expressed by interviewees also extend previous ethical treatments by indicating ways in which climate engineering could compound existing injustices. (shrink)

At the climax of Ender's Game, we see Ender exhausted and at wit's end. Sorting out the mess of who is actually responsible for what is difficult–we feel conflicted about the whole thing, just as Ender does. In this chapter, Aristotle helps us make sense of responsibility and voluntary action and considers whether a person can be responsible for something that he or she did not cause. It looks at why we should care about whether a fictional character is responsible (...) and consider an alternative notion of responsibility that explains Ender's post‐xenocide actions as Speaker for the Dead. The chapter first establishes what moral responsibility is and then contrasts moral responsibility with causal responsibility. He is not to blame for the destruction of the buggers, he does what he can to try to make things right. (shrink)

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than conclude on this basis that archaeological facts and fictions are indistinguishable, (...) I identify a number of strategies that archaeologists rely on to make discerning use of “legacy” data – archaeological data recovered and curated over for decades, even centuries, often for very different purposes than those that animate contemporary archaeological inquiry. These include source criticism, secondary retrieval, repositioning and recontextualizing these data in ways that can, sometimes radically shift the “facts” associated with them. The construction of critical genealogies of these facts – the travels and transformations of the material, interpretive and narrative facts of archaeology – is a crucial condition for the successful exploitation of these epistemic possibilities. (shrink)

Material traces of the past are notoriously inscrutable; they rarely speak with one voice, and what they say is never unmediated. They stand as evidence only given a rich scaffolding of interpretation which is, itself, always open to challenge and revision. And yet archaeological evidence has dramatically expanded what we know of the cultural past, sometimes demonstrating a striking capacity to disrupt settled assumptions. The questions we address in Evidential Reasoning are: How are these successes realized? What gives us confidence (...) in the credibility and robustness, the trustworthiness, of the evidential claims based on archaeological data? And, what constitute best practices in building evidential claims, critically scrutinizing them and putting them to work in archaeological contexts? Rather than retreat to abstractions about how how science operates in the ideal, we approach this question by interrogating a number of close-to-the-ground case studies with the aim of teasing out the wisdom embodied in archaeological practice. The cases we consider – of fieldwork, strategies for working with old evidence, and the role of external resources – illuminate the role of various types of inferential scaffolding and bring into focus practice-grounded epistemic norms that we believe serve archaeologists better than the all-or-nothing ideals of truth and objectivity that dominate programmatic debate. (shrink)

Standpoint theory is based on the insight that those who are marginalized or oppressed have distinctive epistemic resources with which to understand social structures. Inasmuch as these structures shape our understanding of the natural and lifeworlds, standpoint theorists extend this principle to a range of biological and physical as well as social sciences. Standpoint theory has been articulated as a social epistemology and as an aligned methodological stance. It provides the rationale for ‘starting research from the margins’ and for expanding (...) the diversity of backgrounds and experience represented in scientific communities. (shrink)

Two fundamental rules of reasoning are Universal Generalisation and Existential Instantiation. Applications of these rules involve stipulations such as ‘Let n be an arbitrary number’ or ‘Let John be an arbitrary Frenchman’. Yet the semantics underlying such stipulations are far from clear. What, for example, does ‘n’ refer to following the stipulation that n be an arbitrary number? In this paper, we argue that ‘n’ refers to a number—an ordinary, particular number such as 58 or 2,345,043. Which one? We do (...) not and cannot know, because the reference of ‘n’ is fixed arbitrarily. Underlying this proposal is a more general thesis: Arbitrary Reference : It is possible to fix the reference of an expression arbitrarily. When we do so, the expression receives its ordinary kind of semantic-value, though we do not and cannot know which value in particular it receives. Our aim in this paper is defend AR. In particular, we argue that AR can be used to provide an account of instantial reasoning, and we suggest that AR can also figure in offering new solutions to a range of difficult philosophical puzzles. (shrink)

In The Emergent Self, William Hasker joins one of the most heated debates in contemporary analytic philosophy, that over the nature of mind.

Toward theory a homuncular of believing For years and years, philosophers took thoughts and beliefs to be modifications of incorporeal Cartesian egos. ...

I develop a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we use to describe our visual experiences, and on that basis develop a new adverbial theory of what it is to have a visual experience with a certain character.

My main aim is to clarify what we mean by ‘look’ sentences such as (1) below – ones that we use to talk about visual experience: -/- (1) The ball looked red to Sue -/- This is to help better understand a part of natural language that has so far resisted treatment, and also to help better understand the nature of visual experience. -/- By appealing to general linguistic principles I argue for the following account. First, we use (1) to (...) talk about an event. Second, we use the verb ‘look’ to specify the kind of event about which we are talking – it is a looking event. Third, we use the subject ‘the ball’ to specify a stimulus of the event – something that looks some way in the event. Fourth, we use the adjunct ‘to Sue’ to specify an experiencer of the event – someone to whom things look some way in the event. Finally, we use the complement ‘red’ to specify a way of the event – a way in which the event occurs (I take ways of occurring to be properties of events). Which way do we use ‘red’ in (1) to specify? I argue: the maximally specific way w such that the following is generically true: looking events whose stimulus is red occur in way w (it is important that this is understood generically: this is what does much of the work in explaining our use of (1) and other ‘look’ sentences). Putting this together, what we mean by (1) is: there was a looking event whose stimulus was the ball, whose experiencer was Sue, and which occurred in the maximally specific way that looking events occur when their stimulus is red. -/- This account of how we use ‘red’ in (1) is one of the most interesting aspects of my thesis. It extends to an account of how we use ‘proud’ in ‘John walks proud’, ‘as if he is American’ in ‘John talks as if he is American’, ‘like a duck’ in ‘John sounds like a duck’, and so on. In each case we use the expression in question to specify a way: the maximally specific way proud people walk, the maximally specific way American people talk, and so on. So the study of ‘look’ sentences has much to tell us about the functioning of many other English language constructions, and suggests that ways have a significant role to play in the semantics of natural language – a fact that has not yet been sufficiently recognised by linguists or philosophers of language. -/- My thesis also has implications for the philosophy of perception. One of the central questions about perception is: What is the nature of visual experience? What is it, for example, for a ball to look red to Sue? My thesis offers an answer: What it is for the ball to look red to Sue is for whatever it is that we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ to be the case, and what we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ is that there is a looking event whose stimulus is the ball, whose experiencer is Sue, and which is occurring in a certain way. It thus delivers an adverbial account of visual experience, one that has the resources to better deal with problems that are traditionally thought to be decisive against adverbial accounts. (shrink)

In this chapter we explore two important questions that we believe should be central to any discussion of the ethics and politics of cultural heritage: What are the harms associated with appropriation and commodification, specifically where the heritage of Indigenous peoples is concerned? And how can these harms best be avoided? Archaeological concerns animate this discussion; we are ultimately concerned with fostering postcolonial archaeological practices. But we situate these questions in a broader context, addressing them as they arise in connection (...) with the appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, both past and present. (shrink)

Neither the range of potential results from genomic research that might be returned to participants nor future uses of stored data and biospecimens can be fully predicted at the outset of a study. Informed consent procedures require clear explanations about how and by whom decisions are made and what principles and criteria apply. To ensure trustworthy research governance, there is also a need for empirical studies incorporating public input to evaluate and strengthen these processes.

For this 1897 publication, the American philosopher William James brought together ten essays, some of which were originally talks given to Ivy League societies. Accessible to a broader audience, these non-technical essays illustrate the author's pragmatic approach to belief and morality, arguing for faith and action in spite of uncertainty. James thought his audiences suffered 'paralysis of their native capacity for faith' while awaiting scientific grounds for belief. His response consisted in an attitude of 'radical empiricism', which deals practically (...) rather than ideologically with real-world phenomena. When facing a 'momentous' decision about belief, he says, we both can and must choose the best hypothesis. The first four essays apply this principle to religious faith, and the rest explore the pragmatic approach to such topics as determinism, ethics and individual achievement. James developed his ideas further in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, both of which are reissued in this series. (shrink)

The contributions to Testing Scientific Theories are unified by an in-terest in responding to criticisms directed by Glymour against existing models of confirmation—chiefly H-D and Bayesian schemas—and in assessing and correcting the "bootstrap" model of confirmation that he proposed as an alternative in Theory and Evidence (1980). As such, they provide a representative sample of objections to Glymour's model and of the wide range of new initiatives in thinking about scientific confirmation that it has influenced. The effect is a sense (...) of engagement and focus, and of significant advance at least in articulation of the problems that require solution; as Earman observes, "it is . . . heartening to report that the various opposing camps learned from each other" (p. vi).' In what follows I am concerned to assess what has been learned both critically, about Glymour's model, and constructively about the resources of the alternatives he challenges. My thesis is that while the theories emerging in this debate do deal with a wider range of scientific practice than before, their remaining limitations raise important questions about the ambitions and criteria of adequacy that have traditionally governed philosophical inquiry in this area. (shrink)

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his (...) search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)

Among the most characteristic effects of the onset of "romanticism" in the eighteenth century was the underinining of the "classical" ethics, based on rational selfdiscipline, by the "romantic" or humanitarian ethics, based on benevolism. A useful indication of the point at which this change in ethics occurred is the moment in which the institution of Negro slavery was attacked by benevolistic theory. As Trevelyan says, the anti-slavery movement was "the first successful propagandist agitation of the modern type" ; years before (...) the eighteenth century there had been sporadic objection against Negro slavery, especially religious objection because Negro slaves were commonly not considered "children of God." But until Francis Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy , no writer formulated ethical principles inimical to slavery as an institution. (shrink)

One of the most influential men of his time, philosopher, psychologist, educator, and author William James (1842-1910) helped lead the transition from a predominantly European-centered nineteenth-century philosophy to a new "pragmatic" American philosophy. Helping to pave the way was his seminal book Pragmatism (1907), in which he included a chapter on "Truth," an essay which provoked severe criticism. In response, he wrote the present work, an attempt to bring together all he had ever written on the theory of knowledge, (...) including an article on the function of cognition, later polemic and expository contributions, and some replies to previous criticism. The result was a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist "epistemology" from James' point of view. In the book, he urges the reader to "turn away from abstractions, verbal solutions, fixed principles, and pretended absolutes and look for concreteness and facts, action and power," arguing that "the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires." For students, scholars--anyone interested in William James or the history of American philosophical thought--this book offers an in-depth exposition of the influential ideas of one of the greatest American thinkers. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York and London, 1909. (shrink)

Complexity, agency, and time -- The vicissitudes of experience -- Belief, spirituality, and time -- The human predicament -- Capital flows, sovereign decisions, and world resonance machines -- The theorist and the seer.

This book analyzes the support that should be given to minority views, reconsidering classic debates in Science and Technology Studies and examining numerous case studies.

" In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-lo.

ABSTRACTGiven the existing inequities in climate change, any proposed climate engineering strategy to solve the climate problem must meet a high threshold for justice. In contrast to an overly thin paradigm for justice that demands only a science-based assessment of potential temperature-related benefits and harms, we argue for the importance of attention to recognitional justice. Recognitional justice, we go on to claim, calls for a different type of assessment tool. Such an assessment would pay attention to neglected considerations such as (...) relationships, context, power, vulnerability, narrative, and affect. Here we develop a care-ethics related tool for assessing the justice of climate engineering with stratospheric aerosols, and suggest that qualitative social science methods may be required for its effective application. We illustrate the use of this tool with a case study involving interviews about stratospheric aerosol injection conducted in Kenya, the Solomon Islands... (shrink)

Two books bound together, from the religious period of one of the most renowned and representative thinkers. Written for laymen, thus easy to understand, it is penetrating and brilliant as well. Illuminations of age-old religious questions from a pragmatic perspective, written in a luminous style.

Lycan (1985, 1988) defended a “Principle of Credulity”: “Accept at the outset each of those things that seem to be true” (1988, p. 165). Though that takes the form of a rule rather than a thesis, it does not seem very different from Huemer’s (2001, 2006, 2007) doctrine of phenomenal conservatism (PC): “If it seems to S that p , then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p ” (2007, (...) p. 30). My Principle was differently motivated and put to uses different from Huemer’s. In this paper I shall explore some of the differences. (shrink)

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

Reflecting the dangers of irresponsible science and technology, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein quickly became a mythic story that still feels fresh and relevant in the twenty-first century. The unique framework of the Frankenstein myth has permeated the public discourse about science and knowledge, creating various misconceptions around and negative expectations for scientists and for scientific enterprises more generally. Using the Frankenstein myth as an imaginative tool, we interviewed twelve scientists to explore how this science narrative shapes their views and perceptions of (...) science. Our results yielded two main conclusions. First, the Frankenstein myth may help scientists identify popular concerns about their work and offer a framework for constructing a more positive narrative. Second, finding optimistic science narratives may allow scientists to build a better relationship with the public. We argue that by showing the ethical principles and social dimensions of their work, scientists could replace a negative Frankenstein narrative with a more optimistic one. (shrink)

Existential instantiation is a rule of inference that allows us infer, from the proposition that there are some p things, the proposition that a is a p thing. What role does 'a' play here? According to one account, recently defended by Breckenridge and Magidor, we use 'a' to refer to a p thing. I argue that this cannot be right. I propose an alternative account, according to which we use 'a' to refer to a supposedly p thing.

There is an account of modal operators that is both elegant and powerful and that deserves to be called the standard account. There are, however, some epistemic uses of modal operators which seem to be counterexamples to the account – they pose what I call the objectivity problem. It is often thought that the objectivity problem can be fixed by a certain kind of modification to the standard account. I argue that this kind of modification cannot work. Then I argue (...) that the problem posed for the standard account by recently discussed eavesdropper cases is really just the objectivity problem in a different guise, thereby emphasizing the need for a new solution to the objectivity problem. Finally, I propose a new solution to the objectivity problem. (shrink)