The public can influence animal welfare law and regulation. However what constitutes ‘the public’ is not a straightforward matter. A variety of different publics have an interest in animal use and this has implications for the governance of animal welfare. This article presents an ethnographic content analysis of how the concept of a public is mobilized in animal welfare journals from 2003 to 2012. The study was undertaken to explore how experts in the discipline define and regard the role (...) of the public in determining animal welfare standards. Analysis indicates that experts in animal welfare constitute different types of citizen and consumer publics around specific types of animal use, framed by different theories of value. These results suggest a need for greater clarity about the roles and responsibilities of experts and publics in animal welfare reform processes. Clearly citizens and consumers can both contribute to promoting higher welfare standards, but an over-reliance on market mechanisms and consumer behaviour to assign value is beset by moral hazards, foremost being the risk of disarticulating the concept of animal welfare from the public good. (shrink)

The public can influence animal welfare law and regulation. However what constitutes ‘the public’ is not a straightforward matter. A variety of different publics have an interest in animal use and this has implications for the governance of animal welfare. This article presents an ethnographic content analysis of how the concept of a public is mobilized in animal welfare journals from 2003 to 2012. The study was undertaken to explore how experts in the discipline define and regard the role (...) of the public in determining animal welfare standards. Analysis indicates that experts in animal welfare constitute different types of citizen and consumer publics around specific types of animal use, framed by different theories of value. These results suggest a need for greater clarity about the roles and responsibilities of experts and publics in animal welfare reform processes. Clearly citizens and consumers can both contribute to promoting higher welfare standards, but an over-reliance on market mechanisms and consumer behaviour to assign value is beset by moral hazards, foremost being the risk of disarticulating the concept of animal welfare from the public good. (shrink)

A meaningful distinction can be made between functions and mere effects in biological systems without resorting to teleological arguments: (i) biological systems must cope with a multitude of problems or they will cease to exist; (ii) the solutions to these problems invariably depend on circular causal chains (“feedback loops”); and (iii) biological functions are attributes of elements in biological systems that have an effect which, by contributing to the correcting behavior of a feedback control system, assists in solving a biological (...) problem. The analysis is applied to several biological systems. The proposed solution is discussed primarily in its relation to two popular approaches to the concept of biological function, i.e., the “causal role accounts” and the “selected effect accounts”. (shrink)

In What Things Do , Verbeek (What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency and design. Penn State University Press, University Park, 2005a ) develops a vocabulary for understanding the social role of technological artifacts in our culture and in our daily lives. He understands this role in terms of the technological mediation of human behavior and perception. To explain mediation, he levels out the modernist separation of subjects and objects by decreasing the autonomy of humans and increasing (...) the activity of things. His approach consists primarily within a clever integration of the theories of Latour and Ihde, which provides a comprehensive understanding of the social role of technological artifacts. Despite the fact that Verbeek’s book is carefully thought out and already quite influential in the field of philosophy of technology, his approach raises some conceptual and pragmatic questions. The conceptual questions concern (a) the precise meaning of the concept of mediation and the possibility of distinguishing between different forms of mediation, and (b) the differences and similarities between human and technological agency and intentionality. The pragmatic questions concern the application of his theory to the realm of engineering ethics. Particularly pressing is the question of how to assign (moral) responsibility to humans when technological artifacts are mediating the outcomes of human actions. With this article, I will raise these issues, and look forward to Verbeek’s reply. (shrink)

This article provides a strategic history of the role assigned by modern historians to visual representation in early modern science, an aspect of historiography that is largely ignored in the scholarly literature. Despite the current undervaluation of images and visual reasoning, historians in the 1940s and 1950s who established the 20th century concept of the Scientific Revolution, also assigned a conspicuous role to images, claiming 15th century art as a chapter in the history of science and identifying the (...) first modern scientists in artists such as Brunelleschi and Leonardo. My analysis of the writings that shaped the discourse on visual representation---by giants such as George Sarton, Herbert Butterfield, and Alexandre Koyré---shows that the handful of concepts introduced in these early discussions formed the foundations of the subsequent scholarly approach to early modern scientific images. However, close scrutiny during the 1970s defined these concepts as interesting but not as key elements for the emergence of modern science proposed earlier. The wave of social studies of science in the 1980s further diminished the importance of images, to the point that recent surveys of early modern science neither consider the role of visual representation nor include figures in their narratives. Several recent publications with suggestive titles such as The Power of Images in Early Modern Science promise to recover a significant role for images in the Scientific Revolution. The present inquiry into the earlier discourse seeks to clarify the historiographic framework into which these new efforts fit. (shrink)

Sortition, i.e. random appointment for public duty, has been employed by societies throughout the years as a firewall designated to prevent illegitimate interference between parties in a legal case and agents of the legal system. In judicial systems of modern western countries, random procedures are mainly employed to select the jury, the court and/or the judge in charge of judging a legal case. Therefore, these random procedures play an important role in the course of a case, and should comply (...) with some principles, such as transparency and complete auditability. Nevertheless, these principles are neglected by random procedures in some judicial systems, which are performed in secrecy and are not auditable by the involved parties. The assignment of cases in the Brazilian Supreme Court is an example of such a procedure, for it is performed using procedures unknown to the parties involved in the judicial cases. This article presents a review of how sortition has been historically employed by societies and discusses how Mathematical Statistics may be applied to random procedures of the judicial system, as it has been applied for almost a century on clinical trials, for example. A statistical model for assessing randomness in case assignment is proposed and applied to the Brazilian Supreme Court. As final remarks, guidelines for the development of good randomization procedures are outlined. (shrink)

Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A (...) slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created. (shrink)

Suppose that one adopts a broadly Chomskyan perspective, in which there is a distinction between the language faculty and other cognitive faculties, including what Chomsky has recently called the “Conceptual-Intensional system”. Then there must in principle be at least three stages in this association that need to be understood. First, there is the nonlinguistic stage of conceptualizing a particular event.1 For example, while all of the participants in an event may be affected by the event in some way or another, (...) human cognizers typically focus on one or the other of those changes as being particularly salient or relevant to their interests. This participant is taken to be the “theme” or “patient” of the event, perhaps in some kind of nonlinguistic conceptual representation, such as the one developed by Jackendoff (1983, 1990b). Second, this conceptual/thematic representation is associated with a linguistic representation in which the entity seen as the patient of the event is represented as (say) an NP that is the direct object of the verb that expresses what kind of an event it was. This is the interface between language and the conceptual system. Finally, there is the possibility of adjusting this representation internally to the language system, by way of movements, chain formations, Case assignment processes, or whatever other purely syntactic processes there may be. For example, the NP that represents the theme and starts out as the direct object of the verb may become the subject if there is no other subject in the linguistic representation, either because there was no agent in the conceptual representation (as with an unaccusative verb), or because it was suppressed (as with a passive verb). (shrink)

This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual (...) dependencies with quantifiers, attitude ascriptions, conditionals, questions, and relativization. The result is an innovative, philosophically informed compositional semantics compatible with the truth-conditional paradigm. (shrink)

Successfully navigating the norms of a society is a complex task that involves recognizing diverse kinds of rules as well as the relative weight attached to them. In the United States, different kinds of rules—federal statutes and regulations, scientific norms, and professional ideals—guide the work of researchers. Penalties for violating these different kinds of rules and norms can range from the displeasure of peers to criminal sanctions. We proposed that it would be more difficult for researchers working in the U.S. (...) who were born in other nations to distinguish the seriousness of violating rules across diverse domains. We administered a new measure, the evaluating rules in science task, to National Institutes of Health-funded investigators. The ERST assessed perceptions of the seriousness of violating research regulations, norms, and ideals, and allowed us to calculate the degree to which researchers distinguished between the seriousness of each rule category. The ERST also assessed researchers’ predictions of the seriousness that research integrity officers would assign to the rules. We compared researchers’ predictions to the seriousness ratings of 112 RIOs working at U.S. research-intensive universities. U.S.-born researchers were significantly better at distinguishing between the seriousness of violating federal research regulations and violating ideals of science, and they were more accurate in their predictions of the views of RIOs. Acculturation to the U.S. moderated the effects of nationality on accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of future research and education. (shrink)

In line with familiar portrayals of Kant's ethics, interpreters of his philosophy of education focus essentially on its intellectual dimension: the notions of moral catechism, ethical gymnastics and ethical ascetics, to name but a few. By doing so, they usually emphasise Kant's negative stance towards the role of feelings in moral education. Yet there seem to be noteworthy exceptions: Kant writes that the inclinations to be honoured and loved are to be preserved as far as possible. This statement is (...) not only at odds with Kant's general claim that education should not encourage feelings, but more importantly, it encourages a feeling that is in many ways paradigmatically un-Kantian. How are we to understand the fact that of all feelings, the love of honour should be preserved? To answer this question, I begin by clarifying the reasons behind Kant's negative stance towards feelings in moral education. I then turn to his account of the feeling of love of honour. After distinguishing between its good and its bad forms, I consider two ways of making sense of the positive role Kant assigns to it. The first, modest reading will suggest that the feeling of love of honour is morally useful because it has two functions: an epistemic one, and a motivational one. The second, more ambitious reading will suggest that the feeling of love of honour enables the child to experience her inner worth as bearer of value. (shrink)

Objectives: To analyse legislation and medical professional positions concerning the doctor’s role in assisted dying in western Europe, and to discuss their implications for doctors.Method: This paper is based on country-specific reports by experts from European countries where assisted dying is legalised , or openly practiced , or where it is illegal .Results: Laws on assisted dying in The Netherlands and Belgium are restricted to doctors. In principle, assisted suicide is not illegal in either Germany or Switzerland, but a (...) doctor’s participation in Germany would violate the code of professional medical conduct and might contravene of a doctor’s legal duty to save life. The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill proposed in the UK in 2005 focused on doctors, whereas the Proposal on Assisted Dying of the Norwegian Penal Code Commission minority in 2002 did not.Professional medical organisations in all these countries except The Netherlands maintain the position that medical assistance in dying conflicts with the basic role of doctors. However, in Belgium and Switzerland, and for a time in the UK, these organisations dropped their opposition to new legislation. Today, they regard the issue as primarily a matter for society and politics. This “neutral” stance differs from the official position of the Royal Dutch Medical Association which has played a key role in developing the Dutch practice of euthanasia as a “medical end-of-life decision” since the 1970s.Conclusion: A society moving towards an open approach to assisted dying should carefully identify tasks to assign exclusively to medical doctors, and distinguish those possibly better performed by other professions. (shrink)

The role of mathematics in the development of Gilles Deleuze's (1925-95) philosophy of difference as an alternative to the dialectical philosophy determined by the Hegelian dialectic logic is demonstrated in this paper by differentiating Deleuze's interpretation of the problem of the infinitesimal in Difference and Repetition from that which G. W. F Hegel (1770-1831) presents in the Science of Logic . Each deploys the operation of integration as conceived at different stages in the development of the infinitesimal calculus in (...) his treatment of the problem of the infinitesimal. Against the role that Hegel assigns to integration as the inverse transformation of differentiation in the development of his dialectical logic, Deleuze strategically redeploys Leibniz's account of integration as a method of summation in the form of a series in the development of his philosophy of difference. By demonstrating the relation between the differential point of view of the Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus and the differential calculus of contemporary mathematics, I argue that Deleuze effectively bypasses the methods of the differential calculus which Hegel uses to support the development of the dialectical logic, and by doing so, sets up the critical perspective from which to construct an alternative logic of relations characteristic of a philosophy of difference. The mode of operation of this logic is then demonstrated by drawing upon the mathematical philosophy of Albert Lautman (1908-44), which plays a significant role in Deleuze's project of constructing a philosophy of difference. Indeed, the logic of relations that Deleuze constructs is dialectical in the Lautmanian sense. (shrink)

At the end of the sixteenth century astronomers and others felt compelled to choose among different cosmologies. For Tycho Brahe, who played a central role in these debates, the intersection of the spheres of Mars and the Sun was an outstanding problem that had to be resolved before he made his choice. His ultimate solution was to eliminate celestial spheres in favour of fluid heavens, a crucial step in the abandonment of the Ptolemaic system and the demise of Aristotelian (...) celestial physics. These debates involved issues that had not previously been part of astronomy, and had the effect of undermining the traditional hierarchy of the sciences. While this complicated story involves many scientific personalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the present paper we will concentrate on one figure who has been assigned an unnecessarily minor role in most histories of science: Christoph Rothmann. In the present paper we show that ‘the dissolution of the celestial spheres’ depends on arguments about the substance of the heavens, following a mistaken argument of Gemma Frisius, elaborated by Joannes Pena and appropriated by Rothmann. We next consider the status and origin of the doctrine, as presented by Brahe, that the heavenly spheres are solid, and the impact on Brahe of Rothmann's treatise on the comet of 1585. Rothmann provided several key ideas that enabled Brahe to develop his system, and we suggest in passing that Rothmann may also have precipitated Brahe's re-evaluation of his attempt to detect the parallax of Mars during the opposition of 1582–83. We offer a new account of this central piece of evidence for the Tychonic system. (shrink)

We propose a model of reference that contrasts with standard linguistic approaches in that it focuses on the role of interaction in reference, arguing that referring expressions in conversations are not designed for interchangeable audiences but rather exploit the common ground between partners. Our model also differs from psycholinguistic approaches in that it uses conversational data, since critical aspects of natural conversations are absent from laboratory tasks used so far and thus are not captured by current models. Examples from (...) conversations are presented to demonstrate that speakers often try to manage the accessibility of a problematic referent to an addressee by presenting a context for it as well as a referring expression, even at the cost of syntactic orthodoxy. We also present examples demonstrating that partners negotiate as to what representation is good enough for present purposes and whether that has been achieved. While strategies may vary as to explicitness, we believe these negotiations underlie all formulations of referring expressions. (shrink)

This research looks at how mindfulness can contribute to business ethics education in MBA programmes. Mediation analysis was used to measure the influence of mindfulness on the participants’ performance in business ethics related courses and to quantify the influence of emotional intelligence which is a mediating variable. The effectiveness of mindfulness was evaluated using a Randomised Controlled Trial on participants of Executive MBA programmes. Half the participants were assigned to the intervention group and the other half placed on the waiting (...) list for the next programme and used as the control group. Statistical analysis revealed that the increase in performance in business ethics related courses through mindfulness as also direct increase through emotional intelligence were significant. 40% of the enhancement of performance came through emotional intelligence while the remaining 60% came directly from mindfulness. (shrink)

Conducted among parents of young ice hockey players, this field experiment tested if making salient increasingly popular social norms that promote sportspersonship, learning, and having fun in sports, increases parents’ own self-determined endorsement of these behaviors and values, improves their psychological well-being, and impacts on their children’s on-ice behaviors. Hockey parents were randomly assigned to the experimental condition vs. control condition. Parents’ motivations for encouraging their child to learn and to have fun in hockey were then assessed. Score sheets for (...) the games that followed the study provided access to their children’s on-ice behaviors, as indicators of sportspersonship. Parents in the experimental condition reported higher self-determination for encouraging their child to learn and have fun in hockey compared to parents in the control condition. Furthermore, children of parents in the experimental condition had more assists. A mediation model revealed that the dynamic norms manipulation increased parents’ self-determined motivation for encouraging their child to learn and to have fun in hockey, which in turn, predicted higher psychological well-being. Together, these results provide support for the contention that highlighting increasingly popular social norms that promote sportspersonship, learning, and fun in sports, represents a promising strategy for creating positive social change in this life context. (shrink)

When one looks into the role of artificial languages in philosophy of language it seems appropriate to start with making a distinction between philosophy of language proper and formal semantics of natural language. Although the distinction between the two disciplines may not always be easy to make since there arguably exist substantial historical and systematic relationships between the two, it nevertheless pays to keep the two apart, at least initially, since the motivation commonly given for the use of artificial (...) languages in philosophy of language is often rather different from the one that drives the use of such languages in semantics. Of course, this difference in motivation should not blind us for the commonalities that exists between the two disciplines. Philosophy of language and formal semantics have a common history, and arguably also share some of their substance. Philosophy of language is by and large an outgrowth of work in the analytical tradition in philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Both ordinary language philosophy, with its emphasis on the description of actual language use, as well as the more logic-oriented and formally inclined school of logical positivism contributed to the definition of philosophy of language as a separate philosophical discipline, with its own set of problems and methods to solve them. Another major contributor to the establishment of philosophy of language as a distinct discipline has been modern linguistics, in particular generative grammar in the tradition of Chomsky that became the dominant paradigm in linguisticsin the fifties and sixties of the previous century. And as it happens, both the generative tradition of Chomsky and analytic philosophy in its formal and less formal guises have been important factors in the development of formal semantics as well. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the two have something in common. That the communalities go beyond a common ancestry, but are reflected in substance and methods as well, will be argued later on. However, be that as it may, it is still a good idea to keep philosophy of language and formal semantics separate, at least initially, since the role that is assigned to artificial languages and the ways in which these languages are employed in both does differ in a number of respects that are worth keeping in mind.. (shrink)

In physics, objects are often assigned vector characteristics such as a specific velocity. How can this be understood from a metaphysical point of view – is assigning an object a vector characteristic to attribute it an intrinsic property? As a short review of Newtonian, special relativistic and general relativistic physics shows, if we wish to assign some object a vector characteristic, we have to relate it to something – call it S. If S is to be different from the original (...) object – and I argue for this assumption – then having the specific vector characteristic is not an intrinsic property under different readings of “intrinsic”. For instance, I argue that lonely objects with different orientations do not constitute metaphysically distinct possibilities. There are, however, difficulties in applying the loneliness test, and they concern the role of the space‐time. (shrink)

We all know that problems of transportation and allocation appear frequently in practical life. We need to transfer materials from production centers to consumption centers to secure the areas’ need for the transported material or allocate machines or people to do a specific job at the lowest cost, or in the shortest time. We know that the cost factors Time is one of the most important factors that decision-makers care about because it plays an “important” role in many of (...) the practical and scientific issues that we face in our daily lives, and we need careful study to enable us to avoid losses. For this, the linear programming method was used, which is one of the research methods. Processes, where the problem data is converted into a linear mathematical model for which the optimal solution achieves the desired goal. Since these models are linear models, we can solve them using the direct simplex method and its modifications, but the specificity that these models enjoy has enabled scholars and researchers to find special methods that help us in obtaining the optimal solution. Whatever the method used, the goal is to determine the number of units transferred from any material from production centers to consumption centers, or to allocate a machine or person to do a job so that the cost or time is as short as possible. These issues were addressed according to classical logic, but the ideal solution was a specific value appropriate to the conditions in which the data was collected and does not take into account the changes that may occur in the work environment. In order to obtain results that are more accurate and enjoy a margin of freedom, we present in this book a study of transport issues and neutrosophic allocation issues and some methods for solving them. By neutrosophic issues we mean These are the problems in which the data are neutrosophic values, i.e. the required quantities and the available quantities. (shrink)

We all know that problems of transportation and allocation appear frequently in practical life. We need to transfer materials from production centers to consumption centers to secure the areas’ need for the transported material or allocate machines or people to do a specific job at the lowest cost, or in the shortest time. We know that the cost factors Time is one of the most important factors that decision-makers care about because it plays an “important” role in many of (...) the practical and scientific issues that we face in our daily lives, and we need careful study to enable us to avoid losses. For this, the linear programming method was used, which is one of the research methods. Processes, where the problem data is converted into a linear mathematical model for which the optimal solution achieves the desired goal. Since these models are linear models, we can solve them using the direct simplex method and its modifications, but the specificity that these models enjoy has enabled scholars and researchers to find special methods that help us in obtaining the optimal solution. Whatever the method used, the goal is to determine the number of units transferred from any material from production centers to consumption centers, or to allocate a machine or person to do a job so that the cost or time is as short as possible. These issues were addressed according to classical logic, but the ideal solution was a specific value appropriate to the conditions in which the data was collected and does not take into account the changes that may occur in the work environment. In order to obtain results that are more accurate and enjoy a margin of freedom, we present in this book a study of transport issues and neutrosophic allocation issues and some methods for solving them. By neutrosophic issues we mean These are the problems in which the data are neutrosophic values, i.e. the required quantities and the available quantities. (shrink)

It is a mistake to think that any philosophical contribution to the study of psychopathology is otiose. I identify three non-exhaustive roles that philosophy can and does occupy in the study of mental disorder, which I call the agenda-setting role, the synthetic role, and the regulative role. The three roles are illustrated via consideration of the importance of Jaspers' notion of understanding and its application to specific examples of mental disorder, including delusions of reference, Capgras delusion and (...) other monothematic delusions, and clinical depression. Together the three roles assign to philosophy of psychopathology the task of determining how to situate the varieties of mental disorder within the system of interpretive and evaluative concepts that partially make up the dynamic but indispensable manifest image. (shrink)

During the 1980s, federal regulations transferred significant portions of the responsibility for monitoring the care and use of research animals from animal care programs to Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs). After a brief review of the history of the regulation of the use of animals in research preceding and during the 4 decades following World War 11, this article raises 4 problems associated with the role IACUCs currently play in monitoring the use of animals in research: (a) (...) lack of expertise, (b) diverted resources, (c) conflict of interest, and (d) restrictions of academic freedom. It is concluded that the care and treatment of animals used in research would be served better and organized more rationally if the day-to-day responsibilities for approving projects and caring for animals were separated more clearly from broader, oversight functions, with the former being assigned to animal care programs and the latter to IACUCs. (shrink)

This paper reexamines Ibn Sina’s theory of knowledge and discusses the key role he assigns to intuition in solving the epistemological problems of knowing the first principles, the middle terms, primary concepts, and existence of oneself. To reconstruct and give a coherent restatement of his epistemology by means of textual analysis and hermeneusis is certainly a worthwhile task since Ibn Sina’s own statement of his views about knowledge has come down to us in a very disjointed form, scattered throughout (...) his large philosophical corpus. (shrink)

Among the most noteworthy and impressive aspects of A.P. Simester’s monumental Fundamentals of Criminal Law is its pervasive pluralism. Many philosophers of criminal law, I have frequently complained, are excessively monistic on a number of basic questions about which pluralism is the more defensible option. I fear, however, that Simester’s views are sometimes too pluralistic. In particular, he assigns five separate functions to mens rea, and advances the novel claim that “mens rea is not, uniquely or even predominately, about culpability.” (...) He alleges that “the so-called ‘fault’ requirements plays an important role in mediating the scope of prohibitions.? My central objective is to challenge whether Simester is correct about whether mens rea has this alleged. (shrink)

The thought system of Qâdî ‘Abd al-Jabbâr, who is a productive intellectual worker in the Mu‘tazilî school, is established on the contingency (imkân) of obligation (taklîf) of the God upon people. In other words he has a universe and order of thought which is built around the term obligation. Therefore, the content of Qâdî’s aforementioned thought which has a very significant place in Mu‘tazilî thought is constituted of responsbilities of human beings. These responsibilities of the human beings are gathered under (...) the title of rational ones (aqliyyât) in terms of being held responsible by reason and the title sem‘iyyât which covers the things that fall under the category of responsibilities that can be only known by revelation (wahy) due to the imposibility of being assigned by the sole reason. In short, aqliyyât corrresponds to the rational field of obligation whereas se‘miyyât corresponds to the legal (shar’i) field of responsibility. The responsibilites under the title aqliyyât are such as tawhîd, justice, and other non-primary premises that serve as instruments for comrehending these two terms. The content of sem‘iyyât, on the other hand, is constituted of the issues that fall outside of the rational obligation (taklîf al-aqlî) and can only be known by means of sam‘ (revelation) such as the knowledge that adultry leads to moral corruption or the knowledge of juristic worships. We can observe that Qâdî ‘Abd al-Jabbâr, did make use of three different kinds of proofs in order to prove, found, and justify the aforementioned issues which lay the foundations for his thought. These are rational (aqlî), revelational (sam‘î) and linguistic (lugawi) proofs, respectively. For each of these kinds of proofs there is an idiosyncratic domain of coverage on which that kind of proof is considered as the unique authority. This research aims to elaborate the domain the only authority of which is the linguistic proofs and also aims to render it comprehensive. So to speak, the motivating factor of this research is to clarify the question of to what extent the language plays a role in Qâdî’s thought and its domain of influence in the simplest way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Role of Scepticism in Modern Philosophy Reconsidered RICHARD H. POPKIN THE THEORY that the revival of ancient scepticism, and the application of its arguments to the controversies of the sixteenth century, played a vital role in the development of modern philosophy was first suggested by me almost forty years ago. A three-part article in the Review of Metaphysics entided "The Sceptical Crisis and the Rise of (...) Modern Philosophy" contained much of the theory.' What was added by the time of my History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (published in x96o,' but finished by 1958 ) was the importance of the sceptical arguments in the controversies of the Reformation and the CounterReformation, and the development of a religious scepticismmfideism--as a way of fending off criticism of basic religious beliefs.s One of the first reviews of my book was by Charles B. Schmitt,4 which he soon followed with his volume on Gianfrancesco Pico and then one on Cicero Scepticus.5 Before Charles Schmitt and I entered this arena, scepticism as a living philosophical view was hardly mentioned in histories of philosophy, which, by and large, saw modern philosophy as a rejection of Scholasticism, with nothing in between. One leaped from William of Ockham and Duns Scotus to Francis Bacon and Descartes, with perhaps a momentary nod to Montaigne as an amus- ' R. H. Popkin, "The ScepticalCrisisand the Riseof Modern Philosophy," Parts I, II, and III, ReviewofMetaphysics8 0953-54): 131--51,3O7--33,and 499-51o. First published in the University of Utrecht series of Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy (Assen:Van Gorcum). sThis part of the story appeared independently in my article, "Scepticismand the CounterReformation in France," Archivfiir Reformatio~geschichte51 (a96o): 58-88. 4This appeared in Philosophyand PhenomenologicalResearch~3 (1963):455. 5His GianfrancescoPico dellaMirandola(I469-x533) and His Critiqueof Aristotleappeared in 1967, and CiceroScepticus:A Studyof theInfluenceof theAcademicain the Renaissancein 197~,both published in the International Archivesof the History of Ideas put out by Nijhoffin The Hague. [5ol] 502 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 1:4 OCTOBER 1993 ing figure who provided Bacon with his stylistic form and Descartes with the opening line for the Discourse on Method. There were practically no articles about or studies of scepticism as a philosophical attitude or activity in modern philosophy before we went to work. The American philosopher Roderick Chisholm had written an article on Sextus and modern empiricism, and that was about it.6 When I took my first course in the history of philosophy with John Herman Randall, I frankly could not make much out of Plato or Aristotle, but when we were assigned to read Sextus Empiricus, I found an author who made sense. Later in the course I was introduced to Hume, whom Randall hated, and I loved. In a course with Paul Oskar Kristeller a few years later, on Hellenistic philosophy, Sextus appeared as a serious figure. A couple of years after that, in a seminar with Charles Hendel on Hume, I wrote a paper on Sextus and Hume. I showed it to Kristeller, who said drily and carefully that it might be worth looking into whether Hume had read Sextus, and whether there was a prior tradition of scepticism in European philosophy. Thus was I set off on the quest. Schmitt and I not only offered a lot of evidence previously ignored or unknown about the recovery of sceptical texts and their use in the philosophical discussions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but we also offered a new paradigm, a new way of conceiving what problems were being agitated, a new way of understanding the kinds of answers being given as ways of resolving the sceptical crisis. The reception of our theory indicated that it provided a more meaningful picture of the making of the modern mind than what had previously been proposed.7 What I should like to deal with now are three questions: Has our theory stood up over almost four decades? Has it had to be revised or amended? And does it need to be expanded (as I have been doing) to encompass another kind of scepticism, that directed against traditional religion from about... (shrink)

The present studies tested the hypothesis that strong assumptions about within-category homogeneity impede children’s recognition of the inductive value of diverse samples of evidence. In Study 1a, children (7-year-olds) and adults were randomly assigned to receive a prime emphasizing within-category variability, a prime emphasizing within-category similarities, or to not receive a prime. Only following the variability prime, children demonstrated a reliable preference for evaluating diverse over nondiverse samples to determine whether there is support for a category-wide generalization. Adults demonstrated a (...) robust preference for diverse samples in all conditions. These effects extended beyond the specific categories included in the prime, as well as to multiple types of test questions. Study 1b demonstrated that priming variability leads children to select diverse samples only when doing so is informative for induction. Implications for conceptual development are discussed. (shrink)

This article brings to light the role and importance of Descartes' concept of freedom for his ethics of belief. For Descartes, I argue, correctly assigning epistemic praise/blame means tracking authentic freedoms: ascertaining whether an act of assent is spontaneous or perverse both before and after eliciting the act of will. Authentic spontaneity ensures that the agent receives praise for his epistemic accomplishment, which includes the right results as well as the right order of steps. Authentic perversity leads to the (...) agent being blamed for not accepting the truth while fully aware of the gravity of the gesture. (shrink)

Recent discussion of mechanism has suggested new approaches to several issues in the philosophy of science, including theory structure, causal explanation, and reductionism. Here, I apply what I take to be the fruits of the 'new mechanical philosophy' to an analysis of a contemporary debate in evolutionary biology about the role of natural selection in speciation. Traditional accounts of that debate focus on the geographic context of genetic divergence--namely, whether divergence in the absence of geographic isolation is possible (or (...) significant). Those accounts are at best incomplete, I argue, because they ignore the mechanisms producing divergence and miss what is at stake in the biological debate. I argue that the biological debate instead concerns the scope of particular speciation mechanisms which assign different roles to natural selection at various stages of divergence. The upshot is a new interpretation of the crux of that debate--namely, whether divergence with gene flow is possible (or significant) and whether the isolating mechanisms producing it are adaptive. (shrink)

L’article traite des différents rôles de l’identité dans l’enseignement de la philosophie. La première partie de l’examen se concentre sur l’identité en tant que matière à apprendre, c’est-àdire l’identité en tant que contenu des théories philosophiques enseignées à l’école. La deuxième partie traite de l’identité en tant qu’objet de recherches, ce qui a trait avant tout au quotidien des élèves et aux identités qu’ils s’assignent ou qu’on leur assigne. La troisième partie examine l’identité qui n’est pas là – une identité (...) absente, qui laisse un vide à combler. Tous ces différents aspects soulignent une nature à multiples facettes du concept d’identité ; c’est pourquoi l’un des objectifs de cet examen est d’offrir une réponse à la question de savoir si l’identité peut encore être considérée aujourd’hui comme l’un des concepts clés de la philosophie ou s’il a été réduit à un aspect marginal de la compréhension de la condition humaine actuelle. (shrink)

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English‐learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2‐year‐old children’s knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment have reported inconsistent findings. The aim of the present study was to establish at what age English‐learning children have verb‐general knowledge of both transitive and intransitive argument structure using a new method: the forced‐choice pointing paradigm. (...) The results suggest that young 2‐year‐olds can associate transitive structures with causal (or externally caused) events and can use transitive structure to assign agent and patient roles correctly. However, the children were unable to associate the conjoined agent intransitive with noncausal events until aged 3;4. The results confirm the pattern from previous IPLP studies and indicate that children may develop the ability to comprehend different aspects of argument structure at different ages. The implications for theories of language acquisition and the nature of the language acquisition mechanism are discussed. (shrink)

Religion emerged among early humans because both purposive and non-purposive explanations were being employed but understanding was lacking of their precise scope and limits. Given also a context of very limited human power, the resultant foregrounding of agency and purposive explanation expressed itself in religion’s marked tendency towards anthropomorphism and its key role in legitimizing behaviour. The inevitability of death also structures the religious outlook; with ancestors sometimes assigned a role in relation to the living. Subjective elements such (...) as the experience of dreams and the internalization of moral precepts also play their part. Two important sources of variation among religions concern the adoption of a dualist or non-dualist perspective, and whether or not the religion’s early political experience is such as to generate a systematic doctrine subordinating politics to religion. The near ubiquity and endurance of religion are further illuminated by analysis of its functions and ideological role. Religion tends to be socially conservative but has the potential to be revolutionary. (shrink)

This study examines the presence and roles of female directors of U.S. Fortune 500 firms, focusing on committee assignments and director background. Prior work from almost two decades ago concludes that there is a systematic bias against females in assignment to top board committees. Examining a recent data set with a logistic regression model that controls for director and firm characteristics, director resource-dependence roles and interaction between director gender and director characteristics, we find that female directors are less likely (...) than male directors to sit on executive committees and more likely than male directors to sit on public affairs committees. There is little if any evidence of systematic gender bias in director assignment to other board committees. We find some evidence that boards evaluate resource dependence differently for women than men. (shrink)

The claim that the level of well-beingeach enjoys ought to be to some extent afunction of individuals'' talents, efforts,accomplishments, and other meritoriousattributes faces serious challenge from bothegalitarians and libertarians, but also fromskeptics, who point to the poor historicalrecord of attempted merit assays and theubiquity of attribution biases arising fromlimited sweep, misattribution, custom andconvention, and mimicry. Yet merit-principlesare connected with reactive attitudes andinnate expectations, giving them some claim torecognition and there is a widespread beliefthat their use indirectly promotes thewell-being of all. (...) After critically evaluatingarguments for and against assigning a prominentrole to merit in a distributive protocol, it isargued that an entitlement to the ``doubtful andspeculative'''' but not the ``known andpresumptive'''' components of well-being can flowfrom perceived relative merit. However,statistical equality of outcome with respect togroups is mandatory. Semi-meritocracies aredefensible institutions, but existing rewardschemes by and large do not meet the conditionsof social justice. (shrink)

The Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) in Africa aims to strengthen the capacities of selected science granting councils (SGCs) in sub-Saharan Africa in order to support research and evidence-based policies that will contribute to Africa’s economic and social development. As part of SGCI, a study was conducted in 2021 to investigate strategies that have been adopted by fifteen SGCs participating in SGCI in promoting ethical practice in research and innovation. Data collection for the study was mainly based on a data (...) abstraction form that was completed for each country by an assigned focal person with a background in research ethics. The focal persons relied on various methods including document and website review and interviews with senior officers at the SGCs. The study specifically sought to describe the strategies and activities being implemented by the 15 SGCs in promoting ethics and integrity in research and innovation. The study revealed various strategies that were being implemented by the 15 SGCs aimed at promoting ethics in research and innovation including requiring proof of research ethics committee approval before releasing research funds and the inclusion of ethics questions in the application form for funding. It was observed that some activities and strategies were generic to most SGCs for example the development of general/standard guidelines for the conduct of research in each respective country. Overall, the different SGCs were involved in a broad spectrum of activities aimed at promoting research ethics and this paper presents an opportunity for cross fertilization of ideas. By providing a summary of the various strategies that SGCs are using in promoting ethical conduct of research, it is hoped that this paper will lead to improvements in the ways SGCs provide support and oversight over the research that they fund. (shrink)

An experiment examined goal understanding and how perceivers’ suspiciousness was associated with the accuracy, valence, and certainty of their inferences about a pursuer’s goal. In initial interactions, one dyad member was randomly assigned as the pursuer, and the other was the perceiver. The congruency of the perceiver’s and the pursuer’s conversation goals and the perceiver’s cognitive busyness were manipulated. Results confirmed that accuracy decreased as perceivers’ suspiciousness increased only for not-busy perceivers in the goal-discord condition because perceivers’ inferences were negatively (...) valenced. Results also supported the hypotheses that certainty decreased as perceivers’ suspiciousness increased only for not-busy perceivers in the goal-discord condition and that certainty increased as perceivers’ suspiciousness increased both for not-busy perceivers in the identical-goal condition and for busy perceivers in the goal-discord condition. (shrink)

Two studies examine whether income volatility might lead to greater personal financial insecurity and might create a decision environment that discourages planning ahead on personal finances. In Study 1, participants who reported more month-to-month variability in their actual income were less likely to have planned for financial contingencies. A lower internal locus of control partially mediated the link between volatility and financial planning decisions in Study 1, and lower internal locus of economic control predicted financial planning decisions independently of volatility. (...) In Study 2, participants who were randomly assigned to receive volatile payments in a simulated work environment were less likely to save their compensation for this work. Again, lower internal locus of economic control predicted financial planning decisions independently of volatility. This is the first study to demonstrate a causal link between income volatility and financial decisions, specifically a heightened tendency to make short-term financial decisions. Both studies also underlined the importance of internal locus of control for financial planning decisions. (shrink)

Our tmst in our own trustworthiness as evaluators of tmth plays a uniquely important role in Lehrer's recent work in epistemology. Lehrer has claimed that a person who trusts in her own trustworthiness has a reason for accepting everything she accepts, including that she is trustworthy. This claim is too bold, trust in our trustworthiness cannot play the epistemic role Lehrer assigns to it. Neither does a suitably revised version of the claim succeed in assigning any important epistemic (...) role to our own trustworthiness as evaluators of truth. (shrink)

Our tmst in our own trustworthiness as evaluators of tmth plays a uniquely important role in Lehrer's recent work in epistemology. Lehrer has claimed that a person who trusts in her own trustworthiness has a reason for accepting everything she accepts, including that she is trustworthy. This claim is too bold, trust in our trustworthiness cannot play the epistemic role Lehrer assigns to it. Neither does a suitably revised version of the claim succeed in assigning any important epistemic (...) role to our own trustworthiness as evaluators of truth. (shrink)

The current behavioral consultation case demonstrates how functional behavioral assessment (FBA) data, basic and applied research, teacher preferences, and contextual variables contribute to the decision making process when developing classroom intervention procedures. A male, African-American, fifth-grade general education student was initially referred for his inappropriate vocalizations duringtime designated for independent seatwork. FBA data suggested that this behavior was being reinforced with teacher attention. Additional data showed that he was failing to complete his assignments. An intervention was implemented where the student (...) was given assignments one a time. He was instructed to solicit teacher attention and his next assignment after completing each assignment. Analysis ofteacher ratings for inappropriate vocalizations and assignment performance data suggest that the intervention was effective in increasing assignment completion and decreasing inappropriate verbalizations. Discussion focuses on how the various data playa role in the development and implementation of classroom intervention procedures. (shrink)

The current behavioral consultation case demonstrates how functional behavioral assessment (FBA) data, basic and applied research, teacher preferences, and contextual variables contribute to the decision making process when developing classroom intervention procedures. A male, African-American, fifth-grade general education student was initially referred for his inappropriate vocalizations duringtime designated for independent seatwork. FBA data suggested that this behavior was being reinforced with teacher attention. Additional data showed that he was failing to complete his assignments. An intervention was implemented where the student (...) was given assignments one a time. He was instructed to solicit teacher attention and his next assignment after completing each assignment. Analysis ofteacher ratings for inappropriate vocalizations and assignment performance data suggest that the intervention was effective in increasing assignment completion and decreasing inappropriate verbalizations. Discussion focuses on how the various data playa role in the development and implementation of classroom intervention procedures. (shrink)