For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s _The Bourgeois Virtues_, a magnum (...) opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. _High Noon_, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. _The Bourgeois Virtues _is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner. (shrink)

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neoinstitutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what (...) your mother taught you. Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life. In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neoinstitutionalism. She proposes a "humanomics," an economics with the humans left in. Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of "market-tested innovation" against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics. (shrink)

Survival after solid-organ transplantation has improved significantly, and many contemporary transplant recipients are of childbearing potential. There are limited data to guide decision-making surrounding pregnancy after transplantation, variations in clinical practice, and significant knowledge gaps, all of which raise significant ethical issues. Post-transplant pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of maternal and fetal complications. Shared decision-making is a central aspect of patient counselling but is complicated by significant knowledge gaps. Stakeholder interests can be in conflict; exploring these tensions can (...) help patients to evaluate their options and inform their deliberations. We argue that uniform, evidence-based recommendations for pregnancy after solid organ transplantation are needed. Conducting research, including patient-engaged studies, in this area should be priority for the transplant community. (shrink)

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe. Or so says Deirdre N. (...) McCloskey in _Bourgeois Dignity_, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity. An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book _The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity_ is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives. (shrink)

Paolo Silvestri interviews Deirdre Nansen McCloskey on the occasion of her latest book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science. The interview covers her personal and intellectual life, the main turning points of her journey and her contributions. More specifically, the conversation focuses on McCloskey’s writings on the methodology and rhetoric of economics, her interdisciplinary ventures into the humanities, the Bourgeois Era trilogy with its history of the ‘Great Enrichment’, her liberal political commitments, and the value (...) and meaning of liberty, equality, and solidarity. Finally, the conversation returns to McCloskey’s ‘humanomics’ approach: an economics with the humans left in. (shrink)

Is economics a science? Deidre McCloskey says 'Yes, but'. Yes, economics measures and predicts, but - like other sciences - it uses literary methods too. Economists use stories as geologists do, and metaphors as physicists do. The result is that the sciences, economics among them, must be read as 'rhetoric', in the sense of writing with intent. McCloskey's books, The Rhetoric of Economics and If You're So Smart, have been widely discussed. In Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics he converses with (...) his critics, suggesting that they too can gain from knowing their rhetoric. The humanistic and mathematical approaches to economics, says McCloskey, fit together in a new 'interpretive' economics. Along the way he places economics within the sciences, examines the role of mathematics in the field, replies to critics from the left, right and centre, and shows how economics can again take a leading place in the conversation of humankind. (shrink)

_An insightful and passionately written book explaining why a return to Enlightenment ideals is good for the world__ "Beginning with the simple but fertile idea that people should not push other people around, Deirdre McCloskey presents an elegant defense of 'true liberalism' as opposed to its well-meaning rivals on the left and the right. Erudite, but marvelously accessible and written in a style that is at once colloquial and astringent."—Stanley Fish__ The greatest challenges facing humankind, according to Deirdre (...) McCloskey, are poverty and tyranny, both of which hold people back. Arguing for a return to true liberal values, this engaging and accessible book develops, defends, and demonstrates how embracing the ideas first espoused by eighteenth-century philosophers like Locke, Smith, Voltaire, and Wollstonecraft is good for everyone. With her trademark wit and deep understanding, McCloskey shows how the adoption of Enlightenment ideals of liberalism has propelled the freedom and prosperity that define the quality of a full life. In her view, liberalism leads to equality, but equality does not necessarily lead to liberalism. Liberalism is an optimistic philosophy that depends on the power of rhetoric rather than coercion,_ and on ethics, free speech, and facts in order to thrive. (shrink)

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is an inference process guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to (...) understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? MEANING AND RELEVANCE sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that greater attention must be given to peoples’ expression of “care” in relation to consumption. We suggest that “caring about” does not necessarily lead to “care-giving,” as conceptualising an attitude–behaviour gap might imply, but that a closer examination of the intensity, morality, and articulation of care can lead to a greater understanding of consumer narratives and, thus, behaviour. To examine this proposition, a purposive sample of self-identified ethical consumers was interviewed. Care is expressed by the (...) study’s participants in a variety of ways and linked to behaviour through diverse patterns that includes consumption and abstention. We find significant correspondence between the academic literature on the ‘ethics of care’ and our participants’ articulation of their ethical consumption behaviours. We suggest, therefore, that a close understanding of an ethics of care among consumers is important both in providing insight into the attitude–behaviour gap challenge evident in the literature and to the continued development of an ethical consumption discourse. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine whether patient/client autonomy is always compatible with the nurse’s role of advocacy. The author looks separately at the concepts of autonomy and advocacy, and considers them in relation to the reality of clinical practice from professional, ethical and legal perspectives. Considerable ambiguity is found regarding the legitimacy of claims of a unique function for nurses to act as patient advocates. To act as an advocate may put nurses at personal and professional risk. (...) It may also be deemed arrogant and insulting to other health care professionals. Patient autonomy can be seen as a subcategory of the right of every individual to self-determination, and as such is protected by law. However, it is questionable whether the traditionally paternalistic approach to health care provision truly respects the autonomous rights of each patient. The author considers examples and cases from the literature that resulted in professional and/or personal difficulties for the nurses involved, and also reflects on an incident from her own practice where a positive outcome was achieved that demonstrated compatibility between the concepts under consideration. (shrink)

This paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a maxim, norm or convention of truthfulness which applies at the level of what is literally meant, or what is said. Pragmatic frameworks based on this view must explain the frequent occurrence and acceptability of loose and figurative uses of language. We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but (...) by expectations of relevance, raised by literal, loose and figurative uses alike. Sample analyses are provided, and some consequences of this alternative account are explored. In particular, we argue that the notions of ‘literal meaning’ and ‘what is said’ play no useful theoretical role in the study of language use, and that the nature of explicit communication will have to be rethought. (shrink)

In this edited volume, authors from multiple academic and creative disciplines interrogate constructionist and new materialist paradigms to assess their adequacy when analysing entanglements and weavings of gender and love in diverse contexts where discursive and material elements intra-act.

Executive power in the European Union consists of various bits and pieces that have been cobbled together across a spectrum of institutions, sub‐actors, and policy areas. No fewer than three institutions of the European Union and its predecessors can claim to exercise executive authority within the Union, albeit to varying degrees and with varying emphasis: the Commission, the Council, and the European Council. This chapter provides a brief overview of the three core executive institutions, followed by a discussion on recent (...) executive constructions outside the EU legal framework. It highlights the pressing need for accountability mechanisms on all levels of Union governance. The European Council has gradually reinforced its own role, becoming in effect the most important agenda setter of the larger developments of the European Union, in spite of the Commission's monopoly of legislative initiative. (shrink)

Virtue ethics proposes a set of seven—four pagan virtues and three Christian—as a roughly adequate philosophical psychology. Hobbes tried to get along with one virtue, prudence, to which Rawls added a veiled virtue of justice. Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice adds the virtue of love. But in criticizing Rawls, she enunciates a “Nussbaum Lemma,” that is, a good society is unlikely to arise from over-simple models of ethical life. Since virtuous, flourishing societies are what we wish, we had better insert the (...) virtues, as she puts it, “from the start.” James Buchanan's constitutionalism, for example, solves moral hazards in a Nussbaumian world, but leaves hanging the ethical start. To start a project ending in constitutional citizenship—or human capabilities, or justice as fairness, or a Leviathan state, or the categorical imperative, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number—we need already an ethical actor, embodying the seven principal virtues. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

Taking “second-generation perpetrators” to refer to the tension between the guilt of the parents who were actively involved in carrying out Nazi atrocities, and the innocence of their offspring, I posit the oscillation between these positions as a form of liminality. Underpinned by the work of Jacques Derrida and Marianne Hirsch, I discuss this form of liminality in relation to concepts of the ghostly, examining the ways in which Holocaust narratives, literary and cinematic, are haunted by the past. I argue (...) that the family conflicts such second-generation narratives present run the risk of displacing the real victims of the Holocaust. (shrink)

Discusses the controversial issue of animal rights and animal cruelty.

In Bettering Humanomics: A New and Old Approach to Economic Science, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey offers a critique of contemporary economics and a proposal for a better humanomics. McCloskey argues for an economic science that accepts the models and mathematics, the statistics and experiments of the current orthodoxy, but also attests to the immense amount we can still learn about human nature and the economy. From observing human actions in social contexts, to the various understandings attained by studying history, philosophy, (...) and literature, McCloskey presents the myriad ways in which we think about life and how we justify and understand our actions in a synergistically human approach towards economic theory and practice. (shrink)

Our book Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986) treats utterance interpretation as a two-phase process: a modular decoding phase is seen as providing input to a central inferential phase in which a linguistically encoded logical form is contextually enriched and used to construct a hypothesis about the speaker's informative intention. Relevance was mainly concerned with the inferential phase of comprehension: we had to answer Fodor's challenge that while decoding processes are quite well understood, inferential processes are not only not understood, but (...) perhaps not even understandable (see Fodor 1983). Here we will look more closely at the decoding phase and consider what types of information may be linguistically encoded, and how the borderline between decoding and inference can be drawn. It might be that all linguistically encoded information is cut to a single pattern: all truth conditions, say, or all instructions for use. However, there is a robust intuition that two basic types of meaning can be found. This intuition surfaces in a variety of distinctions: between describing and indicating, stating and showing, saying and conventionally implicating, or between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional, conceptual and procedural, or representational and computational meaning. In the literature, justifications for these distinctions have been developed in both strictly linguistic and more broadly cognitive terms. The linguistic justification goes as follows (see for example Recanati 1987). Utterances express propositions; propositions have truth conditions; but the meaning of an utterance is not exhausted by its truth conditions, i.e. the truth conditions of the proposition expressed. An utterance not only expresses a proposition but is used to perform a variety of speech acts. It can.. (shrink)

We give an example of an imaginary defined in certain valued fields with analytic structure which cannot be coded in the ‘geometric' sorts which suffice to code all imaginaries in the corresponding algebraic setting.

The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties, which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents in isolation nor derivable by standard rules of semantic composition. An adequate pragmatic account of metaphor interpretation must explain how these properties are derived. Using the framework of relevance theory, we propose a wholly inferential account, and argue that the derivation of emergent properties involves no special interpretive mechanisms not required for the interpretation of ordinary, literal utterances.

Biometrics has done damage with levels of R or p or Student’s t. The damage widened with Ronald A. Fisher’s victory in the 1920s and 1930s in devising mechanical methods of “testing,” against methods of common sense and scientific impact, “oomph.” The scale along which one would measure oomph is particularly clear in biomedical sciences: life or death. Cardiovascular epidemiology, to take one example, combines with gusto the “fallacy of the transposed conditional” and what we call the “sizeless stare” of (...) statistical significance. Some medical editors have battled against the 5% philosophy, as did, for example, Kenneth Rothman, the founder of Epidemiology. And decades ago a sensible few in education, ecology, and sociology initiated a “significance test controversy.” But, grantors, journal referees, and tenure committees in the statistical sciences had faith that probability spaces can substitute for scientific judgment. A finding of p <.05 is deemed to be “better” for variable X than p <.11 for variable Y. It is not. It depends on the oomph of X and Y—the effect size, size judged in the light of how much it matters for scientific or clinical purposes. In 1995 a Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group, for example, came to a rare consensus on effect size: 10 different studies had agreed that a certain drug for treating prostate cancer can increase patient survival by 12%. An 11th study published in the New England Journal in 1998 dismissed the drug. The dismissal was based on a t-test, not on what William Gosset had called, against Ronald A. Fisher’s machinery, “real” error. (shrink)

""This book contains a careful, thorough, and where necessary skeptical as regards doubtful evidence (especially in the case of Plato and the Old Academy) of the beginnings in European thought of the negative or apophatic way of thinking and its relations to more positive or kataphatic ways of thinking about God. One of its greatest strengths, perhaps the greatest, is that the author makes clear that none of the persons concerned, Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, was engaged in the pursuit of (...) a philosophical abstraction, or the heaping of rhetorical superlatives on God. They were rather concerned to present the origin of the universe as an intimately present living reality which infinitely transcends our thought and speech. This, combined with careful attention to the varieties of negative theology and its relations with positive, and the particular difficulties experienced by the members of the various traditions involved, makes the book the best introduction to the negative theology available."" -A. H. Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of Liverpool, England. Emeritus Professor of Classics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Senior Fellow of the British Academy. Irish academic Deirdre Carabine has lived and taught in Uganda for more than twenty years. She has recently been founder Vice-Chancellor at the Virtual University of Uganda (VUU), the first fully online university in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to that she set up International Health Sciences University in Kampala. She has taught at Queen's Belfast, University College Dublin, and Uganda Martyrs University. Currently, she is Director of Programmes at VUU. She attended the Queen's University of Belfast where she graduated with a PhD in philosophy, and University College Dublin where, as one of the first Newman Scholars, she gained a second PhD in Classics. She is also author of John Scottus Eriugena in the Great Medieval Thinkers Series (2000). (shrink)

This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

This paper focuses on the issue of identity, primarily (though not exclusively) in relation to Africana women. The author argues that female identity in Africa today has been both negated and fractured, and that this fracture comes about through the “globalization of woman” and the universalization of both the experienceof women and of female “identity.” She goes on to argue that the ghost of universalism continues to hover over our conceptions of woman, especially the Other woman (that is, the non-white, (...) non-heterosexual, non-middle class woman), despite the postmodern call for the acceptance of difference. According to the author, African female identity has been negated and fractured not only through various cultural practices, but also through colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. (shrink)