Soil balancing is widely used in organic farming, but little is known about the practice because technical knowledge and goals for the practice are produced and negotiated within an alternative community of practice (CoP). We used a review of the private soil balancing literature and semi-structured interviews with farmers and consultants to document the knowledge, shared meanings, and goals of key actors within the soil balancing CoP. Our findings suggest this CoP is dominated by discourse between private consultants and farmers, (...) with few contributions to or from scientists or the peer reviewed literature. The idea of soil balancing is centered around improving soil quality through adjustments in Base Cation Saturation Ratios (BCSR), and practitioners report a wide range of positive agronomic outcomes. For most soil balancers, however, BCSR is only one part of a broader approach to soil health management that also utilizes traditional soil fertility recommendations and soil health-building cultural management practices. Meanwhile, a survey of land grant university soil fertility specialists and the peer-reviewed literature documented a high degree of skepticism and a lack of scientific evidence that BCSR can boost crop yields. We conclude that this scientific discourse reflects a disconnect from the practices and meanings used in the soil balancing CoP. While tensions between the dominant and niche agricultural knowledge systems are not unique, we believe a better appreciation for the nuanced meanings and goals within the soil balancing CoP present an opening for expanded collaborations with scientists doing research on soil health. (shrink)

Experts identified water quality, manure, good handling practices (including personal hygiene and equipment sanitation), and traceability as critical farm problem areas that, if addressed, are likely to decrease risk associated with microbial contamination of fresh produce from all scales of agriculture. However, the diverse nature of production strategies used by produce farmers presents multiple options for addressing foodborne illness issues while simultaneously creating potential complications. We use a mental models methodology to enhance our understanding of the underlying factors and assumptions (...) of small, medium, and large produce growers that influence their decision-making processes for contamination prevention and control. This empirical evidence demonstrates how challenges and opportunities to food safety are related to the scale of production and marketing strategies. We believe that refining the development of standards and existing extension and outreach food safety programs are important to both consumer protection and supporting agricultural communities. Additionally, this approach will help develop and refine food safety programs that will result in empirically grounded recommendations based on identified grower information needs. (shrink)

This chapter is an edited transcription of an author-meets-critics session at the Truth 20|20 Conference, on Douglas Edwards’ award-winning book, The Metaphysics of Truth (2018, Oxford University Press). The Metaphysics of Truth tackles fundamental questions about the role of truth in connections between language and the world. Edwards proposes a pluralist account, according to which sentences in different domains get to be true in different ways. Kellen’s questions center around how to locate Edwards’s pluralist account given certain distinctions between (...) varieties of truth pluralism, and on how to determine what domains certain sentences belong to, especially mixed compounds. Taylor’s comments critically investigate Edwards’ critiques of deflationism, particularly to do with what the deflationist can say about whether truth counts as a ‘sparse’ or ‘abundant’ property, and whether deflationists are able to explain important differences between sparse properties such as being magnetic, and abundant properties, which deflationists will likely think include being true. Lynch provides several questions about the metaphysics of Edwards’s account, including the nature of the determination relation, and the nature of the property of truth itself, and whether Edwards’s account of that property manages to distinguish itself from something a truth minimalist would be happy with. (shrink)

Douglas proposes a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, protecting the integrity and objectivity of science.

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging interview Professor Douglas V. Porpora discusses a number of issues. First, how he became a Critical Realist through his early work on the concept of structure. Second, drawing on his Reconstructing Sociology, his take on the current state of American sociology. This leads to discussion of the broader range of his work as part of Margaret Archer’s various Centre for Social Ontology projects, and on moral-macro reasoning and the concept of truth in political discourse.

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject (...) to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

During the Gulf war, CNN correspondent Peter Arnett distinguished himself with its courageous reporting in Iraq while under fire by the U.S.-led coalition which dropped more bombs on Iraq than were unleashed in World War II. Reporting live from Baghdad throughout the war, Arnett provided vivid daily accounts of life in Iraq during one of the most sustained air attacks in history. From his live telephone reporting of the early hours of the U.S. attack on Iraq in January 1991 through (...) his live satellite reports of the effects of the daily bombing of Iraq, Arnett distinguished himself through his attempts to cut through the lies and disinformation of both sides and to provide accurate reporting on the effects of the U.S.-led coalition assault against Iraq. (shrink)

A Bibliography of Douglas Walton’s Published Works, 1971-20.

Commonsense Consequentialism is a book about morality, rationality, and the interconnections between the two. In it, Douglas W. Portmore defends a version of consequentialism that both comports with our commonsense moral intuitions and shares with other consequentialist theories the same compelling teleological conception of practical reasons. Broadly construed, consequentialism is the view that an act's deontic status is determined by how its outcome ranks relative to those of the available alternatives on some evaluative ranking. Portmore argues that outcomes should (...) be ranked, not according to their impersonal value, but according to how much reason the relevant agent has to desire that each outcome obtains and that, when outcomes are ranked in this way, we arrive at a version of consequentialism that can better account for our commonsense moral intuitions than even many forms of deontology can. What's more, Portmore argues that we should accept this version of consequentialism, because we should accept both that an agent can be morally required to do only what she has most reason to do and that what she has most reason to do is to perform the act that would produce the outcome that she has most reason to want to obtain.Although the primary aim of the book is to defend a particular moral theory, Portmore defends this theory as part of a coherent whole concerning our commonsense views about the nature and substance of both morality and rationality. Thus, it will be of interest not only to those working on consequentialism and other areas of normative ethics, but also to those working in metaethics. Beyond offering an account of morality, Portmore offers accounts of practical reasons, practical rationality, and the objective/subjective obligation distinction. (shrink)

If “perfectionism” in ethics refers to those normative theories that treat the fulfillment or realization of human nature as central to an account of both goodness and moral obligation, in what sense is “human flourishing” a perfectionist notion? How much of what we take “human flourishing” to signify is the result of our understanding of human nature? Is the content of this concept simply read off an examination of our nature? Is there no place for diversity and individuality? Is the (...) belief that the content of such a normative concept can be determined by an appeal to human nature merely the result of epistemological naiveté? What is the exact character of the connection between human flourishing and human nature? These questions are the ultimate concern of this essay, but to appreciate the answers that will be offered it is necessary to understand what is meant by “human flourishing.” “Human flourishing” is a relatively recent term in ethics. It seems to have developed in the last two decades because the traditional translation of the Greek term eudaimonia as “happiness” failed to communicate clearly that eudaimonia was an objective good, not merely a subjective good. (shrink)

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published (...) research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Brad Hooker's rule-consequentialism implausibly implies that what earthlings are morally required to sacrifice for the sake of helping their less fortunate brethren depends on whether or not other people exist on some distant planet even when these others would be too far away for earthlings to affect.

Douglas Sturm, a major ethical thinker, here presents ten intriguing essays that lay the groundwork for a communitarian political theory. Drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Bernard E. Meland, Sturm brings the implications of process thought, especially its principle of internal relations, to bear on the interpretation and evaluation of our social and political life. He argues that American individualism, including its curious transmutations into the forms of corporativism, racism, and nationalism is a constraint that deprives (...) us of a deeper, more complex understanding of ourselves and a richer sense of the goodness of our lives. The essays contrast a communitarian political theory with alternative traditions of social thought, particularly those forms of individualism generated by Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham. Political realities of power, rights, and interests are not to be dismissed, according to Sturm, but they need to be cast within a concept of politics that sustains a community as a whole; thus public good and justice are defined as the central principles of public life. He isolates alternative theoretical perspectives and demonstrates how they deal with several current social and political dilemmas. Sturm applies the principles of the communitarian political theory to a broad range of contemporary concerns: the character and legitimacy of the modern business corporation; the idea of democratic capitalism; legal realism as the prevailing jurisprudence of the practicing lawyer; the scope and focus of bioethics as a discipline. In doing so, he affirms both the inescapability of public life in our existence and the radical character of the evil that it often creates. (shrink)

McCarty, Douglas Morality and ethics would be recognised by virtually everyone as a necessity in human society. In fact morality and ethics are the very foundations on which human society is built. Humans are complex individuals, with personal needs, desires, inclinations, dispositions and preferences, but are also naturally predisposed to live in social groups large and small with similarly complex individuals.

Cenzer, D., R. Downey, C. Jockusch and R.A. Shore, Countable thin Π01 classes, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 59 79–139. A Π01 class P {0, 1}ω is thin if every Π01 subclass of P is the intersection of P with some clopen set. Countable thin Π01 classes are constructed having arbitrary recursive Cantor- Bendixson rank. A thin Π01 class P is constructed with a unique nonisolated point A and furthermore A is of degree 0’. It is shown that no (...) set of degree ≥0” can be a member of any thin Π01 class. An r.e. degree d is constructed such that no set of degree d can be a member of any thin Π01 class. It is also shown that between any two distinct comparable r.e. degrees, there is a degree that contains a set which is of rank one in some thin Π01 class. It is shown that no maximal set can have rank one in any Π01 class, while there exist maximal sets of rank 2. The connection between Π01 classes, propositional theories and recursive Boolean algebras is explored, producing several corollaries to the results on Π01 classes. For example, call a recursive Boolean algebra thin if it has no proper nonprincipal recursive ideals. Then no thin recursive Boolean algebra can have a maximal ideal of degree ≥0”. (shrink)

Traditionally, cognitive values have been thought of as a collective pool of considerations in science that frequently trade against each other. I argue here that a finer-grained account of the value of cognitive values can help reduce such tensions. I separate the values into groups, minimal epistemic criteria, pragmatic considerations, and genuine epistemic assurance, based in part on the distinction between values that describe theories per se and values that describe theory-evidence relationships. This allows us to clarify why these values (...) are central to science and what role they should play, while reducing the tensions among them. (shrink)

The infamous difficulty of Lacan's writing has its own, very apt synecdoche: the matheme. What makes this ‘little letter’ that structures the signifier so apposite a device is how it stymies even those sophisticated readers for whom Lacan is as close-readable as Mallarm e. The proposition offered here is that this crisis of reading is not the consequence of either some terrible mistake or egregious failing in character, but rather a typically Lacanian move by which his text stages the very (...) theory it is presumably explicating. This article suggests that by striving to read the matheme, instead of seizing upon excuses to avoid it, we can begin to understand what Lacan meant when he said that everything emerges from the structure of the signifier. (shrink)

These essays engage Jin Y. Park’s recent translation of the work of Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun and public intellectual in early twentieth-century Korea. Park’s translation of Iryŏp’s Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun was the subject of two book panels at recent conferences: the first a plenary session at the annual meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the second at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association on a group program session sponsored by the (...) International Society for Buddhist Philosophy. This exchange also includes a response from Park. (shrink)

The research described here contributes to the extant empirical research on business ethics education by examining outcomes drawn from the literature on positive organizational scholarship (POS). The general research question explored is whether a course on ethical decision-making in business could positively influence students’ confidence in their abilities to handle ethical problems at work (i.e., moral efficacy), boost the relative importance of ethics in their work lives (i.e., moral meaningfulness), and encourage them to be more courageous in raising ethical problems (...) at work even if it is unpopular (i.e., moral courage). Specifically, the study used a rigorous quasi-experimental pretest–posttest research design with a treatment (N = 30) and control group (N = 30) to investigate whether a graduate-level course in business ethics could influence students’ levels of moral efficacy, meaningfulness, and courage. Findings revealed that participants in the business ethics treatment course experienced significant positive increases in each of the three outcome variables as compared to the control group. The largest increase was in moral efficacy, followed by moral courage, and finally, moral meaningfulness. These findings are discussed in the context of the current research on business ethics education and POS. Implications for future research are discussed. (shrink)

There is considerable disagreement about the epistemic value of novel predictive success, i.e. when a scientist predicts an unexpected phenomenon, experiments are conducted, and the prediction proves to be accurate. We survey the field on this question, noting both fully articulated views such as weak and strong predictivism, and more nascent views, such as pluralist reasons for the instrumental value of prediction. By examining the various reasons offered for the value of prediction across a range of inferential contexts , we (...) can see that neither weak nor strong predictivism captures all of the reasons for valuing prediction available. A third path is presented, Pluralist Instrumental Predictivism; PIP for short. (shrink)

In this first modern, critical assessment of the place of mathematics in Berkeley's philosophy and Berkeley's place in the history of mathematics, Douglas M. Jesseph provides a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley's work.

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 3-4, Spring 2021.

In this paper, the difficulties inherent in the debate between moral nativists and antinativists, who differ in their beliefs on the nature of systems of morality, are shown to exemplify the need for philosophers to support their views with empirical data. Furthermore, it proposes that an empirical study of first-generation immigrant populations has the potential to resolve the debate over moral nativism, as it would allow researchers to observe the moral “critical period.” Based on the recent philosophical advances made through (...) experimental evidence, this paper goes on to argue that empirical data is a valuable source of information from which philosophers ought to draw. (shrink)

With an eye on the future of global ethics, I argue that social-media technologies are not morally neutral tools but are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of agent. They nudge us to do things that are bad for us. Moreover, I argue that we have a duty to quit using social-media platforms, not just on account of possible duties to preserve our own well-being but because users are akin to test subjects on whom developers are testing new nudges, (...) and we ought to deprive them of their test subjects. (shrink)

Combines the work of promising college students with essays by distinguished scholars.

Essays discuss the history, philosophy, methodology, and practices of holistic medicine.

In contrast to classical natural law theory and traditional individualist liberalism, James Luther Adams develops a version of natural law doctrine grounded in liberal religion. In its ontological dimension, his natural law doctrine is derived from a communal understanding of the character of reality. In its institutional dimension, his natural law doctrine promotes a kind of democracy in which freedom of association is central. From this perspective, law is a practice intended to empower persons through their several associations in the (...) constant formation and transformation of community under the direction of divine power. (shrink)

Old philosophical problems never die, but they can be reinterpreted. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of the problem of reconciling divine omniscience and human free will. Classical discussions of this problem concentrate on the nature of God and the concept of free will. The present discussion will focus attention on the concept of knowledge, drawing on developments in epistemology that resulted from the posing of a certain problem by Edmund Gettier in 1963.

The concept of dominance poses several dilemmas. First, while entrenched in genetics education, the metaphor of dominance promotes several misconceptions and misleading cultural perspectives. Second, the metaphors of power, prevalence and competition extend into science, shaping assumptions and default concepts. Third, because genetic causality is complex, the simplified concepts of dominance found in practice are highly contingent or inconsistent. The conceptual problems are illustrated in the history of studies on the evolution of dominance. Conceptual clarity may be fostered, I claim, (...) by viewing diploid organisms as diphenic and by framing genetic causality modestly through individual alleles and their corresponding haplophenotypes. (shrink)

The Issues at Issue: Heidegger declares metaphor to be a function of metaphysics. Ricoeur's tension theory of metaphor takes the understanding of metaphor beyond metaphysics. Ricoeur's theory of metaphor is a theory of metaphorical statement not of naming. The classical, lexical theory of metaphor focuses on a primary meaning of each metaphor. As such metaphor is merely ornamentation in language. What it names could more appropriately be accomplished in literal language. In contrast, metaphor is understood by Ricoeur to be a (...) semantic event made possible by three kinds of tensions. One may understand symbols to function with the same metaphorical tensions. In the case of symbols, however, these tensions function not at the level of the sentence but rather of the narrative. Metaphor and symbol both have an ‘ontological priority’ over other elements of discourse and experience. They ‘work’ because of the event character of both understanding and experience. Understanding and experience have event as their condition of possibility. Metaphor and symbol both have a ‘temporal priority’, as well, for they serve as the shock to think ‘more’. This can occur, however, because they are part of a circularity that is non-metaphysical, that is, the circularity of the event character of the Being-of beings. Hence, just as metaphors are always ‘larger’ than the sentence, so are symbols always ‘larger’ than the narrative. (shrink)