In 1970, exactly fifty years ago, I took entrance examinations in Hebrew and Greek to begin studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome. I have shared in various ministries since then, sometimes in positions that distracted from my academic interests. Nevertheless, I have been a privileged 'insider' to the development of critical studies of the New Testament over the past fifty years. Given my history, the title of this essay shamelessly plagiarises Geoffrey Blainey's delightful recollections of his early (...) years, 'Before I Forget'. (shrink)

In order for the valuable research published in the Anthropology of Consciousness (AoC) journal to have the impact it ought to have upon the anthropological mainstream, contributors must demonstrate that they appreciate the historical tradition of anthropology as an intellectual forebear. Although “ethnometaphysics” has been cited sporadically by anthropologists over the past half-century, it never really caught on as an interdisciplinary speciality like ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, and ethnomathematics. Pointing to the example of discord in the West between viewing psychoactive substances as (...) either “hallucinogens” or “entheogens,” I reassert ethnometaphysics in an aim to revamp the overlooked coining of this sub-field by anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell. Such a position rebrands SAC's alternative outlook in a way that could be seen by mainstream colleagues as less radical, thus giving the Society a more realistic opportunity to provoke progressive changes in the mainstream of our discipline. (shrink)

Words like you, here, and tomorrow are different from other expressions in two ways. First, and by definition, they have different kinds of meanings, which are context-dependent in ways that the meanings of names and descriptions are not. Second, their meanings play a different kind of role in the interpretations of the utterances that contain them. For example, the meaning of you can be paraphrased by a description like "the addressee of the utterance." But an utterance of (1) doesn't say (...) the same thing as an utterance of (2). (shrink)

Societies function on the basis of rules. These rules, rather like the rules of the road, coordinate the activities of individuals who have a variety of goals and purposes. Whether the rules work well or ill, and how they can be made to work better, is a matter of major concern. Appropriately interpreted, the working of social rules is also the central subject matter of modern political economy. This book is about rules - what they are, how they work, and (...) how they can be properly analysed. The authors' objective is to understand the workings of alternative political institutions so that choices among such institutions can be more fully informed. Thus, broadly defined, the methodology of constitutional political economy is the subject matter of The Reason of Rules. The authors have examined how rules for political order work, how such rules might be chosen, and how normative criteria for such choices might be established. (shrink)

A visual imagery task is presented which is beyond the limits of normal human ability, and some of the factors contributing to its difficulty are isolated by comparing the difficulty of related tasks. It is argued that complex objects are assigned hierarchical structural descriptions by being parsed into parts, each of which has its own local system of significant directions. Two quite different schemas for a wire‐frame cube are used to illustrate this theory, and some striking perceptual differences to which (...) they give rise are described. The difficulty of certain mental imagery tasks is shown to depend on which of the alternative structural descriptions of an object is used, and this is interpreted as evidence that structural descriptions are an important component of mental images. Finally, it is argued that analog transformations like mental folding involve changing the values of continuous variables in a structural description. (shrink)

"The book's major parts, one on polarity and the other on analogy, introduce the reader to the patterns of thinking that are fundamental not only to Greek philosophy but also to classical civilization as a whole. As a leading classicist in his own right, Lloyd is an impeccable guide. His sophistication in adducing anthropological parallels to Greek models of polarity and analogy broadens his perspective, making him a forerunner in the study of what we are now used to calling semiotics. (...) A striking example of Lloyd's approach is his re-examination of the dichotomy of Olympian and chthonian gods in ancient Greek world view, which surpasses the reductionist and pseudo-historical models of sky-gods and earth-goddesses that are still commonly invoked to account for polarities in Greek pantheon. "In the second part, dealing with analogy, three crucial metaphorical models for the universe turn out to be basis for a dazzlingly wide variety of scientific and philosophical perspectives. Each model is tested in the whole spectrum of Greek artistic, philosophical and scientific thought. This work is a treasure-house of insights for experts and non experts alike." --Gregory Nagy, Harvard University. (shrink)

Hellman and Shapiro explore the development of the idea of the continuous, from the Aristotelian view that a true continuum cannot be composed of points to the now standard, entirely punctiform frameworks for analysis and geometry. They then investigate the underlying metaphysical issues concerning the nature of space or space-time.

Given a basic conditional of the form, If A then C, individuals usually list three cases as possible: A and C, not‐A and not‐C, not‐A and C. This result corroborates the theory of mental models. By contrast, individuals often judge that the conditional is true only in the case of A and C, and that cases of not‐A are irrelevant to its truth or falsity. This result corroborates other theories of conditionals. To resolve the discrepancy, we devised two new tasks: (...) the “collective” truth task, in which participants judged whether sets of assertions about a specific individual, such as: If A then C, not‐A, C, could all be true at the same time; and one in which participants judged the truth of conditional predictions about specific future events. The results consistently matched the three possibilities, thereby corroborating the model theory. They also showed a massive violation of the probability calculus in estimates of the probabilities of the four cases in the partition of conditionals (A and C, A and not‐C, not‐A and C, and not‐A and not‐C), which summed to over 200%. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting further questions (...) to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

Standard proofs of generalized Bell theorems, aiming to restrict stochastic, local hidden-variable theories for quantum correlation phenomena, employ as a locality condition the requirement of conditional stochastic independence. The connection between this and the no-superluminary-action requirement of the special theory of relativity has been a topic of controversy. In this paper, we introduce an alternative locality condition for stochastic theories, framed in terms of the models of such a theory (§2). It is a natural generalization of a light-cone determination condition (...) that is essentially equivalent to mathematical conditions that have been used to derive Bell inequalities in the deterministic case. Further, it is roughly equivalent to a condition proposed by Bell that, in one investigation, needed to be supplemented with a much stronger assumption in order to yield an inequality violated by some quantum mechanical predictions. It is shown here that this reflects a very general situation: from the proposed locality condition, even adding the strict anticorrelation condition and the auxiliary hypotheses needed to derive experimentally useful (and theoretically telling) inequalities, no Bell-type inequality is derivable. (These independence claims are the burden of §4.) A certain limitation on the scope of the proposed stochastic locality condition is exposed (§5), but it is found to be rather minor. The conclusion is thus supported that conditional stochastic independence, however reasonable on other grounds, is essentially stronger than what is required by the special theory.Our results stand in apparent contradiction with a class of derivations purporting to obtain generalized Bell inequalities from locality alone. It is shown in Appendix (B) that such proofs do not achieve their goal. This fits with our conclusion that generalized Bell theorems are not straightforward generalizations of theorems restricting deterministic hidden-variable theories, and that, in fact, such generalizations do not exist. This leaves open the possibility that a satisfactory, non-deterministic account of the quantum correlation phenomena can be given within the framework of the special theory. (shrink)

Originally published in 1967, this book aims to develop an ethical theory which remedies the defects of Utilitarianism while recognising the truths upon which Utilitarians have insisted. Its thesis is offered as a challenge to all schools of moral philosophy which have flourished in the twentieth century. Dr Grice argues that there are two kinds of Judgement of moral obligation. Social Contract theory, in a form which avoids the classical objections, is employed in setting out the ground of basic obligations; (...) and the ultra obligations of individual men are found to be grounded in their own characters. He then demonstrates that the theory offered, unlike Utilitarianism, throws light on judgements of rights and justice. Moral good is seen eventually as the coping stone, not the foundation stone of morality. (shrink)

With developments in the 19th and early 20th centuries, structuralist ideas concerning the subject matter of mathematics have become commonplace. Yet fundamental questions concerning structures and relations themselves as well as the scope of structuralist analyses remain to be answered. The distinction between axioms as defining conditions and axioms as assertions is highlighted as is the problem of the indefinite extendability of any putatively all-embracing realm of structures. This chapter systematically compares four main versions: set-theoretic structuralism, a version taking structures (...) as sui generis universals, structuralism based on category theory, and a quasi-nominalist modal-structuralism. While none of the approaches is problem-free, it appears that some synthesis of the category-theoretic approach with modal-structuralism can meet the challenges set out, given the notion of “logical possibility.”. (shrink)

A plurality of approaches to foundational aspects of mathematics is a fact of life. Two loci of this are discussed here, the classicism/constructivism controversy over standards of proof, and the plurality of universes of discourse for mathematics arising in set theory and in category theory, whose problematic relationship is discussed. The first case illustrates the hypothesis that a sufficiently rich subject matter may require a multiplicity of approaches. The second case, while in some respects special to mathematics, raises issues of (...) ontological multiplicity and relativity encountered in the natural sciences as well. (shrink)

In 2005, Chinese President Hu Jintao instituted a “Harmonious Society” policy marking a new China’s approach toward development. This generated intense excitement among observers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) who perceive an overlap in objectives between CSR and Harmonious Society and believe that Harmonious Society will lead to increased CSR engagement in China. However, there is little exploration of how Harmonious Society will contribute to increasing CSR engagement. This article seeks to explore whether Harmonious Society will meet this promise. It (...) does so by drawing up a list of actions that if taken by the government would increase the level of CSR in China and make Harmonious Society a relevant factor in the development of Chinese CSR. To do so, my article studies comparative literature on CSR development to develop a framework that divides causes of CSR in a country into environmental constraints and discretionary responses. Understanding what drives the development of CSR allows us to understand what measures the Chinese government can take to influence the level of CSR. Using this framework, my article suggests that Harmonious Society is unlikely to promote CSR in China’s growing private sector because policy measures that affect the “constraints” driving CSR are bounded by other political considerations. (shrink)

Locke is famed for his caution in speculative matters: “Men, extending their enquiries beyond their capacities and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing; ‘tis no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes”. And he is skeptical about the pretensions of natural philosophy, which he says is “not capable of being made a science”. And yet Locke is confident that “Our reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, (...) that there is an eternal, most powerful and most knowing being; which whether anyone will please to call God it matters not”. His certainty about the existence and attributes of God, I will argue, led him to surprisingly strong convictions about a deep and disputed problem at the intersection of seventeenth century metaphysics and natural philosophy: the absolute reality of space and time. Specifically, he based his absolutist conceptions of space and time on God’s literal omnipresence and eternity. Leibniz probably had Locke in mind when he inveighed in 1716 against “real absolute space, the idol of some modern Englishmen”. And Leibniz was right a decade earlier to voice through his mouthpiece Theophilus the suspicion that, despite Locke’s claim to know nothing about the substance of void space, “there are grounds for thinking you know more about it than you say or believe that you do. Some people have thought that God is the place of objects”. (shrink)

The primary objective of this article is to develop a framework for analyzing the ethical foundations and implications of shareholder wealth maximization (SWM). Distinctions between SWM and the more widely examined construct of profit maximization are identified, the most significant being the central role played in SWM by the market mechanism for pricing the corporation''s securities. It is argued that empirical tests concerned with evaluating the ethical implications of SWM will almost surely involve a joint hypothesis. A number of recent (...) empirical studies aimed at testing hypotheses with explicit ethical content are reviewed. (shrink)

This book brings together several internationally known authors with conflicting views on the subject, providing a lively and informative overview of this...

When economists pay homage to the wisdom of the distant past it is more likely that a work two decades old is being admired than one two centuries old. Economics is a science, and the sciences are noteworthy for their digestion and assimilation of the work of previous generations. Contributions remain only as accretions to the accepted body of knowledge; the writings and the writers disappear almost without trace. A conspicuous exception to this rule of professional cannibalization is Adam Smith. (...) Since 1776 he has not lacked for honors that have escaped even his most illustrious peers. Who, after all, wears a David Ricardo necktie? So to the author of The Wealth of Nations, all praise! (shrink)

Eye movements were recorded during the display of two images of a real-world scene that were inspected to determine whether they were the same or not . In the displays where the pictures were different, one object had been changed, and this object was sometimes taken from another scene and was incongruent with the gist. The experiment established that incongruous objects attract eye fixations earlier than the congruous counterparts, but that this effect is not apparent until the picture has been (...) displayed for several seconds. By controlling the visual saliency of the objects the experiment eliminates the possibility that the incongruency effect is dependent upon the conspicuity of the changed objects. A model of scene perception is suggested whereby attention is unnecessary for the partial recognition of an object that delivers sufficient information about its visual characteristics for the viewer to know that the object is improbable in that particular scene, and in which full identification requires foveal inspection. (shrink)

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into (...) an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

Starting from a behavioural-economics critique of standard rational choice theory Sugden seeks to restate the case for classical liberalism. That case has three strands: a refutation of libertarian...

What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external (...) environment. In the first part of the paper, I argue than one way of elucidating this claim is especially plausible—that systematic error, of the kind subjects make about the external environment in traditional “skeptical” scenarios, is not conceivable for introspection of experience, including for our knowledge of similarity relations. I argue that focusing on similarity relations gives us a more interesting version of the argument than for other forms of experiential introspection. Then in the second part of the paper I describe an example, inspired by a similar case due to Sydney Shoemaker, in which a subject, despite being fully rational and attentive, apparently is systematically mistaken about the character of their experience in a surprising way. I argue that the example calls into question whether there are properties of experience satisfying the epistemic access constraint, and therefore whether experience has “phenomenal properties” in the intuitive sense. (shrink)

Just how realistic about human nature and real possibilities must a theory of justice, or a moral theory, more generally, be? Lines have been drawn, with some holding that idealizing away from reality is indispensable and others maintaining that utopian thinking is not just useless but irrelevant. In Utopophobia David Estlund defends the value of utopian theory. At his most modest, Estlund claims that it is a legitimate approach, not ruled out of court by anti-idealists on entirely inadequate grounds—merely “by (...) assumption or definition” as he puts it. Yet he also argues against what we call real world theory, which takes account of human imperfection and feasible options. It invites complacency and undermines aspiration, he argues, and he accepts Rawls’ claim that it will of necessity be unsystematic, thanks to its realism. We accept that the utopian approach is neither useless nor irrelevant. Yet we press hard against the charges against real world theory, maintaining that, properly understood, it invites neither complacency nor aspiration and can perfectly well offer a systematic and principled account of normative concepts, including justice specifically. (shrink)

We examine an argument for the non-context-freeness of English that has received virtually no discussion in the literature. It is based on adjuncts of the form 'X or no X', where X is a nominal. The construction has been held to exemplify unbounded syntactic reduplication. We argue that although the argument can be made in a mathematically valid form, its empirical basis is not secure. First, the claimed unbounded syntactic identity between nominals does not always hold in attested cases, and (...) second, an understanding of the semantics of the construction removes the necessity of making reference to any syntactic reduplication. (shrink)

Amartya Sen reconsiders the idea of 'the standard of living'. He rejects the more conventional economic interpretations in terms of 'unity' and of wealth or 'opulence', and suggests an interpretation in terms of the 'capabilities and freedoms' that states of affairs do or do not allow. His argument is conceptual, but it refers to a wide range of examples. In elaborations of it, John Muellbauer explains how parts of it might be applied; Ravi Kanbur discusses the difficulties raised by choice (...) ex ante, under uncertainty, and choice ex post; Keith Hart discusses the ways in which one might think about living standards in societies in which there is a substantial amount of what he calls 'self provisioning' outside the market; and Bernard Williams reflects on some of the moral and political implications of Sen's argument. There is a bibliography of most of the more important works on the subject. The book will be of interest to economists, sociologists, students of development and moral and political philosophers; it will also be of interest to those concerned with public policy. (shrink)

There has been increased interest in developing what I call environmental virtue ethics (EVE). This paper presents some of the centralfeatures of this project. The first part is a general description of EVE, showing why there is a need for it. The second part spells out the central features of EVE including an account of the good life as flourishing in an expanded or mixed biotic community, and provides a tentative list of important environmental virtues. The third part examines one (...) virtue: friendship, showing how an understanding of it provides insight into current issues in environmental ethics. The final section addresses a challenge to the project of EVE. (shrink)

In Part III of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith declares that people desire to be both esteemed and to be esteem-worthy, but that the latter desire both does and ought to take priority. The main object of this paper is to challenge that priority claim—mainly in its descriptive aspect. If that claim were true, then: agents would be at pains to eliminate any distortions in their self-evaluations; and the effects of the size (especially of total secrecy) and the (...) character of audience on behaviour would be second-order. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Moreover the normative claim seems to overlook some advantages of inflated self-evaluation; and to allow no independent room for norms of modesty/humility. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of economic medicalization where non-medical problems are transformed into medical problems in order to achieve the objective of corporate shareholder wealth maximization. Following an overview of the differences in ethical norms applicable to medical ethics and business ethics, the economic medicalization of medical research practice and publication is examined in some detail. This motivates a general discussion of the problems involved in the ethical approval process for medical research that balances the interests of both business (...) and government in the market for medical products and services. (shrink)

This article takes issue with procedural reductionism, which is the inclination to reduce all matters of judgement and responsibility to the following of some procedure or rule. Two scenarios provide content for a discussion of professional discretion in the context of accountability. The author shows that in professional life there will always be situations that stand beyond the rules of procedures and require the unique judgement of the professional at the time. While this judgement may be determined by the facts (...) available in a situation of uncertainty, it cannot be reduced to the facts (including facts about rules and procedures). The moral judgement will still have an essential indeterminancy about it. (shrink)

Quantum logic as genuine non-classical logic provides no solution to the "paradoxes" of quantum mechanics. From the minimal condition that synonyms be substitutable salva veritate, it follows that synonymous sentential connectives be alike in point of truth-functionality. It is a fact of pure mathematics that any assignment Φ of (0, 1) to the subspaces of Hilbert space (dim. ≥ 3) which guarantees truth-preservation of the ordering and truth-functionality of QL negation, violates truth-functionality of QL ∨ and $\wedge $ . Thus, (...) from within both the classical framework and that of any QL that preserves elementary set theory, two distinct (nonsynonymous) sets of connectives are discernible. Classical derivations of QM paradoxes are all available unless the language of QM is not classically closed. Maintaining this requires a strong and selfdefeating verification theory of meaning, the philosophical cornerstone of the Copenhagen interpretation to which QL was to provide an alternative. (shrink)