Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in terms of their moral goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. The task has been to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. So far, this field has largely ignored issues about uncertainty and the conditions that have been discussed mostly pertain (...) to the ranking of risk-free outcomes. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population. Here, we shall address the question of how to rank population prospects—that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about—by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. We start by illustrating how well-known population axiologies can be extended to population prospect axiologies. And we show that new problems arise when extending population axiologies to prospects. In particular, traditional population axiologies lead to prospect-versions of the problems that they praised for avoiding in the risk-free settings. Finally, we identify an intuitive adequacy condition that, we contend, should be satisfied by any population prospect axiology, and show how given this condition, the impossibility theorems in population axiology can be extended to (non-trivial) impossibility theorems for population prospect axiology. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between epistemic freedom, and epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. I situate epistemic freedom within the larger project of epistemic decolonisation and argue that epistemic freedom is central to both its positive and negative programme. Through exploring the intersections of the notion of epistemic freedom and the scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression, I argue that one can think of epistemic injustices and oppression as infringements on epistemic freedom. I identify shared themes between the theorisation of (...) epistemic freedom and the literature on epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression, including silencing, active ignorance, and epistemic exploitation. I briefly explore each of these themes, identifying both intersections and divergences. Lastly, I draw on the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression to sharpen Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2018. Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London: Routledge) general conception of epistemic freedom and develop a tripartite structure for what substantial epistemic freedom entails. I argue that being epistemically free entails being able to choose one’s epistemic endeavours, having the means to pursue them, as well as being able to meaningfully partake in the shared endeavours of the epistemic communities that one belongs to. (shrink)

This handbook presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of problems associated with the moral standing of future people in current decision-making. Future people pose an especially hard problem for our current decision-making, since their number and their identities are not fixed but depend on the choices the present generation makes. Do we make the world better by creating more people with good lives? What do we owe future generations in terms of justice? Such questions are not only philosophically difficult and important, but (...) also directly relevant to many practical decisions and policy issues, including on climate, health, population control and taxation. If we are to adequately assess such issues, we must be able to determine the value of differently sized populations. The aim of this handbook is to shed light on the value of population change and the nature of our obligations to future generations, and to offer practical guidance to policy-makers as to how our duties to future generations should be discharged. It contains an extensive and accessible introduction for those unfamiliar with the topic of population ethics as well as original work from key figures in academic debates on population ethics covering three main themes: ways out of the paradoxes of population ethics, questioning some philosophical and methodological assumptions underlying these paradoxes, and several applications of population ethics to real world issues. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the relevance of the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer for contemporary feminist scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression. Specifically, I set out to argue for the Gadamerian notion of hermeneutical openness as an important hermeneutic virtue, and a potential remedy for existing epistemic injustices. In doing so I follow feminist philosophers such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Georgia Warnke that have adopted the insights of Gadamer for the purpose of social and feminist philosophy. Further, this (...) paper is positioned in relation to a recent book chapter by Cynthia Nielsen and David Utsler in which they argue for the complementarity, and intersecting themes and concerns of Gadamer's hermeneutics and Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice. However, Nielsen and Utsler solely focus on Fricker's conception of epistemic injustice and the two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, that she identifies. In this paper I expand their analysis by considering other forms of epistemic injustice such as wilful hermeneutical ignorance and contributory injustice. Thus, this paper contributes to the budding literature on the relevance of Gadamer's work for the debates pertaining to epistemic injustice and oppression by expanding such analysis to other forms of epistemic injustice, and by further arguing for the strength of Gadamer's work in terms of offering relevant insights for the reduction and remedy of existing epistemic injustices. (shrink)

A search is under way for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in population axiology. The object of this search has proved elusive. This is not surprising since, as we shall see, any welfarist axiology that satisfies three reasonable conditions implies at least one of three counter-intuitive conclusions. I shall start by pointing out the failures in three recent attempts to construct an acceptable population axiology. I shall then present an impossibility theorem and conclude with a short discussion of (...) how it might be extended to pluralist axiologies, that is, axiologies that take more values than welfare into account. (shrink)

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with impossibility results which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies.1 All of these results have one thing in common, however. They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion: (...) The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better, other things being equal.2 1 The informal Mere Addition Paradox in Parfit (1984), pp. 419ff is the locus classicus. For an informal proof of a similar result with stronger assumptions, see Ng (1989), p. 240. A formal proof with slightly stronger assumptions than Ng’s can be found in Blackorby and Donaldson (1991). For theorems with much weaker assumptions, see my (1999), (2000b), and especially (2000a), (2001), and (2009). 2 See Parfit (1984), p. 388. My formulation is more general than Parfit’s apart from that he doesn’t demand that the people with very high welfare are equally well off. Expressions such as “a population with very high positive welfare”, “a population with very low positive welfare”, etc., are elliptical for the more cumbersome phrases “a population consisting only of lives with.. (shrink)

For the last thirty years or so, there has been a search underway for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in regard to moral duties to future generations. The object of this search has proved surprisingly elusive. The classical moral theories in the literature all have perplexing implications in this area. Classical Utilitarianism, for instance, implies that it could be better to expand a population even if everyone in the resulting population would be much worse off than in the (...) original. The main problem has been to find an adequate population theory, that is, a theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population theory is of general import for moral theory. A number of theories have been proposed in the literature that purport to avoid counterintuitive implications such as the one mentioned above. The suggestions are diverse: introducing novel ways of aggregating welfare into a measure of value, revising the notion of a life worth living, questioning the way we can compare and measure welfare, counting people’s welfare differently depending on the temporal location or the modal features of their lives, and challenging the logic of axiological and normative concepts. We investigate the concepts and assumptions involved in these theories as well as their implications for population theory. In our discussion, we propose a number of intuitively appealing and logically weak adequacy conditions for an acceptable population theory. Finally, we consider whether it is possible to find a theory that satisfies all of these conditions. We prove that no such theory exists. (shrink)

According topositive egalitarianism, not only do relations of inequality have negative value, as negative egalitarians claim, but relations of equality also have positive value. The egalitarian value of a population is a function of both pairwise relations of inequality (negative) and pairwise relations of equality (positive). Positive andnegative egalitarianismdiverge, especially in different-number cases. Hence, an investigation of positive egalitarianism might shed new light on the vexed topic of population ethics and our duties to future generations. We shall here, in light (...) of some recent criticism, further develop the idea of giving positive value to equal relations. (shrink)

Hemtentorna är nu rättade och finns att hämta på expeditionen. Man kan diskutera hemtentorna och resultaten med mig den 16/5 kl. 11 – hör i så fall av dig via elposten. Magisterstudenter och doktorander får sitt resultat efter den muntliga tentamen. Resultat på kursen.

Unveränderter Nachdruck der Originalausgabe von 1930.

Design can be thought of as a model for such endeavours as are intended to result in industrially manufactured products by means of thinking and other intellectual activity. Familiarity with the thinking involved in the designing process is important, not only for those engaged in training designers, but for anyone desirous of systemizing the endeavour. One procedure for approaching an understanding of the way designers think is to describe it with the help of different metaphors. There are some metaphors for (...) thinking about complicated and interrelated phenomena that should lend themselves to illustrating the thinking involved in design, albeit with reservations — e.g. the difficulty of allowing due consideration for what is unthinkable and indescribable in this context. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that the destruction or hiding of archives can cause long-lasting epistemic harms and constitute complex ethical challenges. The case of Kenya’s ‘migrated archives’ is argued to be an example of how actions in the past can have long-lasting epistemic consequences and can cause contemporary epistemic injustices and harms related to one’s knowledge of the past. The perpetrators of such harms and injustices are argued to have a backward-looking epistemic responsibility and to be liable to make (...) epistemic amends. The practice of acknowledgement is suggested as one possible way to make effective epistemic amends. I argue that making effective epistemic amends would constitute a step towards addressing epistemic harms and injustices related to our knowledge of the past. However, it is important to remember that this would only constitute one out of many necessary steps in addressing epistemic injustice and that further individual, institutional and ideological changes are necessary. (shrink)

In this chapter, we take stock of existing critiques of contemporary migration research and bring these debates into contact with ongoing debates among decolonial scholars and in feminist social epistemology. We illustrate how the ethical and epistemic concerns voiced by migration scholars in regard to the socio-epistemic functioning of their field can be understood using the conceptual apparatus that has been developed around the notions of epistemic injustice and oppression. In so doing, we illustrate the relevance and usefulness of both (...) feminist social epistemology and of decolonial theory for theorising the socio-epistemic challenges that migration scholars face. The conceptual framework of epistemic injustice and oppression not only offers clarity in what is at stake within migration studies both ethically and epistemically, but also elucidates moral and epistemic reasons for why these issues should be addressed. This framework both calls attention to issues of undue epistemic marginalisation, and centres these issues as a core concern as migration scholars critically reflect upon the knowledge production and dissemination practices of their field. Understanding the processes through which this happens, rather than just the epistemic outcomes, can help us to identify ways to address the structural inequalities with which the production of migration knowledge is often associated. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper challenges three assumptions common in the literature on expertise: that expertise is linearly derived from scientific knowledge; that experts always align with the established institutional order; and that expertise is a property acquired by individuals. We criticize these ideas by juxtaposing three distinct expert practices involved with flood risk management in England. Virtual engineering is associated with commercial consultancy and relies on standardized software packages to assess local flood inundation. Mathematical experimentation refers to academic scientists creating new digital (...) renderings of the physical dynamics of flooding. Participatory modeling denotes research projects that aim to transform the relationships between experts and local communities. Focusing on different modes of modeling we contribute an analysis of how particular models articulate with specific politics of knowledge as experts form relationships with flood risk management actors. Our empirical study also shows how models can contribute to re-distribution of expertise in local flood risk management. (shrink)

Suppose that A and B are two kinds of goods such that more of each is better than less. A is strongly superior to B if any amount of A is better than any amount of B. It is weakly superior to B if some amount of A is better than any amount of B. There are many examples of these relations in the literature, sometimes under the labels “higher goods” and “discontinuity.” The chapter gives a precise and generalized statement (...) of Strong and Weak Superiority and discusses different ways in which these relations can be relevant to the aggregation of welfare. It also proves a number of general results. One of the results gives rise to a dilemma: It can be used as an argument against the existence of value superiority or, alternatively, as an argument against the view that superiority entails a radical difference in value. (shrink)

In his Populist Democracy: A Defence (1993), Torbjörn Tännsjö suggests, roughly, the following necessary and sufficient conditions for a democratic collective choice: If the majority of a given group of voters prefer A to B, then the collective choice is A rather than B; and if the majority of voters had preferred B to A, then the collective choice would have been B rather than A. Moreover, the preference of a voter is equated with the one she is showing by (...) the act of voting (e.g., by putting a ballot in a box). Tännsjö’s definition has the advantage of being simple, naturalistic, and, to the best of my knowledge, more exact that most other definitions proposed in the literature. As such, I think it is a useful starting point for a discussion of how to define democratic decision making. As we will see below, such a discussion can be quite illuminating and generate interesting and fruitful questions regarding how to understand democracy. Tännsjö claims that his definition is in line with common language use, i.e., that it is a lexical definition. Pace Tännsjö, I shall show that it departs from common language use since it has a number of counterintuitive implications in regards to which decisions and methods that are classified as democratic or undemocratic. I shall suggest a number of amendments to avoid these drawbacks and incorporate these amendments in a definition of a democratic collective choice. The result is a definition of a democratic decision that is superior to Tännsjö’s, or so we will argue. It will be acknowledged, however, that it still has some shortcomings that future efforts need to rectify, or that it might not be possible to give a 1 simple and naturalistic definition of democracy that is sufficiently in line with common language use. To avoid a possible misunderstanding, let me add that I don’t think there is necessarily one correct way of defining a democratic decision (although there might be a common kernel) and I certainly don’t suggest that the definition proposed here is the only way of explicating the ordinary language use of the term “democracy”.. (shrink)

The person-affecting restriction, in its slogan form, states that an outcome can be better than another only if it is better for someone. It has a strong intuitive appeal and several theorists have suggested that it avoids certain counterintuitive implications in population ethics. At the same time, the restriction has highly counterintuitive implications and yields non-transitive orderings in some nonidentity cases. Many theorists have taken this criticism to be decisive. Recently, however, there have been some reformulations of the restriction, suggesting (...) that the restriction survives this “old” criticism. This paper investigates the viability of those reformulations, which are versions of “Comparativism,” and argues that most of them either have counterintuitive implications or are extensionally equivalent with impersonal theories, but that “Soft Comparativism” seems to have an advantage over impersonal theories. (shrink)

As the title of this paper indicates, I’m going to discuss what we ought to do in situations where our actions affect future generations. More specifically, I shall focus on the moral problems raised by cases where our actions affect who’s going to live, their number and their well being. I’ll start, however, with population axiology. Most discussion in population ethics has concentrated on how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the (...) relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with “paradoxes” which purport to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. Derek Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox is a case in point. The main question of my paper concerns the implication of such axiological paradoxes for normative theories. Do the axiological paradoxes translate into paradoxes for normative theories or will they, as some believe, disappear if we switch to a normative framework? (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relations between population ethics and metaethics. Population ethics gives rise to well-known paradoxes, such as the paradox of mere addition. After presenting a version of this paradox, it is argued that a different way to dismantle it might be by considering it as a way to change our standard view of justification in moral theory. Two possible views are considered: a non-cognitivist approach to justification and to the explanation of inconsistency in morals; Parfit's suggestion that (...) certain paradoxes might be «quarantined» without shaking our confidence in moral theories encapsulating them. (shrink)

Fred Feldman has proposed a desert-adjusted version of utilitarianism,, as a plausible population axiology. Among other things, he claims that justicism avoids Derek Parfit's. This paper explains the theory and tries to straighten out some of its ambiguities. Moreover, it is shown that it is not clear whether justicism avoids the repugnant conclusion and that it is has other counter-intuitive implications. It is concluded that justicism is not convincing as a population axiology.

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with “paradoxes” which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. Already in Derek Parfit’s seminal contribution to the topic, an informal paradox — the Mere Addition Paradox — was presented and later contributions have (...) proved similar results.1 All of these contributions, however, have one thing in common: They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion: The Repugnant Conclusion: For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better, other things being equal.2 A number of theorists, however, have argued that we should accept the Repugnant Conclusion and hence that avoidance of this conclusion is not a convincing adequacy condition for a population axiology. Torbjörn Tännsjö, for example, argues that the Repugnant Conclusion is not at all repugnant but rather “an unsought, but acceptable, consequence of hedonistic utilitarianism”:3.. (shrink)

Suppose one sets up a sequence of less and less valuable objects such that each object in the sequence is only marginally worse than its immediate predecessor. Could one in this way arrive at something that is dramatically inferior to the point of departure? It has been claimed that if there is a radical value difference between the objects at each end of the sequence, then at some point there must be a corresponding radical difference between the adjacent elements. The (...) underlying picture seems to be that a radical gap cannot be scaled by a series of steps, if none of the steps itself is radical. We show that this picture is incorrect on a stronger interpretation of value superiority, but correct on a weaker one. Thus, the conclusion we reach is that, in some sense at least, abrupt breaks in such decreasing sequences cannot be avoided, but that such unavoidable breaks are less drastic than has been suggested. In an appendix written by John Broome and Wlodek Rabinowicz, the distinction between two kinds of value superiority is extended from objects to their attributes. (shrink)

Who should have a right to take part in which decisions in democratic decision making? This “boundary problem” is a central issue for democracy and is of both practical and theoretical import. If nothing else, all different notions of democracy have one thing in common: a reference to a community of individuals, “a people”, who takes decision in a democratic fashion. However, that a decision is made with a democratic decision method by a certain group of people doesn’t suffice for (...) making the decision democratic or satisfactory from a democratic perspective. The group also has to be the right one. But what makes a group the right one? The criteria by which to identify the members of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions have been surprisingly difficult to pin down. In this paper, I shall revisit some of the problems discussed in my 2005 paper in light of some recent criticism and discussion of my position in the literature, and address a number of new issues. (shrink)

Total Utilitarianism is the view that an action is right if and only if it maximizes the sum total of people’s well-being. A common objection to Total Utilitarianism is that it is insensitive to matters of distributive justice. For example, for a given amount of well-being, Total Utilitarianism is indifferent between an equal distribution and any unequal distribution, and if there would be a tiny gain in well-being by moving from an equal distribution to an unequal, we have a duty (...) to do so. To meet the objection from justice, Fred Feldman has suggested a desert adjusted version of Total Utilitarianism ---‘Justicism’ --- which in addition to the value of wellbeing takes into account factors concerning people’s desert.1 Feldman’s suggestion is novel and interesting but his theory has been severely criticized as a theory of distributive justice.2 In the present paper, I shall try to salvage what I think might be a kernel of truth in Feldman’s suggestion, or at least a kernel that is worthy of further investigation. (shrink)

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations \is better than" and \is as good as". This eld has been riddled with para- doxes and impossibility results which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. All of these results have one thing in common, however. They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Derek (...) Par t's Repugnant Conclusion. Moreover, some theorists have argued that we should accept the Repugnant Conclusion and hence that avoidance of this conclusion is not a convincing adequacy condition for a population axiology. As I shall show in this chapter, however, one can replace avoid- ance of the Repugnant Conclusion with a logically weaker and intuitively more convincing condition. The resulting theorem involves, to the best of my knowledge, logically weaker and intuitively more compelling con- ditions than the other theorems presented in the literature. As such, it challenges the very existence of a satisfactory population ethics. (shrink)

Parfit (Theoria 82:110–127, 2016) responded to the Sequence Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing imprecise equality. However, Parfit’s notion of imprecise equality lacked structure. Hájek and Rabinowicz (2022) improved on Parfit’s proposal in this regard, by introducing a notion of degrees of incommensurability. Although Hájek and Rabinowicz’s proposal is a step forward, and may help solve many paradoxes, it can only avoid the Repugnant Conclusion at great cost. First, there is a sequential argument for the Repugnant Conclusion that uses (...) weaker and intuitively more compelling assumptions than the Sequence Argument, and which Hájek and Rabinowicz’s proposal only undermines, in a principled way, by allowing for implausible weight to be put on the disvalue of inequality. Second, if Hájek and Rabinowicz do put such implausible weight on the disvalue of inequality, then they will have to accept that a population A is not worse than another same sized population B even though everyone in B is better off than anyone in A. (shrink)

In this article I argue that data-sharing risks becoming epistemically extractivist and is a practice sensitive to Linda Martín Alcoff´s challenges for extractivist epistemologies. I situate data-sharing as a socio-epistemic practice that gives rise to ethical and epistemic challenges. I draw on the findings of an institutional ethnography of an international social science research project to identify several ethical and epistemic concerns, including epistemic extractivism. I identify Alcoff’s first and second challenge for extractivist epistemologies in the findings of the empirical (...) investigation and argue that they are important considerations for the ethics and socio-epistemological functioning of data-sharing in social science. (shrink)

This article argues that the influence of heteronormativity on the conceptualization of women and technology in feminist constructivist technology studies creates serious problems for the analysis. This research aims to understand the coproduction of gender and technology in society, but does not approach the two elements in a symmetrical fashion. Hence, ethnographic studies can only exemplify how the gender of technology producers is reflected in the technology created. Masculine gender identity is stabilized as a cause for the masculinity of a (...) technology that is shaped by social relationships. The criticism is fleshed out in a close examination of case study accounts of ethnographies among producers and users of technology. It is argued that a habitual reproduction of heteronormativity, present in the surrounding culture and in the technological communities studied, has prevented the adoption of approaches to the subject conducive to the objective of this feminist research. Acknowledging that destabilizing gender can undermine the critical thrust of feminist critique, the paper turns towards queer theory for ideas about how to produce criticism that does not rely on the stability of identity. The article closes with suggesting how a queer feminist approach could contribute to different readings of life with technology. (shrink)

This paper deals with various aspects of the development of data systems for engineering materials. The problem considered here is the difference between the end-users' mental model of materials, which focuses on performance, and the concepts of properties of materials held by materials specialists. Previous treatises on this problem have elaborated on systems aspects in general, emphasising incompatibilities in the relationship mentioned and the means of overcoming these incompatibilities by service management. Another perspective applied has been the historical one, combined (...) with experience of traditional views on science and technology. The present paper pursues this general path by discussing the problem in terms of visions, illusions and myths. These phenomena are thought to be both inevitable in this context and necessary in any attempt to understand the dilemma of data systems for engineering materials. It is believed that the views of the different parties involved are to a great extent steered by visions, illusions and myths, examples of which are discussed. Furthermore, it is suggested that these phenomena have roots in, or are expressions of, paradigms and values related to world pictures. Admittedly eclectic, this discussion leads to the conclusion that a solution to the dilemma in question cannot be found within computer science, materials technology and design theory only. Guidance has to be sought in philosophy and theory of science as well as in literature and the arts. In order to make it possible to implement ideas arrived at by such means, practitioners of psychology will probably have to be consulted. (shrink)

During the last two decades considerable efforts have been made to develop computerized data systems for engineering materials. The results have not come up to the expectations of systems that can be used by designers for selecting of materials. Some factors have been recognized as responsible for the slow progress. It has proved difficult, however, for those involved in this development to make use of such information about the systems in question. Conflicts have occurred between different parties involved. It now (...) seems that too little attention has been paid to the historical background of knowledge and systems related to civiliziation and society. A recently published review of world history from the point of view of the emergence of information technology has provided a basis for some considerations about the nature and roles of data systems. It can be shown that certain activities or features characterize each period of civilization and the development of computers and computerization should be considered as part of this sequence. The same is true for the world history of thinking and knowledge. In the present paper these historical considerations are combined with the observation that in their thinking and perception of ideas people appear to carry with them traditions from the past in varying degrees. Hence differences of opinion about the nature and roles of materials data systems may be explained by differences in the imprint of historical developments on people's ideas. In order to apply this lesson to the development of materials data systems, one has to learn also from the varying interpretations of world history that have been written through the ages. The best approach will probably be incremental and pragmatic rather than holistic and synoptic. (shrink)

The bases for the author's semantic theory include a study of the historical development of word meanings, links in developmental processes, and the various explanations of the facts of a language. The book includes discussions of the function of language, the definition of verbal meaning, and the production and comprehension of speech.

The term coherence is used in many connections. We often speak of coherent reasoning, coherent activities, coherent bodies, and coherent phenomena. In science this term is often used to indicate continuity of a structure in space and time. If many individuals can simultaneously observe similar sets of coherent phenomena, we infer with some justification, first, that the phenomena observed have some kind of correspondence with activities in an external world, that is, a world independent of the existence of the individual (...) observers, and second, that the coherence itself is an attribute of the external world. In a recently published article, to which I shall make several references in this paper, I have called attention to the fact that the science of physics is based on the form and the changes in form of an immediately observed phenomenological world, called the physical world, which can be completely characterized as a structure in space and time. In his analysis of the foundations of the science of physics Eddington has clearly shown that theoretical physics deals exclusively with structures of the type described in the mathematical theory of groups, and that our knowledge of the physical world could have been reached by our sense of vision alone. Coherence in the physical world is that characteristic of the structure which describes the more or less permanent relationship between phenomena in different parts of space at approximately the same time, or a regular sequence in the changing phenomena at approximately the same region of space. (shrink)