The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content, according to which the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. He explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

The problem of the source of necessity is the problem of explaining what makes necessary truths necessarily true. Simon Blackburn has presented a dilemma intended to show that any reductive, realist account of the source of necessity is bound to fail. Although Blackburn's dilemma faces serious problems, reflection on the form of explanations of necessities reveals that a revised dilemma succeeds in defeating any reductive account of the source of necessity. The lesson is that necessity is metaphysically primitive and irreducible.

In the standard analysis of economic institutions--which include social conventions, the working rules of an economy, and entitlement regimes --economists invoke the same theories they use when analyzing individual behavior. In this profoundly innovative book, Daniel Bromley challenges these theories, arguing instead for "volitional pragmatism" as a plausible way of thinking about the evolution of economic institutions. Economies are always in the process of becoming. Here is a theory of how they become. Bromley argues that standard economic accounts (...) see institutions as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics--particularly the "new" institutional economics--suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage. He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents--legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders--who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create. Bromley's approach avoids the prescriptive consequentialism of contemporary economics and asks, instead, that we see these emergent and evolving institutions as the reasons for the individual and aggregate behavior their very adoption anticipates. These hoped-for outcomes comprise sufficient reasons for new laws, judicial decrees, and administrative rulings, which then become instrumental to the realization of desired individual behaviors and thus aggregate outcomes. (shrink)

The perceptions of mainstream teachers and parents of other children, and ?significant others?, are crucial to the extent to which children with difficulties are accepted in mainstream classes. This study examined the views of 507 ?significant others? towards the inclusion of children experiencing a variety of difficulties. They were asked to rank how they felt about children with certain types of ?difficulty?, and given the opportunity to explain their decisions in a subsequent interview. Five main issues were examined, namely the (...) most suitable age for inclusion, the problems faced by parents, the type of difficulty most suitable for inclusion into mainstream classes, the allocation of resources and how resources should be allocated to children with different types of giftedness. Views towards these issues varied depending on the type of difficulty the child experienced. The findings of this study indicate that some children are more likely than others to be readily accepted by ?significant others? for inclusion into mainstream schooling. It is stressed that the perceptions of these ?significant others? impact upon how successful any attempt to include children in mainstream classes will be. (shrink)

A global pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 upsets all standard decision protocols. Pressure from politicians to "open up" the economy presumes that individuals grant credible trust to politicians and merchants eager to recover customers. The asymmetric concern for safety compounds normal heuristics. The Peircean pragmatic maxim reminds us that it is the perceived effects of a post-pandemic society and economy that will drive human volition in the aftermath of Covid-19. Opening up does not equal showing up.

If how we envisage substances prepares the trajectory of our behavior towards them, art objects, substantial through the manner of their fashioning, can reorderhow we comport ourselves in a world that is not for us, to the extent that what we call by the name of “world” cannot be apprehended as the price paid for humanavarice when confronting a global plenitude sacrificed, always, to the scale of our need for it. To frustrate that desolation, we must enrich our view of (...) things, andthis essay examines the thinking of Merleau-Ponty and Virginia Woolf at the service of that imperative. (shrink)

Introduction -- The road to imperfection -- Cataloguing irrationality -- Some real life examples -- Science to the rescue -- A deeper look at what's wrong -- Assigning the blame -- Can it be fixed.

Geary suggests that implicit mathematical principles exist across human cultures and transcend sex differences. Is such knowledge present in animals as well, and is it sufficient to account for performance in all species, including our own? I attempt to trace the implications of Gearys target article for comparative psychology, questioning the exclusion of “subitizing” in describing human mathematical performance, and asking whether human researchers function as cultural agents with animals, elevating their implicit knowledge to secondary domains of numerical performance.

The seventeenth-century Spanish Dominican Cosme de Lerma authored numerous philosophical works, some ofwhich were posthumously reorganised into a Cursus philosophicus, intended as an arts course for the Dominican studia in Italy. Lerma’s philosophical project consisted in developing the doctrines proposed a century earlier by his fellow Dominican friar Domingo de Soto. Through analysing Lerma’s Compendium and Disputationes based on Soto’s Summulae and Lerma’s Commentaries on Aristotle’s Logic, this paper explores three issues: first, Lerma’s axiomatic theory of inference, including the development (...) of Soto’s project of relevance logic (relating to the analysis of the paradoxes of implication); second, the question whether there are different degrees of validity (answered negatively by Lerma); third, Lerma’s psychology of inference, which offers an interpretation of human inferential behaviour and its limitations in terms of the scholastic theories of causation and natural agency. (shrink)

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

O texto parte das considerações que Schopenhauer faz acerca do princípio de razão suficiente do agir na sua dissertação Sobre a quadrúplice raiz do princípio de razão suficiente e da negação da Vontade de vida nos §68-70 de O mundo como vontade e como representação; e como a conduta relacionada a este conceito pode ser observada ao longo da história, seja no cristianismo ou nas religiões indianas, mostrando como é possível chegar à tal conhecimento. Em seguida, aliado ao texto kantiano (...) sobre as grandezas negativas, mostro a inversão que Schopenhauer faz dos sinais do que é considerado positivo ou negativo, ou seja, ser e nada, devido a uma troca de perspectiva em consequência da chamada “viragem da vontade”. (shrink)

Continuing the tradition of Oxford Calculatorial physics, the late fourteenth-century British Carmelite Richard Lavenham authored an amplification of the popular short textbook commonly referred to as Termini naturales. A copy of this amplification, preserved in a late fourteenth-century manuscript (Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, ms Lat. Z. 300 [= 1872]), is followed by a short series of notes and comments on some of the principles introduced in Lavenham’s treatise (drawn from the first four books of Aristotle’s Physics). The present article offers (...) an edition of the text, and analyses its content and relationship with fourteenth-century physics, especially with the physical doctrines of Richard Lavenham. (shrink)

Opusculum insolubilium is an anonymous sixteenth-century British logical treatise dealing with the so-called “insolubles”, i.e. self-reflexive paradoxical propositions. It summarises the fundamental principles of the approach proposed by Roger Swyneshed in the fourteenth century, which became popular in the British academic circles during the fifteenth century. The present paper has two basic aims: to contrive a modern edition of this treatise which could be used fora further research in post-mediaeval scholastic logic, and to provide elementary information about its content and (...) historical context. (shrink)

Instead of drawing out exact paths for overcoming barriers, the authors of the book Enhancing Science Impact refer back to the necessity of reflecting on all aspects of research. There is no one-fits-all solution of approaching sustainability. Instead a comprehensive understanding of problem-structuring is necessary for addressing current challenges. Even though the work provides a practical foci-guideline, a critical reflection on how nature is represented within research programmes and projects is missing.

Refiguring Critical Theory offers some thoughts about the nature of democracy and the possibilities of individual and collective self-determination. The text traces theories of the relationship between being and consciousness from Marx through Lukacs and the Frankfurt School to Habermas' recent work The Theory of Communicative Action.

The seventeenth century can be viewed as an era of (closely related) innovation in the formal and natural sciences and of paradigmatic diversity in philosophy (due to the coexistence of at least the humanist, the late scholastic, and the early modern tradition). Within this environment, the present study focuses on scholastic logic and, in particular, syllogistic. In seventeenth-century scholastic logic two different approaches to logic can be identified, one represented by the Dominicans Báñez, Poinsot, and Comas del Brugar, the other (...) represented by the Jesuits Hurtado, Arriaga, Oviedo, and Compton. These two groups of authors can be contrasted in three prominent features. First, in the role of the theory of validity, which is either a common basis for all particular theories (in this case, sentential logic and syllogistic), or a set of observations regarding a particular theory (in this case, syllogistic). Second, in the view of syllogistic, which is either an implication of a general theory of validity and a semantics of terms, or an algebra of structured objects. Third, in the role of the scholastic analysis of language in terms ofsuppositio, which either is a semantic underpinning of syllogistic, or it is replaced by a semantics of propositions. (shrink)

This article reflects on the contemporary phenomenon of ‘fake news’ from a Schutzian perspective. Discerning the truth or falsity of an utterance – whether it is true, and therefore deemed ‘real’, or not and thus ‘fake’ –, calls for a framework for determining truth value. Thus, after a brief introduction, situating fake news within the history of strategic disinformation and propaganda, we analyze Schutz’s perspective on truth and rationality. Schutz’s concept of truth and rationality are centered around the paradigm of (...) social constructivism, which situates the production of objects of thought in its sociocultural context and considers these objects socially derived or mediated. Reality, from this angle, is tied to group consensus, and, thus, can be considered objectified knowledge within the in-groups to which the members belong. This view of reality seems to follow, essentially, the logic of internet phenomena, such as filter bubbles and echo-chambers. (shrink)

The development and use of large and dynamic health data repositories designed to support research pose challenges to traditional informed consent models. We used semi-structured interviewing to elicit diverse research stakeholders' views of a model of consent appropriate to participation in initiatives that entail collection, long-term storage, and undetermined future research use of multiple types of health data. We demonstrate that, when considering health data repositories, research stakeholders replace a concept of consent as informed with one in which consent is (...) engaged. In engaged consent, a participant's ongoing relationship with a repository serves as a substitute or adjunct to information exchange at enrollment. We detail research stakeholders' views of the risks of engaged consent and suggest questions for further study about engagement and consent procedures in initiatives that aim to store data for future unspecified research purposes. (shrink)

Johann Eck (1486–1543) has been introduced to modern scholarship as a prominent figure of the pre-Tridentine Counter-Reformation. As part of the curricular transformations of the University of Ingolstadt, he wrote commentaries on logical and scientific works by Aristotle and Peter of Spain. Utilising a variety of sources, the two volumes dedicated to physics and natural philosophy published in 1518 and 1519 were self-contained textbooks including annotated translations of the texts and quaestio-commentaries. These developed the doctrines of the Oxford Calculators mediated (...) through Continental sources, reproducing their conceptual and mathematical apparatus, including the famous middle degree theorem and Bradwardine’s law. (shrink)

In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Italian logician, natural philosopher, and doctor of medicine Cajetan of Thiene wrote a commentary on William Heytesbury’s Regulae solvendi sophismata, which later became a part of the printed edition of Heytesbury’s treatises. Several late fifteenth century reprints sustained its circulation and further influence. Following Heytesbury, Cajetan listed four alternative treatments of paradoxes, where the first three were formulated in general logico-semantic terms and the last one in terms of obligationes. The present (...) analysis reconstructs the first three positions in terms of the theories of logical operators endorsed as part of the solution to paradoxes. This reconstruction uncovers different underlying views of operators, namely context-sensitive, value-functional, and supervaluationist.Priore dimidia parte saeculi 15 Caietanus de Thiena, logicus, physicus et medicus, commentarium super G. Hentisberi Regulis solvendi sophismata conscripsit, quod posterius una cum Hentisberi tractatibus typis impressum est. Cuius commentarii notitiam auctoritatemque continuam iteratae nonnullae eius editiones in fi ne 15 saeculi factae sustinebant. Caietanus quattuor vias tractandi insolubilia distinxit, quarum tres primae conceptibus generalibus logico-semanticis, quarta doctrina de obligationibus innixae sunt. In analysi hic proposita auctor primas tres vias reconstruit, doctrinas varias de logicis coniunctionibus vel notis reserans, super quibus illae viae solvendi paradoxa fundantur. Quarum prima vim notarum a contextu sermonis dependentem facit. Altera notas pure “compositionaliter” tractat. Tertia iuxta modum doctrinae de “supervaluatione” omnes formales tautologias servat, aliis considerationibus neglectis. (shrink)

The article deals with the analysis of one medieval solution of semantic paradoxes, namely with the position of the so-called “cassantes” (i.e. “those who nullify”). The solution is based upon designating problematical sentences to be agrammatical and thus “saying nothing”: paradoxes are solved by means of deyning apparent truth-apts. Theoretically fundamental supposition of this step is drawing the distinction between grammatical and logical structure of a sentence, or (from a speech-act theoretical point of view) the distinction between a sentence and (...) a statement. Remarkable analogies can also be shown between this distinction and the distinction between two conceptions of congruence in the twelfth-century grammar. Nowadays the cassationist approach is the solution of paradoxes proposed in the theoretical framework of the illocutionary logic. (shrink)