Local knowledge (both technological and sociological) and communication systems represent a logical starting point and a rich body of resources for successful agricultural research, development, and extension (RD&E). Drawing upon concrete examples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this essay presents an overview of definitions, topics, and applications of local knowledge in agricultural RD&E. Also noted are caveats, future research and training needs, and human values issues related to the study and utilization of local knowledge systems and their products.

In all cultures, ethnomedical practices are largely the same for animals and people, whether in mode of administration of materia medica, in the materials themselves, or in surgical, mechanical, behavioral, medico-religious, and other realms. Below, parallels between veterinary and human ethnomedical techniques are outlined. Taken together, they suggest that a number of benefits could be gained by closer collaboration between veterinary and human medicine in the delivery of basic healthcare information and services.

Cancer is a group of diseases that are complicated by various treatment choices available. Information exchange between a patient and physician is critical in helping people to understand what is happening to them and what options for therapy are recommended and available. When information is not exchanged, information control by one or both of the participants occurs. Information needs to be taken into account by both health care professional and patients in making decisions during the crucial phases of care. The (...) phases of care presented are a diagnosis, treatment, the decision, and a recurrence. Factors that influence effective information exchange among patient-provider systems are discussed. (shrink)

Within a given culture – whether industrialized or more tradition oriented – essentially the same fundamental medical theories, practices, and pharmacopoeia tend to be applied to human and non-human sickness and patients. In modern industrialized societies, however, healthcare services are sharply divided between human and veterinary medicine. There is likewise a sharp division between practitioners in these two health sectors: medical doctors and veterinarians. Yet in non-Western, traditional or indigenous medical systems, the same practitioners often treat both humans and animals. (...) There is a growing body of literature that attests to the efficacy of traditional health practices and herbal medicines for the prevention and treatment of both human and livestock ailments.The authors argue for an intersectoral approach to human and veterinary health services in poor countries, especially those targeted to rural people with LIMITED access to modern health services. Extension of conventional medical and veterinary services is particularly difficult and costly in Third World countries where the necessary infrastructure (roads, clinics, labs, cold chains, etc.) is poorly developed and where much of the populace and their livestock reside in remote, rural areas, or where people may be nomadic or transhumant. Consideration should therefore be given to the joint delivery of human and livestock healthcare and related services, as well as to linking informal, ethnoveterinary practices and practitioners with more formalized systems of veterinary AND medical practice. Several advantages of such an approach are identified and explored. (shrink)

This article analyzes survey data from a national sample of K-12 public school teachers (N = 5190) with a focus on the nested sample of middle and high school social studies teachers (N = 927). The authors examine social studies teachers’ views on nationalism, including the sub-categories of chauvinistic nationalism and patriotism. In the analyses, the authors show differences in levels of nationalism based on demographic and regional factors and the relationship between levels of nationalism and teachers’ beliefs about educational (...) rights for undocumented immigrant students using both correlation and linear regression analyses. We argue that teachers’ views on nationalism could be a critical factor in shaping beliefs toward equity in relation to immigrant students. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” (...) as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

Is there progress in philosophy? If so, how much? Philosophers have recently argued for a wide range of answers to these questions, from the view that there is no progress whatsoever to the view that philosophy has provided answers to all the big philosophical questions. However, these views are difficult to compare and evaluate, because they rest on very different assumptions about the conditions under which philosophy would make progress. This paper looks to the comparatively mature debate about scientific progress (...) for inspiration on how to formulate four distinct accounts of philosophical progress, in terms of truthlikeness, problem-solving, knowledge, and understanding. Equally importantly, the paper outlines a common framework for how to understand and evaluate these accounts. We distill a series of lessons from this exercise, to help pave the way for a more fruitful discussion about philosophical progress in the future. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a psychological explanation for ‘grounding observations’—observations that are thought to provide evidence that there exists a relation of ground. Our explanation does not appeal to the presence of any such relation. Instead, it appeals to certain evolved cognitive mechanisms, along with the traditional modal relations of supervenience, necessitation and entailment. We then consider what, if any, metaphysical conclusions we can draw from the obtaining of such an explanation, and, in particular, if it tells us anything (...) about whether we ought to posit a relation of ground. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of metaphysical explanation. The account is modelled on Kitcher’s unificationist approach to scientific explanation. We begin, in Sect. 2, by briefly introducing the notion of metaphysical explanation and outlining the target of analysis. After that, we introduce a unificationist account of metaphysical explanation before arguing that such an account is capable of capturing four core features of metaphysical explanations: irreflexivity, non-monotonicity, asymmetry and relevance. Since the unificationist theory of metaphysical explanation inherits irreflexivity and non-monotonicity (...) directly from the unificationist theory of scientific explanation that underwrites it, we focus on demonstrating how the account can secure asymmetry and relevance. (shrink)

Ethnoveterinary research, development, and extension (ERD&E) has emerged as a rich field for discovering, adapting, and transferring appropriate and sustainable animal health technologies to rural and peri-urban stockraisers, especially in Third World countries. This field is defined as the holistic, interdisciplinary study of local knowledge and practices, together with the social structure in which they are embedded, that pertain to the healthcare and healthful husbandry of animals used for a multitude of purposes. Especially in the Third World, livestock play a (...) large number of important roles that are little understood or appreciated in today's First World. Study of these benefits and their role in Third World livelihoods offers numerous lessons that span not only the virtues but also some of the technical, ethical, and methodological challenges of working with local knowledge. ERD&E emerged as an internationally recognized branch of research in the mid-1970s largely in response to an increasing concern with animal health in the context of practical, field-level projects in animal agriculture. As many as 90% of the world's population continue to rely mainly on their own localized ethnomedicine for the bulk of their personal healthcare as well as their veterinary needs. With the escalating costs of Western healthcare technologies, it is essential to build upon this local knowledge. Of course, ethnoscience is not perfect, and recognition of the immense value of ERD&E does not imply that conventional science is to be abandoned. Rather each has much to learn from the other. Making knowledge by judiciously drawing upon insider and outsider, site-specific and universalistic, and both old and new understandings can take us back to a brighter development future. (shrink)

Many think that sentences about what metaphysically explains what are true iff there exist grounding relations. This suggests that sceptics about grounding should be error theorists about metaphysical explanation. We think there is a better option: a theory of metaphysical explanation which offers truth conditions for claims about what metaphysically explains what that are not couched in terms of grounding relations, but are instead couched in terms of, inter alia, psychological facts. We do not argue that our account is superior (...) to grounding-based accounts. Rather, we offer it to those already ill-disposed towards grounding. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have argued that their discipline makes no progress (or not enough in comparison to the “hard sciences”). A key argument for this pessimistic position appeals to the purported fact that philosophers widely and systematically disagree on most major philosophical issues. In this paper, we take a step back from the debate about progress in philosophy specifically and consider the general question: How (if at all) would disagreement within a discipline undermine that discipline’s progress? We reject (...) two arguments from disagreement to a lack of progress, and spell out two accounts of progress on which progress is compatible with disagreements that persist or increase over time. However, we also argue that disagreement can undermine our ability to tell which developments are progressive (and to what degree). So, while disagreement can indeed be a threat to progress, the precise nature of the threat has not been appreciated. (shrink)

In The Virtues of Ignorance the author demonstrates that classical theories of virtue are flawed and developes a consequentialist theory of virtue. ;Virtues are excellences of character. They are traits which are considered to be valuable in some way. A person who is virtuous is one who has a tendency to act well. Classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, believed that virtues, as human excellences, could not involve ignorance in any way. On their view, the virtuous agent, when acting (...) well, knows what she is doing under the description which makes the action conform to virtue. For example, the generous person must know that she is, in fact, helping others in need. Yet, there is a class of virtues, the "virtues of ignorance," which essentially involve ignorance. For example, modesty requires that the agent underestimate self worth. In the first portion of the dissertation, this class of virtues is discussed, and problems raised for the traditional theories of virtue. ;In the latter portion of the dissertation, the author outlines a consequentialist theory of virtue. It is argued that the only hope of developing a unified theory of virtue is along consequentialist lines, because attempts at identifying the psychological state which is necessary for virtue have failed. On a consequentialist theory, a virtue is defined in terms of its consequences. Thus, the moral quality of the character trait is determined by how much good it brings about . The virtues of ignorance can easily be accommodated in such a theory because these traits do bring about good, even if the agent possessing the trait acts out of ignorance. (shrink)

The uses of the most “social” of the social sciences—sociology and anthropology—in international agricultural research and development (R&D) have often been poorly understood. Drawing upon a decade of work by the Sociology Project of the Small Ruminant Collaborative Research Support Program, this article exemplifies how and where social scientists can and have contributed to major development initiatives, and it illustrates some of the larger lessons to be learned for human values concerns in international agriculture.

In this opinionated review, I draw attention to some of the contributions reinforcement learning can make to questions in the philosophy of mind. In particular, I highlight reinforcement learning's foundational emphasis on the role of reward in agent learning, and canvass two ways in which the framework may advance our understanding of perception and motivation.

It is widely thought that grounding is a hyperintensional phenomenon. Unfortunately, the term ‘hyperintensionality’ has been doing double-duty, picking out two distinct phenomena. This paper clears up this conceptual confusion. We call the two resulting notions hyperintensionalityGRND and hyperintensionalityTRAD. While it is clear that grounding is hyperintensionalGRND, the interesting question is whether it is hyperintensionalTRAD. We argue that given well-accepted constraints on the logical form of grounding, to wit, that grounding is irreflexive and asymmetric, grounding is hyperintensionalTRAD only if one (...) endorses a sentential operator view of grounding. We argue that proponents of the sentential operator view will need to distinguish two importantly different kinds of hyperintensionalityTRAD—weak and strong—and we offer them a way to do so. (shrink)

What is it like to be a good person? I examine and reject suggestions that this will involve having thoughts which have virtue or being a good person as part of their content, as well as suggestions that it might be the presence of feelings distinct from the virtuous person’s thoughts. Is there, then, anything after all to the phenomenology of virtue? I suggest that an answer is to be found in looking to Aristotle’s suggestion that virtuous activity is pleasant (...) to the virtuous person. I try to do this, using the work of the contemporary social psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and his work on the ‘flow experience’. Crucial here is the point that I consider accounts of virtue which take it to have the structure of a practical expertise or skill. It is when we are most engaged in skilful complex activity that the activity is experienced as ‘unimpeded’, in Aristotle’s terms, or as ‘flow’. This experience does not, as might at first appear, preclude thoughtful involvement and reflection. Although we can say what in general the phenomenology of virtue is like, each of us only has some more or less dim idea of it from the extent to which we are virtuous—that is, for most of us, not very much. (shrink)

Eternalists believe that there is no ontological difference between the past, present and future. Thus, a challenge arises: in virtue of what does time have a direction? Some eternalists, Oaklander and Tegtmeier ) argue that the direction of time is primitive. A natural response to positing primitive directionality is the suspicion that said posit is too mysterious to do any explanatory work. The aim of this paper is to relieve primitive directionality of some of its mystery by offering a novel (...) way to understand the phenomenon in terms of the recently popularised notion of grounding. (shrink)

Muller and Saunders ([2008]) purport to demonstrate that, surprisingly, bosons and fermions are discernible; this article disputes their arguments, then derives a similar conclusion in a more satisfactory fashion. After briefly explicating their proof and indicating how it escapes earlier indiscernibility results, we note that the observables which Muller and Saunders argue discern particles are (i) non-symmetric in the case of bosons and (ii) trivial multiples of the identity in the case of fermions. Both problems undermine the claim that they (...) have shown particles to be physically discernible. We then prove two results concerning observables that are truly physical: one showing when particles are discernible and one showing when they are not (categorically) discernible. Along the way we clarify some frequently misunderstood issues concerning the interpretation of quantum observables. 1 Background2 Criticisms2.1 Bosons2.2 Fermions3 Reformulating the Insight3.1 What weakly discerns?3.2 General results4 Conclusion. (shrink)

According to the No Alternate Possibilities argument, if time passes then the rate at which it passes could be different but time cannot pass at different rates, and hence time cannot pass. Typically, defenders of the NAP argument have focussed on defending premise, and have taken the truth of for granted: they accept the orthodox view of rate necessitarianism. In this paper we argue that the defender of the NAP argument needs to turn her attention to. We describe a series (...) of worlds that appear to contain differential passage: worlds where time passes at different rates in different subregions. If the NAP argument is to succeed, rate necessitarians must show that each of these worlds is either metaphysically impossible, or does not contain differential passage. (shrink)

This paper defends Flatland—the view that there exist neither determination nor dependence relations, and that everything is therefore fundamental—from the objection from explanatory inefficacy. According to that objection, Flatland is unattractive because it is unable to explain either the appearance as of there being determination relations, or the appearance as of there being dependence relations. We show how the Flatlander can meet the first challenge by offering four strategies—reducing, eliminating, untangling and omnizing—which, jointly, explain the appearance as of there being (...) determination relations where no such relations obtain. Since, plausibly, dependence relations just are asymmetric determination relations, we argue that once we come mistakenly to believe that there exist determination relations, the existence of other asymmetries (conceptual and temporal) explains why it appears that there are dependence relations. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral distress (MD) is an emotional and psychological response to morally challenging dilemmas. Moral distress is experienced frequently by nurses in the intensive care unit (ICU) and can result in emotional anguish, work dissatisfaction, poor patient outcomes, and high levels of nurse turnover. Opportunities to discuss ethically challenging situations may lessen MD and its associated sequela.ObjectiveThe purpose of this project was to develop, implement, and evaluate the impact of nursing ethics huddles on participants’ MD, clinical ethics knowledge, work satisfaction, and (...) patient care among ICU nurses.Sample and SettingThe sample, 32 nurses from three ICU settings in an 800-bed tertiary academic medical center, participated in six nursing ethics huddles over a two-month period.MethodsAlvita K. Nathaniel’s Theory of Moral Reckoning guided development of the nursing ethics huddle process.1 The Moral Distress Thermometer was administered at three data points: baseline level of MD, and pre- and post-huddle to determine changes in the subjects’ level of MD.2 Focused content analysis was used to analyze qualitative responses from questionnaires about the subjects’ perception of the effect of the huddles on work satisfaction and patient care. Knowledge attainment was evaluated via open-ended short-answer questions.ResultsOverall, use of nurse-ethicist-led nursing ethics huddles was associated with improved quality of work life, patient care, and clinical ethics knowledge. The change in pre- and post-nursing ethics huddles MD scores was statistically significant (p < 0.0001). (shrink)

An agent exercises instrumental rationality to the degree that she adopts appropriate means to achieving her ends. Adopting appropriate means to achieving one’s ends can, in turn, involve overcoming one’s strongest desires, that is, it can involve exercising synchronic self-control. However, contra prominent approaches, I deny that synchronic self-control is possible. Specifically, I draw on computational models and empirical evidence from cognitive neuroscience to describe a naturalistic, multi-system model of the mind. On this model, synchronic self-control is impossible. Must we, (...) then, give up on a meaningful conception of instrumental rationality? No. A multi-system view still permits something like synchronic self-control: an agent can control her very strong desires. Adopting a multi-system model of the mind thus places limitations on our conceptions of instrumental rationality, without requiring that we abandon the notion altogether. (shrink)

Metaphysics of Science is the philosophical study of key concepts that figure prominently in science and that, prima facie, stand in need of clarification. It is also concerned with the phenomena that correspond to these concepts. Exemplary topics within Metaphysics of Science include laws of nature, causation, dispositions, natural kinds, possibility and necessity, explanation, reduction, emergence, grounding, and space and time. Metaphysics of Science is a subfield of both metaphysics and the philosophy of science—that is, it can be allocated to (...) either, but it exhausts neither. Unlike metaphysics simpliciter, Metaphysics of Science is not primarily concerned with metaphysical questions that may already arise from everyday phenomena such as what makes a thing (a chair, a desk) the very thing it is, what its identity criteria are, out of which parts is it composed, whether it remains the same if we exchange a couple of its parts, and so forth. Nor is it concerned with the concrete entities (superstrings, molecules, genes, and so forth) postulated by specific sciences; these issues are the subject matter of the special philosophies of science (for example, of physics, of chemistry, of biology). Metaphysics of Science is concerned with more abstract and general concepts that inform all of these sciences. Many of these concepts are interwoven with each other. For example, metaphysicians of science inquire whether dispositionality, lawhood, and causation can be accounted for in nonmodal terms; whether laws of nature presuppose the existence of natural kinds; and whether the properties of macrolevel objects supervene on dispositional or nondispositional properties. This article surveys the scope (section 1), historical origin (section 2), exemplary subject matters (section 4), and methodology (section 5) of Metaphysics of Science, as well as the motivation that drives it (section 3). (shrink)

ABSTRACT An overview of some of the main modes of making images of natural objects and processes, as they have appeared in the history of science, leads to two main conclusions. First, the dichotomies that have traditionally distinguished, for example, art from science, museums from laboratories, and geometrical from algebraic methods have produced a poverty of understanding of visualization. It is at the intersections of these dichotomies where much of the creative work of science occurs, and it is into those (...) intersections that this Focus section leads us. Second, the section suggests that we need to understand images as arguments. Generalizing, we need to develop a “materialized epistemology” that reunites sensual with ideational knowing. Recent work in the history of science is already pointing the way and producing a dramatically new historiography. (shrink)

Not many philosophers have dealt seriously with the problems of women's rights and status, and those that have, have unfortunately often been on the wrong side. In fact Plato and Mill are the only great philosophers who can plausibly be called feminists. But there has been surprisingly little serious effort made to analyse their arguments; perhaps because it has seemed like going over ground already won.

Stegenga (forthcoming) formulates and defends a novel account of scientific progress, according to which science makes progress just in case there is a change in scientific justification. Here we present several problems for Stegenga’s account, concerning respectively (i) obtaining misleading evidence, (ii) losses or destruction of evidence, (iii) oscillations in scientific justification, and (iv) the possibility of scientific regress. We conclude by sketching a substantially different justification-based account of scientific progress that avoids these problems.

This article introduces a non‐cognitivist account of metaphysical explanation according to which the core function of judgements of the form ⌜x because y⌝ is not to state truth‐apt beliefs. Instead, their core function is to express attitudes of commitment to, and recommendation of the acceptance of certain norms governing interventional conduct at contexts.

Recently, society and the accounting profession have become increasingly concerned with ethics. Accounting researchers have responded by attempting to investigate and analyze the ethical behavior of accountants. While the current state of ethical behavior among practitioners is important, the ability of accountants to detect ethical problems that may not be obvious should also be studied and understood. This study addresses three questions: (1) are auditors alert to ethical issues; (2) if so, how important do they perceive them to be; and (...) (3) what factors affect their sensitivity threshold and their perceptions of the importance of the issues?Most of the prior research in accounting ethics presents subjects with scenarios that contain an obvious ethical issue, and subjects realize that they are participating in an ethics study. In the present study, the ethical problems are integrated into general accounting situations in order to discover the sensitivity of accounting professionals to them. This study defines ethical sensitivity as the ability to interpret a given situation and to realize that a moral problem exists. (shrink)

Discusses managing the environment from philosophical, scientific, and political perspectives.

I propose that the successes and contributions of reinforcement learning urge us to see the mind in a new light, namely, to recognise that the mind is fundamentally evaluative in nature.

We have now celebrated the centenary of J. J. Thomson’s famous paper (1897) on the electron and have examined one hundred years of the history of our first fundamental particle. What should philosophers of science learn from this history? To some, the fundamental moral is already suggested by the rapid pace of this history. Thomson’s concern in 1897 was to demonstrate that cathode rays are electrified particles and not aetherial vibrations, the latter being the “almost unanimous opinion of German physicists” (...) (p. 293) But were these German physicists so easily vanquished? De Broglie proposed in 1923 that electrons are a wave phenomenon after all and his proposal was soon multiply vindicated, even by the detection of the diffraction of the electron waves. Should we not learn from such a reversal? Should we not dispense with the simple-minded idea that Thomson discovered our first fundamental particle and admit that the very notion of discovery might well be ill-suited to science? (shrink)

Recently, macroscopic accounts of chemical kind individuation have been proposed as alternatives to the microstructural essentialist account advocated by Kripke, Putnam, and others. These accounts argue that individuation of chemical kinds is based on macroscopic criteria such as reactivity or thermodynamics, and they challenge the essentialism that grounds the Kripke-Putnam view. Using a variety of chemical examples, I argue that microstructure grounds these macroscopic accounts, but that this grounding need not imply essentialism. Instead, kinds are individuated on the basis of (...) similarity of reactivity between substances, and microstructure explains similarity of reactivity. (shrink)

We defend two claims: (1) if one is attracted to a strong non-maximalist view about truthmaking, then it is natural to construe this as the view that there exist fundamental truths; (2) despite considerable aversion to fundamental truths, there is as yet no viable independent argument against them. That is, there is no argument against the existence of fundamental truths that is independent of any more specific arguments against the ontology accepted by the strong non-maximalist. Thus there is no argument (...) that the strong non-maximalist herself will find dialectically motivating. (shrink)

According to the No Alternate Possibilities argument, if time passes then the rate at which it passes could be different. Thus, time cannot pass, since if time passes, then necessarily it passes at a rate of 1 second per second. One response to this argument is to posit hypertime, and to argue that at different worlds, time passes at different rates when measured against hypertime. Since many A-theorists think we can make sense of temporal passage without positing hypertime, we pursue (...) a different response. We describe several worlds that do not contain hypertime, but do contain differential passage: worlds where time passes at different rates in different subregions within the same world. Hence we argue that even if we focus just on the set of worlds that do not contain hypertime (whether this is all, or only some of the worlds) we find that not all these worlds are such that time passes at a rate of 1 second per second. Thus the No Alternate Possibilities argument fails even when restricted to just this set of worlds. (shrink)

This paper explores a problem for Michael McKenna’s conversation model of moral responsibility that views blame as characteristically part of a conversational exchange. The problem for this model on which this paper focuses is the problem of private blame. Sometimes when we blame we do so without any intention to engage in a communicative exchange. It is argued that McKenna’s model cannot adequately account for private blame.

Substantial evidence has shown that involvement in peer-to-peer farming networks influences whether a farmer decides to try a new practice. Formally organized farmer networks are emerging as a unique entity that blend the benefits of decentralized exchange of farmer knowledge within the structure of an organization providing a variety of sources of information and forms of engagement. We define formal farmer networks as farmer networks with a distinct membership and organizational structure, leadership that includes farmers, and an emphasis on peer-to-peer (...) learning. This study complements existing ethnographic research on the benefits of organized farmer networking by examining farmers in one longstanding formal farmer network, Practical Farmers of Iowa. Using a nested, mixed-method research design, we analyzed survey and interview data to understand how participation and forms of engagement in the network are associated with the adoption of conservation practices. Responses from 677 farmers from a regular member survey disseminated by Practical Farmers of Iowa in 2013, 2017, and 2020 were pooled and analyzed. GLM binomial and ordered logistic regression results indicate that greater participation in the network, particularly through in-person formats, has a strong and significant association with greater adoption of conservation practices. Logistic regression results show that building relationships in the network is the most important variable for predicting whether a farmer reported adopting conservation practices as a result of participation in PFI. In-depth interviews with 26 surveyed member farmers revealed that PFI supports farmers to adopt by providing information, resources, encouragement, confidence building, and reinforcement. In-person learning formats were more important to farmers relative to independent formats because they were able to have side conversations with other farmers, ask questions, and observe results. We conclude that formal networks are a promising way to expand the use of conservation practices, particularly through targeted efforts to increase relationship building in the network through face-to-face learning opportunities. (shrink)

Examines prudential and moral reasoning in ancient and modern ethics. Ancient ethical theories' task of articulating the agent's overall goal; Structural differences between ancient eudaemonist theories and modern theories; Virtue as a complex intellectual kind of understanding.

Disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality for Latinx populations are a paradigmatic example of the now widely acknowledged structural racism in U.S. health care that predisposed minorities to...