This reissued volume by Isaiah Berlin, originally published in 1996, comprises primarily essays from the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s concerning political themes such as government repress...

This article discusses the ethics of nuclear waste management in terms of the concept of responsibility for the harmful effects of modern technology. At present, the principle that every country and new generation should assume responsibility for the nuclear waste they produce is challenged by a globalised industry and the repositories of nuclear waste that have accumulated over the past fifty years and been left for future generations to manage. The basic premise of the article is that modern technology, particularly (...) nuclear power, calls for a new kind of responsibility that extends to future generations as well. This new concept of responsibility and the principles of long-term management of nuclear waste are set out and discussed in detail, with reference to Kant, Jaspers, Jonas, Peter Kemp and others. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 685, August 2012.

This special issue re-evaluates the 1950s as a period of transnationalism in ideas and political practices, offering innovative insights into political history and political ideas. Without setting the national and transnational spheres against each other, the issue argues that the dialectics between the two was a defining element of Europe in this period. The articles explore transnational cooperation and exchanges among intellectuals, politicians and trade unionists, showing how they were changing in their interaction. The editorial sets out from the research (...) on the postwar configuration of Europe based on the retake of the nation state, combining it with new research of transnational history and putting out some methodological innovations. The editorial also highlights some significant themes across the articles: the central role of translation and localisation, the interaction with local interests and disputes, the Cold War, the acceleration of European integration, the rise of the Third World, the tensions between hope and fear or between nihilism and rebirth of Europe, the centrality of science. (shrink)

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3-5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children’s and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children’s laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize (...) children’s everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children’s laughter in detail. It was found that children’s laughter tended to be directed to children and adults’ laughter tended to be directed to adults. 87% of children’s laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2,7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground. (shrink)

The goal of the present deliverable is to provide a developmental analysis of attentional intersubjectivity, which, as we show below, is a more inclusive notion than the more commonly used term ‘joint attention’. The use of the term ‘joint attention’ is not consistent in the literature, sometimes referring to the general phenomenon when two or more subjects attend to the same target, sometimes to more reciprocal situations in which the subjects also are aware of attending to the same target. Most (...) often solely visual attention has been described, but implicitly the descriptions have been thought to generalize to other modalities. The concepts introduced in this deliverable constitute an attempt to construct a coherent framework that will allow for distinguishing and comparing the range of behaviours that in the literature have been addressed as ‘joint attention’ behaviours. By attentional intersubjectivity we refer to the general case when two or more subjects simultaneously focus their attention on the same target. Attentional intersubjectivity will be further divided into types, according to which behaviours that are typically associated with attentional intersubjectivity occur during the interaction, and in which combinations. The result is that the over-all behaviour of the subjects during different types of attentional intersubjectivity differs. Our contentions are that: a) the types of attentional intersubjectivity identified in this report build on each other cumulatively and constitute different levels, and b) these levels correspond to evolutionary and developmental stages. In saying that the types are cumulative we mean that there is a progress by successive stages where each type is causally dependent on the type preceding it, and, furthermore, has increased in complexity as compared to previous types. While attentional intersubjectivity involves several perceptual modalities, for practical reasons, this study primarily concerns the visual modality. Our analysis is, however, intended also to be applicable to these other modalities. (shrink)

The contribution of this work is a classification of corporate social action underlying the Social Ratings Data compiled by Kinder Lydenburg Domini Analytics, Inc. We compare extant typologies of corporate social action to the results of our exploratory factor analysis. Our findings indicate four distinct latent constructs that bear resemblance to concepts discussed in prior literature. Akey finding of our research is that positive and negative social action are both empirically and conceptually distinct constructs and should not be combined in (...) future research. Additionally, we recommend that some prior research results be reconsidered to determine whether these newly derived measures might clarify some previous findings. (shrink)

A social conception of science -- The pursuit of forms -- Beyond the doctrine of signs -- Structures of mediation -- Signs in action -- Prospects of communication -- From a rhetorical point of view.

BackgroundHuman embryonic stem cells as a source for the development of advanced therapy medicinal products are considered for treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Research has shown promising results and opened an avenue of great importance for patients who currently lack a disease modifying therapy. The use of hESC has given rise to moral concerns and been the focus of often heated debates on the moral status of human embryos. Approval for marketing is still pending.ObjectiveTo Investigate the perspectives and concerns of patients (...) with PD, patients being the directly concerned stakeholders in the ethical discussion.MethodsQualitative semi-structured interviews related to this new therapy in seventeen patients from two Swedish cities.ResultsThe participants expressed various interests related to the use of human embryos for development of medicinal therapies; however, overall, they were positive towards the use of hESC for treatment of PD. It was deemed important that the donating woman or couple made the choice to donate embryos voluntarily. Furthermore, there were concerns that the industry does not always prioritise the patient over profit; thus, transparency was seen as important. (shrink)

Summary: A study of pedagogical deliberation : directing attention by means of actionoriented humanistic theory.

Two views of scientific theories dominated the philosophy of science during the twentieth century, the syntactic view of the logical empiricists and the semantic view of their successors. I show that neither view is adequate to provide a proper understanding of the connections that exist between theories at different times. I outline a new approach, a hybrid of the two, that provides the right structural connection between earlier and later theories, and that takes due account of the importance of the (...) mathematical models of a theory and of the various distinct formulations that pick out these models. (shrink)

Measures of happiness are increasingly being used throughout the social sciences. While these measures have attracted numerous types of criticisms, a crucial aspect of these measures has been left largely unexplored—their calibration. Using Eran Tal’s recently developed notion of calibration we argue first that the prospect of continued calibration of happiness measures is crucial for the science of happiness, and second, that continued calibration of happiness measures faces a particular problem—The Two Unknowns Problem. The Two Unknowns Problem relies on the (...) claim that individuals are necessarily a part of the measurement apparatus in first person measures of happiness, and the claim that we have no reason to believe that the evaluation standards people employ are invariant across individuals and time. We argue that calibrating happiness measures therefore involves solving an equation with two unknowns—an individual’s degree of happiness, and their evaluation standards—which is, generally, not possible. Third, we consider two possible escape routes from this problem and we suggest that the most promising route requires yet unexplored empirical and theoretical work on linking happiness to behavioral or neural evidence. (shrink)

This article examines the contention that the central concepts of C. S. Peirce’s semeiotic are inherently communicational. It is argued that the Peircean approach avoids the pitfalls of objectivism and constructivism, rendering the sign-user neither a passive recipient nor an omnipotent creator of meaning. Consequently, semeiotic may serve as a useful general framework for studies of learning processes.

Evolutionary theodicies are attempts to explain how the enormous amounts of suffering, premature death and extinction inherent in the evolutionary process can be reconciled with belief in a loving and almighty God. A common strategy in this area is to argue that certain very valuable creaturely attributes could only be exemplified by creatures that are produced by a partly random and uncontrolled process of evolution. Evolution, in other words, was the only possible way for God to create these kinds of (...) creatures. This article presents and examines two versions of the “only way”-argument. The anthropocentric version tries to justify God’s use of evolution by reference to the value of human freedom, and argues that freedom presupposes that God lets go of full control over the process of creation . The non-anthropocentric version presents a similar argument with respect to more inclusive creaturely properties, such as that of being “truly other” than God, or of being a “creaturely self” with a certain degree of autonomy in relation to God . With the help of a number of thought-experiments of the “Twin-Earth”-type, the author argues that both the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric only way-arguments fail. (shrink)

In population ethics, some appeal to certain lexical and critical level total views to avoid the repugnant conclusion. Since the very repugnant conclusion is a weaker adequacy condition, we may think that these views will also allow us to avoid this conclusion. In this paper I argue that this is not the case. First, I show that the idea that some popular lexical total views could allow us to avoid the very repugnant conclusion is mistaken. Then I demonstrate that the (...) same is true of critical range total views. Finally, I clarify which views allow us to avoid this conclusion. (shrink)

An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice. What is experimental knowledge, and how do we get it? While there is general agreement that experiment is a crucial source of scientific knowledge, how experiment generates that knowledge is far more contentious. In this book, philosopher of science James Mattingly explains how experiments function. Specifically, he discusses what it is about experimental practice that transforms observations of what may be very localized, (...) particular, isolated systems into what may be global, general, integrated empirical knowledge. Mattingly argues that the purpose of experimentation is the same as the purpose of any other knowledge-generating enterprise—to change the state of information of the knower. This trivial-seeming point has a non-trivial consequence: to understand a knowledge-generating enterprise, we should follow the flow of information. Therefore, the account of experimental knowledge Mattingly provides is based on understanding how information flows in experiments: what facilitates that flow, what hinders it, and what characteristics allow it to flow from system to system, into the heads of researchers, and finally into our store of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

SummaryHow can the immense amount of suffering and waste inherent in the evolutionary process be reconciled with the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God? A widely embraced proposal in the area of “evolutionary theodicy” is the so-called “Only Way”-argument. This argument contends that certain valuable goods – in particular, creaturely independence and human freedom – can only come about through a genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled process of evolution. In a previous article, I have argued that the “Only (...) Way”-argument can be defeated by a “Twin Earth”-thought experiment: If God is omnipotent, he could have created – directly, without evolution – creatures that are molecule-for-molecule identical to those that he actually created through evolution. If the creatures that he actually created have freedom and independence, there is no valid reason to deny that the non-evolved “twin creatures” would also be free and independent. Recently, Eikrem and Søvik have suggested a way of blocking my Twin Earth-argument by appealing to the distinction between type-values and token-values. While ES admit that the Twin Earth-argument shows the non-necessity of evolution for the existence of certain type-goods, they argue that an evolutionary creation can be justified by appeal to valuable token-goods that could not have existed without evolution. In this article, I respond to ES’s token-goods argument by showing that it is incompatible with a basic presupposition of “Only Way” evolutionary theodicies, namely the claim that the evolutionary process is genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled. (shrink)

Part of the standard protection of decisionally incapacitated research subjects is a prohibition against enrolling them unless surrogate decision makers authorize it. A common view is that surrogates primarily ought to make their decisions based on what the decisionally incapacitated subject would have wanted regarding research participation. However, empirical studies indicate that surrogate predictions about such preferences are not very accurate. The focus of this article is the significance of surrogate accuracy in the context of research that is not expected (...) to benefit the research subject. We identify three morally relevant asymmetries between being enrolled and not being enrolled in such non-beneficial research, and conclude that when there is a non-negligible probability that surrogates’ predictions are wrong, it will generally be better to err on the side of not authorizing enrollment. (shrink)

Reflexive Methodology established itself as a groundbreaking success, providing researchers with an invaluable guide to a central problem in research methodology – how to put field research and interpretations in perspective, paying attention to the interpretive, political, and rhetorical nature of empirical research. Now thoroughly updated, the Second Edition includes a new chapter on positivism, social constructionism, and critical realism, and offers new conclusions on the applications of methodology. It provides further illustrations and updates that build on the acclaimed and (...) successful First Edition. (shrink)

According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflec of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association-with-focus constructions (...) impossible. Furthermore, while focus has a uniform import, the sources of meaning differences in association with focus are various. (shrink)

In Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness, Gabriele Gava tackles one of the thorniest questions in Peirce research, namely the problem of Peirce’s relationship to Kantian philosophy. The leading argument of the book amounts to what may be the most sustained defence of a transcendental reading of Peirce’s thought since Karl-Otto Apel’s pioneering efforts. In pursuing this path, Gava is not exactly moving through uncharted terrain; but nor has he chosen the road most travelled in recent times. For...

It is not contoversial to state that acts of fraud do not belong in the academic world. What is debated is the best way to minimise the risk of fraudulent behaviour. Broadly speaking there are two different approaches to this problem. They differ with regard to whether the main focus is on internal or external control. In this article I argue that the main emphasis should be on internal structures in order to achieve the desired end. Only when the internal (...) structures are in place is it meaningful to adopt external, supportive means to the same end. Invitation to the academic project as such, education and training in research ethics and good research practice, the implementation of good documentation procedures and the implementation of a procedure for investigation of suspicions of fraud which is characterised by efficiency, impartiality and competence are the four primary ingredients in the cure. The first three are suggested to build up the necessary foundation before a structure of investigation procedures are established. (shrink)

, Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1991; 158 pp., price not indicated, ISBN 91-554-2807-X.

Together with large biobanks of human samples, medical registries with aggregated data from many clinical centers are vital parts of an infrastructure for maintaining high standards of quality with regard to medical diagnosis and treatment. The rapid development in personalized medicine and pharmaco-genomics only underscores the future need for these infrastructures. However, registries and biobanks have been criticized as constituting great risks to individual privacy. In this article, I suggest that quality with regard to diagnosis and treatment is an inherent, (...) morally normative requirement of health care, and argue that quality concerns in this sense may be balanced with privacy concerns. (shrink)

Research on incompetent humans raises ethical challenges, especially when there is no direct benefit to these research subjects. Contemporary codes of research ethics typically require that such research must specifically serve to benefit the population to which the research subjects belong. The article critically examines this “same-population condition”, raising issues of both interpretation and moral justification. Of particular concern is the risk that the way in which the condition is articulated and rationalized in effect disguises or downplays the instrumentalization of (...) incompetent individuals. (shrink)

We synthesize literature from organization theory and political sociology to develop a conceptual lens from which organizing can be examined as a process whereby institutional structures are changed in ways similar to how social movements change entire societies. Implied is that hegemonic power structures maintain existing institutional structures by either resisting insurgencies or by making them seem senseless in the first place.

This focused review is based on earlier studies which have shown that both children and adults diagnosed as having developmental coordination disorder (DCD), benefited from sensorimotor therapy according to the method Retraining for Balance (RB). Different approaches and assessments for children and adults in regard to DCD are scrutinized and discussed in comparison to RB which mainly includes (a) vestibular assessment and stimulation (b) assessment and integration of aberrant primary reflexes and (c) assessment and stimulation of auditory and visual perception. (...) Earlier results indicate that the process of sensorimotor therapy using RB techniques could be described according to a conceptual Kinesthetic-Vestibular Developmental Model (KVDM) whereby the training elicited temporary physical and psychological regressions followed by transformations i.e. positive physical and psychological development. We have also seen that this recurring pattern is similar for children and adults. In our conceptual model vestibular stimulation (perceptual priming) stimulates the nervous system, which might enhance object-related priming. This perceptual priming will also assist the suppression of persistent aberrant primary reflexes. In order to develop effective methods for assessment and intervention of DCD over the life span the importance of primary reflex inhibition and vestibular stimulation as well as a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches have to be considered. (shrink)