In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS lVIoore. This is a good thing and, I think, marks an advance (evolutionary ~) in the way the history and philosophy of science should be done. In addition, the book itself is well made with very few printing errora. St.•Jerome's College Univei·sity of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada F. F. CENTORE Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology. By MICHAEL NOVAK. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Pp. (...) viii+ 311. $14.95. Not long ago, it was common for people to interrupt theoretical presentations with the exclamation "Bottom-Line! " as a way of indicating that they wished to get right to the practical conclusions. By and large, Michael Novak's long-running debate with the liberation theologians and philosophers has been a debate at the bottom-line. There theologians and philosophers have developed elaborate and varied intellectual arguments which :finish with quite similar decisions in the realm of political economy and international relations. Gustavo Gutierrez argues in terms.of the Catholic Christian tradition, Jon Sobrino in terms of the gospels, J~nrique Dussel in terms of a phenomenology of presence. But, in the end, they almost invariably anive at positions which are fundamentally opposed to capitalist property and market arrangements in general and to the dominance of the first world over the third world in particular. They come out there, of course, because they start "on the left" in their appreciation of the spiritual and material oppression and its causes. No wonder, then, that their direction in politics and economics is almost invariably for some species of socialism. Novak's question in Will it Liberate? is, as the title indicates, whether they have the causes and the solutions straight, and he goes right to it without much eonsideration of their laborious efforts in formal theology and philosophy. People who have read books like The Spfrit of Democratic Capitalism and Freedom icith Justice will be familiar with the basic line of reasoning here. The state of the world, especially in Latin America, the fons et origo of liberation thought, is indeed parlous, marked by widespread poverty, misery, ignorance, and abuse. Thus far, Novak is in complete accord with the liberationists. Nor does he deny that class divisions and national dependency have much to do with the problems. What he asks, :first of a11, is whether Latin American and other third-world economies have been genuinely capitalist and whether a Leninist dependency analysis will BOOK REVIEWS 363 really account for their woes. He argues that the most troubled economies have remained basically pre-capitalist with heavily regulated and pl'otected markets maintained by authoTitarian political systems and that world trade patterns as well as the experience of the " East Asian Rim " casts doubt on the connection between first-world prosperity and thirdworld indigence. Secondly, he calls into doubt the expectation that socialism, under any form which really undoes capitalist structures, can remedy the woes. The socialist aspirations of the liberationsists remain, on the whole, vague and utopian; but, to the extent that they take flesh, they tend toward a statist control of politics, economics, and culture. But all our experience of statism, in the world beyond dreams, is one of limited political and cultural freedom and of diminished economic energy. The second world, including its extensions in Cuba and Nicaragua, is proof that liberation, so understood, will not liberate. What Novak would like of the liberation theologians and philosophers is to give more serious attention to the liberal tradition with its emphasis on individual autonomy and voluntariness in politics, economy, and culture. Without saying so explicitly, he asks them to study Madison and Mill now in prefel'ence to Marx and Lenin. He insists that this tradition is, in its best manifestations, profoundly social and that its application, in contrast to that of the socialist ideal, has meant unparalleled (albeit imperfect ) achievements in alleviating misery and in liberating people. For the most part, it is a practical tradition which has developed institutions of democratic capitalism while eschewing the discussion of theology and metaphysics. However, Novak believes that these institutions, despite the secularism of many of the chief liberal writers, have their roots in a Judeo-Christian sensibility combining confidence in... (shrink)

The Continuous Parameter Estimation Model is applied to develop individual genomic-level heritabilities for the latent hierarchical structure and developmental dynamics of Life History (LH) strategy LH strategies relate to the allocations of bioenergetic resources into different domains of fitness. LH has moderate to high population-level heritability in humans, both at the level of the high-order Super-K Factor and the lower-order factors, the K-Factor, Covitality Factor, and General Factor of Personality (GFP). Several important questions remain unexplored. We developed measures of genome-level (...) heritabilities employing an American sample of 316 monozygotic (MZ) and 274 dizygotic (DZ) twin dyads and a Swedish sample of 863 MZ and 475 DZ twin dyads. This novel heritability index measures individual genetic transmissibility, therefore opening new avenues for analyzing complex interactions among heritable traits inaccessible to standard structural equations methods. For these samples: (1) moderate to high heritability of factor loadings of Super-K on its lower-order factors is demonstrated, evidencing biological preparedness, genetic accommodation, and the gene-culture coevolution of biased epigenetic rules of development; (2) moderate to high heritability of the magnitudes of the effect of the higher-order factors upon their loadings on their constituent factors, evidencing genetic constraints upon phenotypic plasticity; and (3) that heritability of the LH factors, of factor loadings, and of the magnitudes of the correlations among factors are weaker among those with slower LH speeds, demonstrating that inter-individual variation in transmissibility is a function of individual socioecological selection pressures. (shrink)

This seminal collection on the ethical issues associated with infectious disease is the first book to correct bioethics’ glaring neglect of this subject. Timely in view of public concern about SARS, AIDS, avian flu, bioterrorism and antibiotic resistance. Brings together new and classic papers by prominent figures. Tackles the ethical issues associated with issues such as quarantine, vaccination policy, pandemic planning, biodefense, wildlife disease and health care in developing countries.

To accept that cognition is embodied is to question many of the beliefs traditionally held by cognitive scientists. One key question regards the localization of cognitive faculties. Here we argue that for cognition to be embodied and sometimes embedded, means that the cognitive faculty cannot be localized in a brain area alone. We review recent research on neural reuse, the 1/f structure of human activity, tool use, group cognition, and social coordination dynamics that we believe demonstrates how the boundary between (...) the different areas of the brain, the brain and body, and the body and environment is not only blurred but indeterminate. In turn, we propose that cognition is supported by a nested structure of task-specific synergies, which are softly assembled from a variety of neural, bodily, and environmental components (including other individuals), and exhibit interaction dominant dynamics. (shrink)

When in 2006 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued revised recommendations for HIV testing in health care settings, vocal opponents charged that use of an ?opt-out? approach to presenting HIV testing to patients; the implementation of nontargeted, widespread HIV screening; the elimination of a separate signed consent; and the decoupling of required HIV prevention counseling from HIV testing are unethical. Here we undertake the first systematic ethical examination of the arguments both for and against the recommendations. Our examination (...) reveals that the ethical concerns raised by the critics predominately pertain not to ethically suspect elements of the recommendations themselves, but to suspicions that they will be implemented improperly. It has not been shown that the recommendations cannot be implemented properly. Here we show that in the United States the recommendations are morally justifiable and that safeguards or regulatory oversight may serve to ensure that the recommendations are properly implemented. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Ethical Importance of Infectious Disease The Global Infectious Disease Status Quo: AIDS and TB Drug Resistance Limiting Liberty in Contexts of Contagion Improving Global Health References Further reading.

Archaeologists have proposed that behavioral knowledge of a tool can be conceptualized as a “recipe”—a unit of cultural transmission that combines the preparation of raw materials, construction, and use of the tool, and contingency plans for repair and maintenance. This parallels theories in cognitive psychology that behavioral knowledge is hierarchically structured—sequences of actions are divided into higher level, partially independent subunits. Here we use an agent-based simulation model to explore the costs and benefits of hierarchical learning relative to holistic learning, (...) where entire behavioral sequences are learned in an all-or-nothing fashion, and diffusionist learning, where actions are completely independent. Hierarchical learning is favored under the reasonable assumptions that learning is associated with some degree of both error and cost, and that behavior can be grouped into subunits that repeat in one or more tool recipes. These general predictions can be tested in the archaeological and ethnographic record. Recent advances in evolutionary developmental biology have revealed a number of parallels between the hierarchically structured, recipe-like organization of behavioral knowledge that we examine here and the manner in which biological organisms develop. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the pragma-dialectical conception of a fallacy, according to which a fallacy is an argumentative speech act which violates one or more of the rules of 'rational discussion'. That conception is found to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for committing a fallacy. It is also found wanting in several other respects.

We agree that the emergence of cumulative technological culture was tied to nonsocial cognitive skills, namely, technical-reasoning skills, which allowed humans to constantly acquire and improve information. Our concern is with a reading of the history of cumulative technological culture that is based largely on modern experiments in simulated settings and less on phenomena crucial to the long-term dynamics of cultural evolution.

At the heart of the current surge of interest in religion among contemporary Continental philosophers stands Augustine’s Confessions. With Derrida’s Circumfession constantly in the background, this volume takes up the provocative readings of Augustine by Heidegger, Lyotard, Arendt, and Ricoeur. Derrida himself presides over and comments on essays by major Continental philosophers and internationally recognized Augustine scholars. While studies on and about Augustine as a philosopher abound, none approach his work from such a uniquely postmodern point of view, showing both (...) the continuing relevance of Augustine and the religious resonances within postmodernism. Posed at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and religious studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Augustine as well as those interested in the invigorating discussion between philosophy, religion, and postmodernism. Contributors include Geoffrey Bennington, Philippe Capelle, John D. Caputo, Elizabeth A. Clark, Hent de Vries, Jacques Derrida, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Kearney, Catherine Malabou, James O’Donnell, Michael J. Scanlon, and Mark Vessey. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor. (shrink)

This paper is a critical assessment of argumentum ad baculum, or appeal to force. Its principal contention is that, contrary to common opinion, there is no general fallacy of ad baculum. Most real-life ad baculums are, in fact, fairly strong. A basic logical form for reconstructed ad baculums is proposed, and a number of heterodoxical conclusions are also advanced and argued for. They include that ad baculum is not necessarily a prudential argument, that ad baculum need not involve force, violence, (...) or threats, and that one can argue ad baculum to oneself. The starting point of the paper, however, is a critical evaluation of three ad baculums from the exercise sets of Irving Copi's well-known Introduction to Logic. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Aristotle on the Infinite (to apeiron): From Cosmological Principle to Mathematical Operation Aristotle on Space: Magnitude (megethos) and Place (topos) Aristotle on Time: The “Number of Motion” and “Ever‐rolling Stream” Bibliography.

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” provides a rich analytic framework for understanding how the many dimensions of aesthe...

Any human enterprise that consumes billions of dollars, especially when those dollars are those of citizen tax payers, should be subject to at least occasional scrutiny and stock-taking. This Special Issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine is an attempt to do just that: to ask whether the massive investment of money, equipment and human scientific talent that has been poured into studying the human genome under the assumption that this enormous scientific endeavor will advance human health has been worth (...) it thus far, and whether it is likely to bear fruit in the futureThe expression that best encapsulates the goal of using genomic information to alter trajectories of... (shrink)

We argue that the strengths of the Theory of Event Coding (TEC) can usefully be applied to a wider scope of cognitive tasks, and tested by more diverse methodologies. When allied with a theory of conceptual representation such as Barsalou's (1999a) perceptual symbol systems, and extended to data from eye-movement studies, the TEC has the potential to address the larger goals of an embodied view of cognition.

The misleading and propagandistic tendencies in American news reporting have been a part of public discussion from its earliest days as a republic (Innis, 2007;Sheppard, 2007). “Fake news” is hardly new (McKernon, 1925), and the term has been applied to a variety of distinct phenomenon ranging from satire to news, which one may find disagreeable (Jankowski, 2018;Tandoc et al., 2018). However, this problem has become increasingly acute in recent years with the Macquarie Dictionary declaring “fake news” the word of the (...) year in 2016 (Lavoipierre, 2017). The international recognition of fake news as a problem (Pomerantsev and Weiss, 2014;Applebaum and Lucas, 2016) has led to a number of initiatives to mitigate perceived causes, with varying levels of success (Flanagin and Metzger, 2014;Horne and Adali, 2017;Sample et al., 2018). The inability to create a holistic solution continues to stymie researchers and vested parties. A significant contributor to the problem is the interdisciplinary nature of digital deception. While technology enables the rapid and wide dissemination of digitally deceptive data, the design and consumption of data rely on a mixture of psychology, sociology, political science, economics, linguistics, marketing, and fine arts. The authors for this effort discuss deception’s history, both old and new, from an interdisciplinary viewpoint and then proceed to discuss how various disciplines contribute to aiding in the detection and countering of fake news narratives. A discussion of various fake news types (printed, staged events, altered photographs, and deep fakes) ensues with the various technologies being used to identify these; the shortcomings of those technologies and finally the insights offered by the other disciplines can be incorporated to improve outcomes. A three-point evaluation model that focuses on contextual data evaluation, pattern spread, and archival analysis of both the author and publication archives is introduced. While the model put forth cannot determine fact from fiction, the ability to measure distance from fact across various domains provides a starting point for evaluating the veracity of a new story. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a convergence of fields studying the processing of DNA, such as transcription, replication, and repair. This convergence has been centered around the packaging of DNA in chromatin. Chromatin structure affects all aspects of DNA processing because it modulates access of proteins to DNA. Therefore, a central theme has become the mechanism(s) for accessing DNA in chromatin. It seems likely that mechanisms involved in one of these processes may also be used in others. For example, the discovery (...) of transcriptional coactivators with histone acetyltransferase activity and chromatin remodeling complexes has provided possible mechanisms required for efficient repair of DNA in chromatin. BioEssays 21:596–603, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Partisan or Neutral? critically examines the Rawlsian ideal of a public, supposedly neutral, political theory meant to justify contemporary constitutional democracies. Placing this ideal-appealed to by neo-natural law theorists and advocates of "public theology" as well as by political theorists-against the background of the history of political liberalism, White shows its contradictory nature. He argues that any such legitimating theory will be 'partisan,' in the sense of appealing to convictions concerning the human good that will not be universally accepted. He (...) concludes that all politics must be imperfect-a matter of pragmatism and prudence in forming the most workable compromises possible and in acquiescing, where our principles allow us to do so, in situations that are often far from optimal. (shrink)

According to the propositional view of belief, a belief situation involves a believer’s standing in the relation of belief to a proposition. It is argued that the propositional view has unacceptable implications concerning the identity conditions of belief situations involving beliefs with indexical contents, especially where such beliefs are held over a period of time during which background circumstances change. After a critical discussion of Perry’s alternative to the propositional view, a version of the adverbial theory of belief, which accounts (...) satisfactorily for the identity conditions of belief situations, is advanced. This theory, which avoids the standard objections to adverbialism, is defended against the charge that it cannot provide an account of the semantics of sentences attributing the same belief to two or more believers. In the course of this defense it is argued that the standard propositional account of such sentences is insensitive to everyday language. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the role of Anselm’s ontological argument in the philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. Anselm’s argument appears prominently in Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method (1933) and Essay on Metaphysics (1940), as well as in his early work Speculum Mentis (1924). In the proof, Collingwood finds the central expression of the priority of “faith” in the first principles of thought to reason’s activities. For Collingwood, it is Anselm’s proof that clearly expresses this relationship between faith and reason. The (...) two elements of this analysis that must be understood if one is to understand Collingwood’s use of the proof are what he means by “the idea of an object that shall completely satisfy the demands of reason” and the “special case of metaphysical thinking.” I analyze both of these elements and conclude by showing how Anselm’s proof is essential to Collingwood’s historical science of mind. (shrink)

When phylogenetic trees constructed from morphological and molecular evidence disagree (i.e. are incongruent) it has been suggested that the differences are spurious or that the molecular results should be preferred a priori. Comparing trees can increase confidence (congruence), or demonstrate that at least one tree is incorrect (incongruence). Statistical analyses of 181 molecular and 49 morphological trees shows that incongruence is greater between than within the morphological and molecular partitions, and this difference is significant for the molecular partition. Because the (...) level of incongruence between a pair of trees gives a minimum bound on how much error is present in the two trees, our results indicate that the level of error may be underestimated by congruence within partitions. Thus comparisons between morphological and molecular trees are particularly useful for detecting this incongruence (spurious or otherwise). Molecular trees have higher average congruence than morphological trees, but the difference is not significant, and both within- and between-partition incongruence is much lower than expected by chance alone. Our results suggest that both molecular and morphological trees are, in general, useful approximations of a common underlying phylogeny and thus, when molecules and morphology clash, molecular phylogenies should not be considered more reliable a priori. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper develops a semantical account of sentences containing performative principal verbs in which these verbs are analyzed as indexical expressions: the proposition picked out by a sentence containing a performative verb depends on aspects of the context of use of the sentence; and these same aspects of context of use also determine the truth value of the proposition picked out. A two‐dimensional modal operator is utilized in analyzing non‐ performative sentences that contain principal verb which, in other contexts, have (...) performative uses. Thus, the analysis developed accounts for the performative — non‐performative distinction within a formal semantic‐pragmatic framework; the more common approach of relegating the distinction to the somewhat vague realm of ‘language use’ is avoided.RésuméCet article développe un traitement sémantique des phrases contenant un verbe principal performatif. Ces verbes sont analysés comme des expressions indicées: la proposition sélectionnée par une phrase contenant un verbe performatif dépend du contexte d'usage de cette phrase; et ces mêmes aspects du contexte d'usage déterminent également la valeur de vérité de la proposition sélectionnée. Un opérateur modal à deux dimensions est utilisé pour l'analyse de phrases non‐performatives contenant un verbe principal performatif dans d'autres contextes. L'analyse développée rend ainsi compte de la distinction performatif — non‐performatif dans un cadre sémantico‐pragmatique; on évite ainsi la solution habituelle consistant à reléguer cette distinction dans le domaine plutôt vague de l'usage linguistique.ZusammenfassungEs wird eine semantische Darstellung von Sätzen entwickelt, die performative Hauptverben enthalten, indem diese Verben als indexikale Ausdrücke analysiert werden: die Proposition, die durch einen Satz mit einem performativen Verb bezeichnet wird, hängt von Aspekten des Gebrauchskontextes des Satzes ab; und gerade diese Aspekte bestimmen auch den Wahrheitswert der Proposition. Ein zweidimensionaler Modaloperator wird verwendet, um nicht‐performative Sätze zu analysieren, die Hauptverben enthalten, welche — in andern Kontexten — einen performativen Gebrauch haben. Auf diese Weise gibt die entwickelte Analyse innerhalb eines formalen semantisch‐syntaktischen Rahmenwerkes Rechenschaft über die Unterscheidung performativ — nicht‐performativ; man vermeidet dadurch das übliche Vorgehen, die Unterscheidung in den etwas vagen Bereich des sog. 〈Sprachgebrauchs〉 abzuschieben. (shrink)

THIS PAPER PRESENTS THE SEMANTIC THEORY FOR A TEMPORAL-MODAL LOGIC WITH RIGIDLY REFERENTIAL TEMPORAL OPERATORS ('dtomorrow' AND 'dnow') IN WHICH THE 'TRADITIONAL' INDETERMINIST INTERPRETATION OF ARISTOTLE'S _DE INTERPRETATIONE 9 CAN BE MODELED. THIS LOGIC HAS, I BELIEVE, SOME INTRINSIC PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST AND PLAUSIBILITY. HOWEVER, THE PRESENT PAPER IS PRINCIPALLY DEVOTED TO AN INITIAL EXAMINATION OF THE RELATION BETWEEN THE LOGIC AND SUCH TOPICS IN THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY OF THE TIME AND OF THE MODALITIES AS THE NECESSITY OF THE PAST, ABSOLUTE (...) VERSUS TEMPORALLY RELATIVE ALETHIC MODALITIES, THE 'PLENITUDE' PRINCIPLE AND UNACTUALIZED POSSIBILITIES, AND THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF TIME. (shrink)