In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 In 2010 the city of Colorado Springs was strapped for cash. Government officials announced that they would either have to raise revenue through increased taxation or cut public services—­ in some cases rather severely—­ including, perhaps, police and fire protection, and even more basic bits of municipal infrastructure. The city shut down one-­ third of residential streetlights and closed public restrooms. Citi­ zens were outraged, but a majority (...) of voters had recently defeated a proposed tax increase. It’s tempting to suppose that the city was trying to teach its citizens a lesson: if you want public services, you have to be willing to pay for them. Colorado Springs is, and has been for some time now, a died-­in-­the-­wool small-­government, anti-­tax-­increase, fiscally conservative town. As Colorado Springs resident Bo Sharifi put it, “As soon as I hear government [say] ‘Oh, we need more money’... I guess I kind of automatically assume there’s probably some other things you could probably cut before firemen, policemen, city lights and that sort of thing.”1 On the surface, that seems reasonable. So... what comes to mind? How about food stamps? What about WIC? Of course these are federal services, not funded by Coloradans alone. There’s government, and then there’s government. Well, how about... well... what? Doesn’t the government spend money on all sorts of things we could very easily do without? Perhaps. Isn’t it part of our job to know or to decide which things these are? If we don’t trust government, even more obviously we don’t trust it with our money, though we pretty clearly have no idea how public funds are actually allocated or spent. When asked whether he remembered the proposed tax increase that the city had voted against, Sharifi replied, “maybe.” Bo and his wife were charged $125 to have Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century By Steven Cassedy Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014 JOHN MARIANA Book Reviews 139 their streetlight turned back on. Bo’s wife Sara viewed this as extortion. “By shoveling out a hundred dollars to turn on a streetlight that we kind of felt was supposed to be on anyway, that it was giving them what they wanted,” she said. They who? One resident wrote the city of Colorado Springs a check for $300 to turn the lights on for his entire neighborhood. City Councilwoman Jan Martin pointed out to him that the total cost to the individual Colorado Springs taxpayer to keep the streetlights on—­and to fund the maintenance of public parks and medians, as well as community centers and pre-­recession-­level police and fire services—­by approving the tax increase would have been: $200. He replied that he would never vote for a tax increase. In other words, as the reporter who covered the story (Robert Smith) observed, he would rather pay more to keep the streetlights on in his own neighborhood than to pay for all city services combined. Smith remarked that “Colorado Springs was stepping away from one of the things that we take for granted in most American cities: that we’re all in it together—­ at least when it comes to basic services.”2 As near as I can tell, this is the moral of Steven Cassedy’s exceptionally timely Connected: that we’re all in it together. For much of the book Cassedy merely traces the history of the emergence in the consciousness of ordinary Americans of the concept of the social network, but he is not so much talking about the notion of a network society as such, as I understand him. Or, at any rate, the network society as such is not really his main concern. He is talking about the idea of social, political, national, and ultimately global and universal human interconnectedness that was a distinct product of the complex networked structures (both concrete and abstract) that came to constitute modern American life in the twentieth century (and of course life pretty much everywhere ), and about our understanding of ourselves as so networked.3 On this... (shrink)

Plantation workers have seemingly little opportunities for labour agency, defined as the worker’s ability to act and improve their conditions. In response to a call for a better understanding of the horizontal dimension shaping labour agency, this article questions what local factors determine the worker’s ability to act by analysing the institutional constraints embedded in the national context through a mixed methods approach. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data is used to understand what shapes and constrains the potential for (...) labour agency in the case of plantation workers in the pineapple sector of Costa Rica. We provide new empirical evidence of the relation between the local opportunity structure—proxied by perceived job security and union awareness—and labour agency in terms of a worker’s intention to choose forthright (voice), evasive (exit) or repressed (loyalty) actions. The model results indicate that a lack of job security and a lack of union awareness significantly reduce the likelihood to use forthright actions (such as voicing concerns, striking or joining a union) compared to evasive (such as leaving the job) or repressed actions (such as doing nothing). In addition, the qualitative analysis of the local opportunity structure identifies four institutional constraints: weak employment protection, vulnerability of migrant workers, limited workers’ representation and insufficient labour law enforcement. Besides overcoming these institutional constraints, empowering workers to make their voices heard also requires awareness raising about their collective bargaining rights and more job security. (shrink)

Global competition has made thetraditional sugarcane and pineapple industriesincreasingly non-viable in Hawaii. One initiative torevive the agricultural sector calls for diversifyinginto non-traditional export crops that gains highervalue by attaching the paradise identity such as freshpineapples, macadamia nuts, or tropical flowers.Drawing from cases of pineapples and macadamia nuts,this paper examines how Hawaii's foodstuffs were ableto capture a premium value of place-association due tothe social construction of Hawaii as a place. Anexpansion of the niche markets, however, has allowedthe symbolic meaning of (...) these products to beappropriated and reconstituted by global interests.Without confronting the fundamental problemsassociated with land and labor relations in Hawaii,Hawaii producers are caught in a niche-markettreadmill. They continuously seek new potentials forhigh-value crops, but are unable to maintain controlbeyond their inventive stage. (shrink)

_Abduction of generalizations_ is the process in which explanatory hypotheses are formed for an observed, yet puzzling generalization such as ``pineapples taste sweet" or ``rainbows appear when the sun breaks through the rain". This phenomenon has received little attention in formal logic and philosophy of science. The current paper remedies this lacuna by first giving an overview of some general characteristics of this process, elaborating on its ubiquity in scientific and daily life reasoning. Second, the adaptive logic $\LAG$ is (...) presented to explicate this process formally. (shrink)

What is required for you to know what a certain property is? And what is required for you to have the concept of that property? Hume held that a person who has never tasted a pineapple cannot know what the property tasting like a pineapple is. He also thought that this person cannot have the corresponding concept. A subsequent tradition in empiricism generalises these claims at least to all the so-called "secondary qualities." I will argue that this tradition is mistaken. (...) I will argue that there is no more of a philosophically significant connection between the property tasting like a pineapple and your taste experiences of pineapples than there is between the property having a mass and your tactile experiences when lifting objects. Likewise with respect to the corresponding concepts. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether abstract objects such as numbers and properties exist, but in recent years philosophical debate about what things exist has been ratcheted up more than a notch to question whether even ordinary objects such as pineapples and tables exist. One view has it that all existence questions are difficult questions whose answers hang on achieving an ontological theory that succeeds in carving nature at its joints. Some proponents of this view further claim to have succeeded (...) in that carving, even without the benefit of any instrument sharper than the a priori arguments conjured in their armchairs, and to have discovered, alas, that no ordinary concrete objects exist. Naturally, many of us have been made to wonder what premise in the argument for that conclusion enjoys a plausibility greater than that of the negation of the argument's conclusion. In her remarkable new book, Ontology Made Easy, Amie Thomasson strives to do much more than that in defense of common‐sense ontology. But not only for common‐sense ontology. She propounds a unified approach to all existence questions—whether about the existence of dogs, shoes or tables, or about the existence of numbers, propositions or fictional characters—according to which existence questions “are not deep and difficult subjects for metaphysical dispute, but rather questions to be resolved straightforwardly by employing our conceptual competence, often combining this with empirical investigations” (20). Thomasson calls her way of resolving existence questions the easy approach to ontology, and to that I now turn. (shrink)

The taste of this particular chunk of fresh pineapple, the one which I am just now eating, is scrumptious. That taste is something the chunk has in common with other such chunks, like the one I had a few seconds ago and the one I will have in a few seconds time. The taste of this pineapple chunk is thus a feature, a property, which this and various other chunks of pineapple share. Now, intuitively at least, no purely mathematical entity, (...) like a function, is scrumptious. Hence a property, like the taste of this chunk of pineapple, cannot be any such function. This kind of argument, if sound, would cut a wide swathe through the field of metaphysics. All those theories which attempt to reduce onto logically suspicious types of entities to mathematical entities would fall to the blade. This could well help to reduce the impact of contemporary philosophy on the world's dwindling forests. I save contemporary metaphysics by explaining where the argument goes wrong. (shrink)

The attention that prominent fashion houses have been paying to climate change and environmental concerns has never been so prominent. Fashion week of 2019 and 2020 made such a concern a staple of the fashion discourse. Designers and fashion houses are exploring fabric alternatives such as Piñatex (derived from discarded pineapple skins), they are advertising their runways as “carbon neutral,” and fashion colossuses such as Burberry, Gap, Levi’s, and H&M are vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 30% by 2030. (...) However, the genuine nature of such intentions is not impermeable to criticism. While “sustainable fashion” – arguably the “it” vocabulary choice of the past couple of years – certainly has its praiseworthy sides, it is also, at times, another strategy to spike consumerism. In this chapter, I aim to investigate the viability of fashion’s current interest in environmental concerns in light of an analysis of fashion’s most indisputably prominent side: its relation to the aesthetic realm. Playing along the lines of the analytic debate gauging the relative impact of ethical values over aesthetic values and vice versa, I will consider how aesthetic demands can be steered by the necessity of ethical reflection without for this reason erasing, or at least hiding, the appreciation of style, glamour, and couture. I will conclude with a reassessment and potential solution, based on the inherently performative side of fashion, to the question of whether sustainable fashion can be seen as a current, viable, and potentially effective way of responding to contemporary environmental concerns. (shrink)

This study analyzes the gendered nature of recent production and labor force restructuring in the Dominican Republic. Using a longitudinal case study of work relations on a large transnational corporate pineapple plantation, the author explores the production politics involved in the initial corporate attempt to create a wage labor force and the subsequent replacement of employees with contracted labor crews. She demonstrates how female, and then male, labor forces were negotiated in this process and how labor relations became embedded in (...) local gendered institutions. The study reveals how workforces and spheres of work are constituted through struggles over gender, as well as ethnicity and class, in intersecting arenas linking the local community to the global economy. In this case, gender proves critical in shaping both worker identity and the shifting scope and form of resistance to plantation practices. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Truth Relativism Metaphysics of Truth Relativism Truth Relativism and the Scope Problem Truth Pluralism Example: Relative Moral Truth Conclusion References.