This book demonstrates that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems...

Originally published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges proved to be as controversial as its author expected. Integrating research in the burgeoning sciences of anthropology, geology, astronomy, biology, economics, and chemistry, it was the first attempt to connect the natural sciences to a history of creation. The author, whose identity was not revealed until 1884, was Robert Chambers, a leading Scottish writer and publisher. Vestiges reached a huge popular audience and was widely read by the social and intellectual elite. It sparked debate (...) about natural law, setting the stage for the controversy over Darwin's Origin. In response to the surrounding debate and criticism, Chambers published Explanations: A Sequel, in which he offered a reasoned defense of his ideas about natural law, castigating what he saw as the narrowness of specialist science. With a new introduction by James Secord, a bibliography of reviews, and a new index, this volume adds to Vestiges and Explanations Chambers's earliest works on cosmology, an essay on Darwin, and an autobiographical essay, raising important issues about the changing meanings of popular science and religion and the rise of secular ideologies in Western culture. (shrink)

Defining brain mechanisms that control and adapt motivated behavior will not only advance addiction treatment. It will help society see that addiction is a disease that erodes free will, rather than representing a free will that asks for or deserves consequences of drug-use choices. This science has important implications for understanding addiction's comorbidity in mental illness and reducing associated public health and criminal justice burdens.

Let us hypothesize that there are three main "registers" of writing: narrative, description and commentary. "Narrative" and "description" are by definition concerned with diachronic and synchronic relationships ; and it may be said that taken together, they therefore exhaust the inventory of all relationships constituting the "world" our language regards as possible. It is often remarked that there is such an affinity between narration and description that on occasion they are hard to distinguish: narration is the description of an action (...) or change, and description mimes the action of relating items one to the other, and hence may have a narrative function. This solidarity of narration and description justifies their being grouped together as constituting the "topic" of literary discourse. But the function of "commentary," which correlates the text with a context, is to create a different type of relationship, in which makes the narrative/descriptive topic "meaningful." We are thus distinguishing "meaning" and "meaningfulness" on the grounds that "meaning" can be understood as the object of semantic analysis , whereas "meaningfulness" is the meaning bestowed on a set of relationships by an act of interpretation . This type of meaningfulness is what the moral of a La Fontaine fable most characteristically seeks to create. Thus, the two-line commentary segment in Le Chat, la Belette et le petit Lapin: Ceci ressemble fort aux débats qu'ont parfoisLes petits souverains se rapportants aux rois1 designates the narrative/descriptive relationships established on the fable proper , designates the pragmatic context , but also specifies the analogy/homology between the two which makes the text meaningful . Meaningfulness in this sense is thus definable as the perception of a text/context relationship. · 1. "This greatly resembles the debates which petty sovereigns have when they refer to kings." [My translation] Ross Chambers, Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the author of Gérard de Nerval et la poétique du voyage, La Comédie au château, L'Ange et l'automate, "Spirite" de Théophile Gautier, and Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative. (shrink)

We develop an algorithm that can be used to approximate a decisionmaker’s beliefs for a class of preference structures that includes, among others, α-maximin expected utility preferences, Choquet expected utility preferences, and, more generally, constant additive preferences. For both exact and statistical approximation, we demonstrate convergence in an appropriate sense to the true belief structure.

This refreshingly different discussion of laws, customs, and agencies examines the underlying political, cultural, and ethical structures that bind a society and define its character. At a time of major national unheavals, Robert R. Chambers reconsiders the nature of a best society and how it can be achieved. Human behavior is organized by means of two distinct, often opposing, types of rules, each with its own modus operandi and set of ethical principles. The conflicts of rules take on a wider, (...) more compelling dimension when they are used in mixtures, as they are in all states. To illustrate his theory, Chambers describes two model island societies. In the "status" society the rules are appropriate to people working together as a team; in the "free" society, the rules are appropriate to people who relate to one another as neighbors. He analyzes the systems and structures in each type of society and illustrates the inherent conflicts between the two types of rules when used in various combinations. Although purely theoretical, significant elements of Chambers' discussion clearly mirror current social and political difficulties facing democracies and socialist regimes. Political Theory and Societal Ethics is an important addition to the debates over the merits of different configurations of rules and of democratic versus centrally run societies. (shrink)

In this article, it is shown that a wide range of comparative statics results from expected utility theory can be extended to generalized expected utility models using the tools of supermodularity theory. In particular, a range of concepts of decreasing absolute risk aversion may be formulated in terms of the supermodularity properties of certainty equivalent representations of preferences.