Biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1895-1986, Indian philosopher.

Treatise with auto-commentary on Dvaita philosophy.

Contributed articles on Indic philosophy, Vedic grammer, and classical Sanskrit literature; includes some on the life of Kr̥ṣṇa Mādho Jha, Sanskrit scholar.

Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. Scientific Perspectivism argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas Kuhn (...) theorized forty years ago. Using the example of color vision in humans to illustrate how his theory of “perspectivism” works, Ronald N. Giere argues that colors do not actually exist in objects; rather, color is the result of an interaction between aspects of the world and the human visual system. Giere extends this argument into a general interpretation of human perception and, more controversially, to scientific observation, conjecturing that the output of scientific instruments is perspectival. Furthermore, complex scientific principles—such as Maxwell’s equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields—make no claims about the world, but models based on those principles can be used to make claims about specific aspects of the world. Offering a solution to the most contentious debate in the philosophy of science over the past thirty years, Scientific Perspectivism will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of science. (shrink)

Study of Śivasvarodaya, work on yoga; includes original Sanskrit text with English translation.

This book collects some of the most exciting pioneering work in perceptual and cognitive psychology. The authors' quantitative approach to the study of mental images and their representation is clearly depicted in this invaluable volume of research which presents, interprets, evaluates, and extends their work. The selections are preceded by a thorough review of the history of their experiments, and all of the articles have been updated with reviews of the current literature. The book's first part focuses on mental rotation; (...) the second includes other, more complex transformations and sequences of transformations. A third part describes work on rotational transformations in the context of the perceptual illusion of &"apparent motion.&" Roger N. Shepard is Professor of Psychology, Stanford University. Lynn A. Cooper is Professor of Psychology, University of Arizona. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This anthology collects some of the most important papers on what is believed to be the major force in evolution, natural selection. An issue of great consequence in the philosophy of biology concerns the levels at which, and the units upon which selection acts. In recent years, biologists and philosophers have published a large number of papers bearing on this subject. The papers selected for inclusion in this book are divided into three main sections covering the history of the subject, (...) explaining its conceptual foundations, and focusing on kin and group selection and higher levels of selection.One of the book's interesting features is that it draws together material from the biological and philosophical literatures. The philosophical literature, having thoroughly absorbed the biological material, now offers conceptual tools suitable for the reworking of the biological arguments. Although a full symbiosis has yet to develop, this anthology offers a unique resource for students in both biology and philosophy.Robert N. Brandon is Professor in the Philosophy Department, Duke University. Richard M. Burian is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chairman, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Commemoration volume of Mahamahopadhyaya Bālakr̥ṣṇa Misŕa, 1887-1943, Sanskrit author; contributed research papers on Hindu philosophy, Sanskrit grammar and Vedic literature and some on his life and works.

In this paper, I explore the links between liberal political theory and the evaluative nature of medical classification, arguing for stronger recognition of those links in a liberal model of medical practice. All judgments of medical or psychiatric "dysfunction," I argue, are fundamentally evaluative, reflecting our collective willingness or reluctance to tolerate and/or accommodate the conditions in question. Illness, then, is "socially constructed." But the relativist worries that this loaded phrase evokes are unfounded; patients, doctors, and communities will agree in (...) the vast majority of cases about what counts as illness. Where they cannot come to agreement, however, we are faced with precisely the sort of dispute about values and ways of life that the institutions of the liberal state are designed to accommodate. I accordingly sketch a model of medical practice, based loosely on Jürgen Habermas's political theories, designed to maximize both our awareness and our understanding of these disputes. (shrink)

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that (...) have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines. Contributors Rachel A. Ankeny Angela N. H. Creager Amy Dahan Dalmedico John Forrester Clifford Geertz Carlo Ginzburg E. Jane Albert Hubbard Elizabeth Lunbeck Mary S. Morgan Josiah Ober Naomi Oreskes Susan Sperling Marcel Weber M. Norton Wise. (shrink)

The civilizational turn in sociological theory is best understood as an attempt to do full justice to the autonomy of culture (against all versions of structural-functional theory) without conceding the issue to cultural determinism. Civilizational formations are based on combinations of cultural visions of the world with regulative frameworks of social life, but the relationship between the two levels is open to conflicting interpretations and strategic uses of them. Axial age civilizations open up new structural and historical dimensions of interaction (...) between cultural and social patterns, and are therefore central to the agenda of civilizational analysis. Among the later breakthroughs which draw on Axial sources, the emergence of modernity stands out as particularly important; the cultural and political program of modernity may be seen as a new and distinctive civilization, but it remains open to more or less formative influences from older civilizational legacies. (shrink)

Work on Sankhya system in Hindu philosophy; includes commentaries.

In his historical perspective on the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, Carl N. Degler explores the study of social evolution and the ongoing search for human nature. In Search of Human Nature provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology. Degler examines why these changes took place, the evidence and people fostering these changes and why students of human nature decided to accept (...) this momentous change in thought. He suggests varying ideologies as the underlying force behind this shift in the study of social science. From Darwin's theory that human social behaviour has drastically evolved from animals, to the belief that human experience serves as the basic differentiating factor in humans, Degler provides a thorough and captivating examination of the roots of human behaviour. (shrink)

Individual semiotic systems interpreting their environment are not well understood from the externalist approach typical of the scientific method. Science constructs probabilities describing large populations of systems, not individuals. The Umwelt, as the individually experienced/created aspects of the habitat aspect of its population’s ecological niche, is given an internalist understanding within the framework of the compositional hierarchy. Vagueness is an important aspect of the internalist condition. It is selectively reduced momentarily by creative choices that can have a Peircean semiotic formulation, (...) and which are often unpredictable externally, thereby appearing to be chance events. (shrink)

In 1933 Godel introduced a calculus of provability (also known as modal logic S4) and left open the question of its exact intended semantics. In this paper we give a solution to this problem. We find the logic LP of propositions and proofs and show that Godel's provability calculus is nothing but the forgetful projection of LP. This also achieves Godel's objective of defining intuitionistic propositional logic Int via classical proofs and provides a Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov style provability semantics for Int which (...) resisted formalization since the early 1930s. LP may be regarded as a unified underlying structure for intuitionistic, modal logics, typed combinatory logic and λ-calculus. (shrink)

A leading expert in informal logic, Douglas Walton turns his attention in this new book to how reasoning operates in trials and other legal contexts, with special emphasis on the law of evidence. The new model he develops, drawing on methods of argumentation theory that are gaining wide acceptance in computing fields like artificial intelligence, can be used to identify, analyze, and evaluate specific types of legal argument. In contrast with approaches that rely on deductive and inductive logic and rule (...) out many common types of argument as fallacious, Walton’s aim is to provide a more expansive view of what can be considered "reasonable" in legal argument when it is construed as a dynamic, rule-governed, and goal-directed conversation. This dialogical model gives new meaning to the key notions of relevance and probative weight, with the latter analyzed in terms of pragmatic criteria for what constitutes plausible evidence rather than truth. (shrink)

In 1961, Ernst Mayr published a highly influential article on the nature of causation in biology, in which he distinguished between proximate and ultimate causes. Mayr argued that proximate causes (e.g. physiological factors) and ultimate causes (e.g. natural selection) addressed distinct ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and were not competing alternatives. That distinction retains explanatory value today. However, the adoption of Mayr’s heuristic led to the widespread belief that ontogenetic processes are irrelevant to evolutionary questions, a belief that has (1) hindered (...) progress within evolutionary biology, (2) forged divisions between evolutionary biology and adjacent disciplines and (3) obstructed several contemporary debates in biology. Here we expand on our earlier (Laland et al. in Science 334:1512–1516, 2011) argument that Mayr’s dichotomous formulation has now run its useful course, and that evolutionary biology would be better served by a concept of reciprocal causation, in which causation is perceived to cycle through biological systems recursively. We further suggest that a newer evolutionary synthesis is unlikely to emerge without this change in thinking about causation. (shrink)

Sanskrit text with autocommentary on Advaita philosophy by Kr̥ṣṇapaṇḍita, 18th century: based on rare manuscripts.

The traditional verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is inadequate for completely describing cerebral lateralization. Musical functions are not necessarily mediated by the right hemisphere; evidence for a specialist left-hemisphere mechanism dedicated to the encoded speech signal is weakening, and the right hemisphere possesses considerable comprehensional powers. Right-hemisphere processing is often said to be characterized by holistic or gestalt apprehension, and face recognition may be mediated by this hemisphere partly because of these powers, partly because of the right hemisphere's involvement in emotional affect, and (...) possibly through the hypothesized existence of a specialist face processor or processors in the right. The latter hypothesis may, however, suffer the same fate as the one relating to a specialist encodedness processor for speech in the left. Verbal processing is largely the province of the left because of this hemisphere's possession of sequential, analytic, time-dependent mechanisms. Other distinctions are special cases of an analytic/holistic dichotomy. More fundamentally, however, the left hemisphere is characterized by its mediation of discriminations involving duration, temporal order, sequencing, and rhythm, at thesensory level, and especially at themotorlevel. Spatial aspects characterize the right, the mapping of exteroceptive body space, and the positions of fingers, limbs, and perhaps articulators, with respect to actual and target positions. Thus there is a continuum of function between the hemispheres, rather than a rigid dichotomy, the differences being quantitative rather than qualitative, of degree rather than of kind. (shrink)

This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. The central claim of the paper is that theoretical models make better sense in the context of a menu of possible explanations. In order to justify this claim, we introduce a distinction (...) between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes. These conceptual tools help us to articulate the basis for modelers’ intuitive confidence that their models make an important epistemic contribution. By focusing on the role of the menu of possible explanations in the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, it is possible to understand how a causal mechanism scheme can improve our explanatory understanding even in cases where it does not describe the actual cause of a particular phenomenon. (shrink)

This book provides a practical and accessible way of evaluating good and bad arguments used in everyday conversations by applying normative models of dialectical (interactive) argumentation, where two parties reason together in an orderly and cooperative way. Using case studies, the author analyzes correct and incorrect uses of argumentation on controversial issues that engage the reader's interest while illustrating points in a practical way. Walton gives clear explanations of the most common errors and tricky deceptions -- traditionally called "fallacies" -- (...) that can trip up an unwary arguer. (shrink)

Background Deep brain stimulation is approved for treating refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder in adults under the US Food and Drug Administration Humanitarian Device Exemption, and studies have shown its efficacy in reducing symptom severity and improving quality of life. While similar deep brain stimulation treatment is available for pediatric patients with dystonia, it is not yet available for pediatric patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, although soon could be. The prospect of growing indications for pediatric deep brain stimulation raises several ethical concerns relating (...) to bodily integrity, the ability to offer informed assent, and the role pediatric patients play in the decision-making process. Objective The aim of this study is to solicit and assess the views of stakeholders (children, parents, clinicians) on pediatric assent, autonomy, and bodily integrity in the context of potential pediatric deep brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder patients ( n = 21), caregivers of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder patients aged 14–18 ( n = 19), and clinicians with experience treating refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder ( n = 25). Interviews were transcribed and coded in MAXQDA 2018 and 2020 software and processed for thematic content analysis to isolate and compare specific themes. Results A majority of respondents (74%, 48/65) across all three stakeholder groups voiced that the decision-making process should be collaborative and involve everyone (clinicians: 84% or 21/25, caregivers 71% or 15/21, and patients 63% or 12/19). We identified a split between respondents’ views on who should have the final say in the event of disagreement (38% or 25/65 favored the patient versus 35% or 23/65 favoring caregivers). A split between respondents also emerged concerning the maturity relevant for deep brain stimulation decision-making, with 45% (29/65) favoring developmental maturity (age/physiological development) and 45% (29/65) favoring decisional maturity (capacity to understand and weigh information). A majority of clinicians indicated that they would not move forward with deep brain stimulation without securing patient assent (80% or 20/25), with some stating the only exception is if patient quality of life was very poor and/or they lacked insight. Both caregivers and patients expressed a significant respect for the patient's right to bodily integrity, with 67% of caregivers (14/21) and 68% of patients (13/19) justifying patient involvement in decision-making specifically with reference to infringements of bodily integrity. Conclusion Our findings demonstrate that despite broad agreement across stakeholders that the decision-making process for pediatric deep brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder should be collaborative and somehow involve pediatric patients, there is disagreement about what this process entails and what factors determine patient involvement in the process. However, there is agreement that children have a right to bodily and brain integrity, which should only be infringed upon in rare circumstances. (shrink)

Research in the organizational sciences has tended to portray prosocial behavior as an unqualified positive outcome that should be encouraged in organizations. However, only recently, have researchers begun to acknowledge prosocial behaviors that help maintain an organization’s positive image in ways that violate ethical norms. Recent scandals, including Volkswagen’s emissions scandal and Penn State’s child sex abuse scandal, point to the need for research on the individual factors and situational conditions that shape the emergence of these unethical pro-organizational behaviors. Drawing (...) on trait activation theory, we argue that the “dark” trait of Machiavellianism should make individuals more willing to engage in UPB. Further, we argue that this willingness will be augmented when Machiavellians hold bottom-line-mentality climate perceptions, or the perception that ethical standards matter less than organizational performance. Using data from 170 U.S. employees, results suggested that Machiavellians are more willing to engage in UPB, but that BLMCPs may not affect their motivation to engage in UPB. We discuss the study’s theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for research. (shrink)

Kaplan and Craver claim that all explanations in neuroscience appeal to mechanisms. They extend this view to the use of mathematical models in neuroscience and propose a constraint such models must meet in order to be explanatory. I analyze a mathematical model used to provide explanations in dynamical systems neuroscience and indicate how this explanation cannot be accommodated by the mechanist framework. I argue that this explanation is well characterized by Batterman’s account of minimal model explanations and that it demonstrates (...) how relationships between explanatory models in neuroscience and the systems they represent is more complex than has been appreciated. (shrink)

In arguing a "role for history," Kuhn was proposing a naturalized philosophy of science. That, I argue, is the only viable approach to the philosophy of science. I begin by exhibiting the main general objections to a naturalistic approach. These objections, I suggest, are equally powerful against nonnaturalistic accounts. I review the failure of two nonnaturalistic approaches, methodological foundationism (Carnap, Reichenbach, and Popper) and metamethodology (Lakatos and Laudan). The correct response, I suggest, is to adopt an "evolutionary perspective." This perspective (...) is defended against one recent critic (Putnam). To argue the plausibility of a naturalistic approach, I next sketch a naturalistic account of theories and of theory choice. This account is then illustrated by the recent revolution in geology. In conclusion I return to Kuhn's question about the role of history in developing a naturalistic theory of science. (shrink)