Commonsense Statements Research Articles

The sophisticated kind theory

ABSTRACT Generic sentences are commonsense statements of the form ‘Fs are G,’ like ‘Bears have fur’ or ‘Rattlesnakes are poisonous.’ Kind theories hold that rather than being general statements about individual objects, they are particular statements about kinds. This paper examines the standard objections against the kind theory and argues that they only apply to the most simplified version of the theory. The more sophisticated version, which has received little discussion in the literature in spite of having been formulated concurrently with the simple version, is immune to this standard battery of objections. After discussing four distinctive features of generic sentences, the paper then presents a modernized extension of the sophisticated kind theory which explains the presence of these features. Although the choice between a kind theory and the more standardly accepted adverbial quantificational theory is complex, these considerations suggest that the two approaches are at least deserving of equal consideration for the purposes of natural language semantics.

Delegation Reconsidered: A Delegation Doctrine for the Modern Administrative State

The delegation doctrine — holding that legislative authority cannot be ceded to executive or judicial officers — long has been accepted as a common-sense statement of the proposition that the constitutional design of separated powers for more than a century. Yet despite its broad acceptance as a doctrine that is consistent with the structure and text of the Constitution, it effectively is treated as simply a notional, not a realistic, constraint. Recent opinions from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, however, pointedly expressed concern about legislated grants of expansive authority to make rules regulating private conduct. These opinions provide an occasion for reexamining how much the Constitution’s division of and limitations on power traditionally assumed to be “legislative” can and should be judicially enforceable.If the constitutional structure is to be preserved, an enforceable delegation doctrine is needed, but the current doctrine — which turns on the scope of a legislative assignment of authority — will not work. Focusing instead first and foremost on the nature of the authority granted and its connection to the constitutional competence of the officials or bodies authorized to exercise discretionary power can provide a path to reinvigorating separation of powers protections.

Playing with science: Sexual citizenship and the Roman Catholic Church counter-narratives in Slovenia and Croatia

Synopsis The article deals with the process of the “secularization” of the Roman Catholic Church and its attempts to secure exclusionary patriarchal and traditional values and interpretations in the context of issues pertaining to sexual citizenship. Taking two case studies as examples – the recent Family Code debate in Slovenia and the Health Education in Croatia – it shows how the Church and its satellite civil society organizations increasingly refrain from using “biblical discourse”, substituting it with what appears as a rational, scientific discourse molded into reassuring and populist common-sense statements. In such a way, the Church is secularizing its discourse in order to “clericalize” society. Furthermore, it is successfully reinventing the issues of family and marriage as an ideological battleground of contemporary cultural wars in post-socialist societies, constituting gays and lesbians as the outsiders of the nation.

Crime as social excess

Gabriel Tarde, along with Durkheim and others, set the foundations for what is today a common-sense statement in social science: crime is a social phenomenon. However, the questions about what social is and what kind of social phenomenon crime is remain alive. Tarde’s writings have answers for both of these capital and interdependent problems and serve to renew our view of them. The aim of this article is to reconstruct Tarde’s definition of crime in terms of genus and specific difference, exploring his criminology as a case of his general sociology. This procedure shows that Tarde succeeded in creating a comprehensive theory of crime and criminals founded not only on his most well-known concept, imitation, but also on his equally important concepts of invention, opposition, social logic and social teleology. For Tarde, crime is a complex phenomenon related to criminal inventions, criminal propagations, the production of penal laws, the execution of controls and punishments, and the collective reactions to all these.

Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World

Philosophy is facing a serious crisis, but no one cares. When German Idealism, Existentialism, and Marxism allied with Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Cultural History, and Literature Studies in the early 20th century, all attempts at conducting philosophy in a style similar to that of the scientists got expelled from the High Church of Philosophy. The creation of the Wykeham Professorship in Hermeneutics (formerly: Logic) at Oxford and the Stanford Chair of Textual NonPresence (formerly: Methodology of Science) are wellknown indicators of these, by now, historical developments. The best philosophical work since then is to be found in the history of philosophy—if one is lucky. One cannot help but wondering what turn philosophy would have taken if someone had picked up the revolutionary developments in logic and mathematics in the 1920s and directed them towards philosophy. Maybe there would still be logic courses in philosophy departments? Who knows? Recently a monograph has appeared which seems to ignore the respiratory epicycles of this modern philosophical slumber completely (and rightly so). Rudolf Carnap, a young German philosopher who is working at the University of Vienna, has the chutzpah to conceive a logischer Aufbau der Welt—a logical structure of the world—as if nothing had happened in philosophy in the last 80 years or so. Well, not much has happened indeed. If only a book like that had been published back then! Carnap’s main aim is to argue for the following thesis: give him any meaningful sentence from natural language or science; then this sentence can be reformulated in a precisely delineated conceptual framework of primitive expressions, exact definitions, and logical and mathematical rules. In fact, there are several possible choices for such frameworks, each one serving a different purpose, but what all of them have in common is that the hidden logical structure of the original sentence will become completely transparent through reformulation. That the target sentence is required to be nothing than a much more precise restatement of the original sentence means that both sentences ought to have the same truth conditions, by the laws of nature and by linguistic convention. Accordingly, each concept from natural language or science will have to be reconstructed in terms of a formally purified concept that has necessarily the same extension as its informal counterpart. This type of translation is possible, or so the thesis says, but it needs the application of logical and mathematical methods as the ones developed by Frege and Russell a long time ago. Of course, these authors have been forgotten by philosophers long since, but in light of Carnap’s book I urge people to reconsider their work: it is worth the effort, even though it means doing the unthinkable, that is, to learn some mathematics before one can philosophize. How does Carnap argue for his revolutionary claim? By concrete example. He erects a particular conceptual system and sketches how both common sense statements and scientific hypotheses may be reformulated within it. The conceptual system he chooses for the sake of demonstration is one that takes elementary first-person descriptions of immediate sense experience as its starting point: merely on the basis of logical concepts, mathematical concepts, and a binary concept of recollected resemblance between total experiences at a time, Carnap wants to express statements about sensory qualities, subjective temporal H. Leitgeb (&) Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: hannes.leitgeb@bristol.ac.uk

Research publications in the field of health: omission of hypotheses and presentation of common-sense conclusions

Medical literature should consist of knowledge applicable to professional education; nevertheless, the profusion of articles in databases provokes disquiet among students. The authors considered the premise that scientific production in the field of health follows a mechanical description of phenomena without the clarity of motivating questions. The aim was to interpret material from expert reports, applied by medical students to analyze articles from renowned journals. This research project was exploratory, searching for latent meanings regarding methodological problems in a sample of papers. It was performed in a Brazilian medical school. The sample was intentionally built, consisting of articles related to original research in the field of health, published over the previous five years. The results came from text content analysis, performed by a professor and his medical students. (1) Failure to state a hypothesis is an equivocal practice: articles did not show clarity of hypothesis to demonstrate that their authors had epistemological knowledge of the methods chosen. (2) There is a certain belief that in normal scientific practice, hypotheses are unnecessary: studies without explicit hypotheses led to suppositions that they merely repeat dominant models. (3) Presentation of common sense as scientific conclusions: research brings together what would have mobilized the researchers initially. Absence of formal hypotheses leaves scientific production vulnerable when put under epistemological discussion. Conclusions from scientific articles are often confounded with common-sense statements. Quantitative research is suggested, for studying the frequency of occurrence of these dubious methodological points.

A representação das palavras contabilidade, custos e investimento para os universitários e profissionais da área econômica/financeira

Considera-se que os profissionais da área da Contabilidade e áreas afins devam compreender os termos empregados na área contábil como requisito necessário para o exercício profissional. Pretendeu-se verificar a visão dos estudantes da área e suas representações dos termos contabilidade, custos e investimento. A perspectiva teórico-metodológica, orientadora desta pesquisa, é a Teoria das Representações Sociais, podendo ser entendida como assertivas do senso comum que se elaboram coletivamente nas interações sociais, sujeito-sujeito e sujeito-grupo para dar conta da realidade. Foram coletados 566 depoimentos em diversas regiões do Brasil. Como resultado, verificou-se que não existe consenso na representação social dos termos estudados e se destacaram quatro classes de pensamento. Pode ser observado que os alunos de Contabilidade formavam um bloco que se polarizava à representação dos alunos de Administração e Marketing. Também se posicionam, distintamente, os alunos de primeiros e segundos anos de graduação em relação aos alunos de terceiros e quartos anos. Constatou-se que não existe consenso para os termos investigados. Esta análise tende a mostrar que o primeiro grupo demonstra relacionar os termos à gestão, enquanto o segundo ao operacional. O terceiro demonstra relacionamento ao método contábil e o quarto à fenomenologia contábil. Esses quatro aspectos estão contidos na epistemologia da contabilidade, mas aparecem valorizados de maneiras distintas para os grupos.

REASONING ABOUT THEORY ADEQUACY. A NEW SOLUTION TO THE QUALIFICATION PROBLEM

One of the main problems in commonsense reasoning is the qualification problem, ie. the fact that the number of qualifications for most general commonsense statements is virtually infinite. In this paper we argue that a solution to this problem should be based on a (meta) conjecture that the theory used to reason about the world contains all the necessary information. We also show that this theory adequacy conjecture can be made before the application of any of the formalisms proposed in the past, eg. circumscription. Finally, we present a formalization of the solution proposed using contexts and circumscription and use it to solve McCarthy's Glasgow-London-Moscow example.

Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States by Peter Douglas Feaver

216 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control ofNuclear 'Weapons in the United States. By Peter Douglas Feaver. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. xviii+ 261; notes, index. $34.50. Historical and analytical works abound about the development of nuclear weapons, proposed strategies, and their impact on interna­ tional relations. Few exist about their control. Peter Douglas Feaver has remedied this lack, to a degree, hampered as he was by the large number of still-classified documents. It is a story of the tension between civilian and military authorities over who shall have custody and control of nuclear weapons. Elected leaders insist on the right to decide if these explosives will be used (termed assertive control), while the military brass want to be as free as possible to respond to enemy action (termed delegative control). Within the democratic ideal of a military that is subordinate to civilian leaders, the tension also involves the technological requirement by civilians that nuclear weapons never explode unintentionally, and the military’s insistence that they always detonate when employed. Assertive control of a weapon was a new concept in 1945. It succeeded initially because Harry Truman sensed that the A-bomb was different from other weapons: it had symbolic value. Indeed, he came to argue that it should not be used again, a position the armed services found preposterous. Time and events eroded strong assertive control. The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1949, inspiring much debate about the need for a rapid response to an attack—or even a preventive strike. As the stockpile increased dra­ matically in the 1950s, including an array of tactical weapons and weapons at sea, it became impractical to keep them under civilian control. “Control” was therefore redefined; the military would have custody in most cases, while civilians retained the authority to direct their use. At the same time, the military acquired technological competence, undercutting one of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) strong suits, while Berlin crises, the Korean War, and other hot events in the Cold War provided strong arguments for having weapons at the ready. Dwight Eisenhower’s style of leadership encouraged more delegative control, and as more and more finished weapons were delivered to Europe, Asia, the navy at sea, and to stateside bases, the “AEC gradually went from controller to auditor to mere supplier” (p. 136). The Cuban missile crisis alerted John Kennedy to the need for greater assertive control, which by this time was exceedingly difficult. Technology, however, provided a means to reaffirm civilian leader­ ship. In the early 1950s, environmental sensing devices (ESDs) were developed to block unauthorized or accidental explosions. These prevented the weapon from arming unless it experienced the accel­ eration, spin, or free fall that were expected in the weapon’s planned TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 217 use. By the 1960s, ESDs led to the construction of permissive action links (PALs), mechanical or electromagnetic locks on the warheads. These use-control devices generally required five or more numbers to be entered; they grew quite sophisticated and eventually incorporated locks that would stay closed after a few failed attempts to open them (by a terrorist, for example). The numbers are widely believed to be held only by the president, but in fact they are found at various levels of command. PALs are now deployed on all weapons except those at sea (where communications from headquarters might be impossible), and the PAL concept has been extended to delivery vehicles, such as aircraft and missiles, to prevent dropping or bring even unarmed warheads. The brst third of Guarding the Guardians is a political science essay, with a conventional amount ofjargon, on the theory of civilian control of nuclear weapons. Feaver advances several propositions that form his model of control, a model that frankly seems to consist of commonsense statements. The rest of the book is a history of custodial policy from the administration of Truman to that of George Bush, with far greater emphasis on the earlier years. While this monograph is intrinsically interesting, its focus is not on technology, and the discussion of PALs and the trade-off in constructing weapons that always...

The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times by Glenn T. Seaborg, Benjamin S. Loeb

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 217 use. By the 1960s, ESDs led to the construction of permissive action links (PALs), mechanical or electromagnetic locks on the warheads. These use-control devices generally required five or more numbers to be entered; they grew quite sophisticated and eventually incorporated locks that would stay closed after a few failed attempts to open them (by a terrorist, for example). The numbers are widely believed to be held only by the president, but in fact they are found at various levels of command. PALs are now deployed on all weapons except those at sea (where communications from headquarters might be impossible), and the PAL concept has been extended to delivery vehicles, such as aircraft and missiles, to prevent dropping or bring even unarmed warheads. The brst third of Guarding the Guardians is a political science essay, with a conventional amount ofjargon, on the theory of civilian control of nuclear weapons. Feaver advances several propositions that form his model of control, a model that frankly seems to consist of commonsense statements. The rest of the book is a history of custodial policy from the administration of Truman to that of George Bush, with far greater emphasis on the earlier years. While this monograph is intrinsically interesting, its focus is not on technology, and the discussion of PALs and the trade-off in constructing weapons that always work when wanted and never work when unauthorized leaves the reader wishing for more. Lawrence Badash Dr. Badash is professor of history of science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His primary interests are the history of nuclear physics and the nuclear arms race. He is the author of Kapitza, Rutherford, and the Kremlin (Yale University Press, 1985) and Scientists and the Development ofNuclear Weapons (Humanities Press, forthcoming). The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times. By Glenn T. Seaborg, with Benjamin S. Loeb. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Pp. xx + 268; illustrations, notes, glossary, appendix, bibliography, index. $39.95. The story in this work is not a happy one. Based on a voluminous journal kept by Democrat Glenn T. Seaborg, the book spans the years the author chaired the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) during the Richard M. Nixon administration (1969—71). It is the last in a trilogy of semiautobiographical volumes documenting key events while he served as commission chairman (1962—71). Unlike his earlier books, which dealt with arms control (Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban [Berkeley, 1981] and Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in theJohnson Years [Lexington, Mass., 1987]), this one is broader in scope and is less upbeat. Throughout, Seaborg’s concern with the Republican admin­ istration’s handling of science and technology policy is evident. 218 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Although he was not at the center of many policy decisions (Nixon told him he was more interested in his technical judgment than his political judgment), Seaborg’s AEC chairmanship placed him in a position to observe the changing and often tumultuous times of that era and the troubles that accompanied them. The development of nuclear energy for peaceful and for weapons purposes as well as Seaborg’s continuing interest in arms control highlight the first third of the book. The commission’s peaceful nuclear projects under its “Plowshare” program seem naive in today’s environmentally concerned context. Seaborg provides an insider’s view on the massive projects to use nuclear explosions to dig deep­ water harbors, release natural gas from embedded rock formations, and possibly to construct a new transisthmian canal. His judgment that Plowshare died during the Nixon years due to a lack of support rather than merely dwindling budgets is an inadvertent tribute to the growing public concern over the environment. If there was one issue above all that helped dampen the short love affair Americans had with nuclear energy, it was the subject of radioactivity and the standards the government used tojustify its use. It came to a head during this period through the revelations, however misguided, of scientists Earnest Sternglass, John W. Gofman, and Arthur R. Tamplin. By challenging the government’s standards, they raised the nuclear issue to a level of public discontent...

Diets for Gastrointestinal Disorders

To the Editor.— I wish to express my very strong support for the opinions of Dr. Robert M. Donaldson, Jr., in his description of the muddle of the diets that are prescribed for patients with gastrointestinal disorders (225:1243, 1973). I hope that Dr. Donaldson's common sense statements about the infrequency with which specific diets are needed will be given much greater publicity. The ritualistic and arbitrary diet sheets that have been prescribed for patients with gastrointestinal symptoms have been in vogue much too long. I believe, however, that Dr. Donaldson's efforts should be supplemented by calling attention to the great need for reviewing with patients their pattern of eating, rather than giving rigid instructions about what to eat. Too little attention is paid to the need for proper spacing of meals, the bad results of skipping meals and then eating too much at one time, eating too fast, and the

Remarks on Realism

Positivists and phenomenalists of all sorts maintain, and long have maintained, some variant of the following thesis concerning the existence of physical objects: Such statements as ‘There is (exists) now a wall behind my back’ are synonymous with a class of statements of which the following is representative ‘If I shall turn my head (have certain kinesthetic experiences), then I shall also have the visual experience called ‘seeing a wall'.’ This amounts to proposing what many of us call a philosophical analysis of ‘exist’ or, more precisely, of one meaning of ‘exist'; for the thesis implies that this verb, in the sense in which we use it when we say ‘This wall exists', is dispensable in the sense of being definable. Realists, who oppose the thesis, hold that ‘exist', in the sense mentioned, is what I would call an undefined descriptive predicate; and then they go on to recommend that instead of defining existence in terms of what we (shall) see, we had better say that we shall, if we turn, see a wall because there is a wall (and because we have put ourselves in a position to perceive it). Thus one could say, perhaps, that the realists wish to convert the positivistic position; instead of founding existence upon experience, they want to found experience (among other things) upon existence. To be sure, this is but a bare and crudely formulated schema of an issue that has been argued for a long time. Also, contemporary analysts for the most part do not discuss the issue directly; they give their attention to preliminary and, therefore, more fundamental questions. Like experienced chess players, who know to which characteristic situations in the middle game certain openings will eventually lead, we try to convince each other of the excellence of our respective openings. There is, in particular, one fundamental or opening move that is now widely discussed and which, I believe, most of us examine with a view to the position in which we shall find ourselves—in the middle game—with respect to the realism issue. I refer to the clarification of the relations between meaning and verification or, to put it the way positivists do, to the formulation of an adequate meaning criterion. Let me indicate the connection between these questions and the crude schema I have given for the realism issue. According to current garden varieties of positivism, a statement is (empirically) meaningful if it is verifiable by (future) experience. ‘There is a wall behind my back’ is, in this view, meaningful because it is synonymous with a class of statements each of which is verifiable by future experience. More pointedly, the familiar common sense statements about the existence of physical objects are considered as meaningful because they are verifiable. This has again the subjectivistic ring realists dislike so much; so they may again be inclined to convert the positivistic position, if only tentatively and because they feel that a piece of realistic common sense would thus be preserved. But to make the conversion is to say that ‘There is a wall behind my back’ is verifiable because it is meaningful.

TUMULT AND SHOUTING

Summary.— Varying conditions entail a variation in methods. Since there is no one best method, choose those elements of the different methods that will best fit your conditions. A common sense statement of facts. Ed.