Climate Change and Structural Emissions: Moral Obligations at the Individual Level

Given that mitigating climate change is a large-scale global issue, what obligations do individuals have to lower their personal carbon emissions? I survey recent suggestions by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Dale Jamieson and offer models for thinking about their respective approaches. I then present a third model based on the notion of structural violence. While the three models are not mutually incompatible, each one suggests a different focus for mitigating climate change. In the end, I agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that people have limited moral obligations to directly lower personal emissions, but I offer different reasons for this conclusion, namely that the structural arrangements of our lives place a limit on how much individuals can restrict their own emissions. Thus, individuals should focus their efforts on changing the systems instead, which will lead to lower emissions on a larger scale

Custom-engineered micro-habitats for characterizing rhizosphere interactions

The interactions amongst plants and microorganisms within the rhizosphere have a profound influence on global biogeochemical cycles, and a better understanding of these interactions will benefit society through improved climate change prediction, increased food security, and enhanced bioenergy production. However, the rhizosphere is one of the most complex and bio-diverse ecosystems on earth, making it difficult to parse apart specific interactions between species. This difficulty is compounded by the inability to directly visualize rhizosphere interactions through the soil. Additionally, conventional laboratory techniques do not offer real-time, high-resolution visualization or the proper environmental control to isolate and probe these interactions. A knowledge gap persists in how to design appropriate culturing platforms that allow researchers to collect spatially and temporally sensitive information about physical and chemical interactions in the rhizosphere. This dissertation addresses that gap by demonstrating the design and use of several custom-engineered micro-habitats in characterizing plant-microbe interactions. Specifically this thesis introduces novel protocols for culturing plants and microorganisms together in microfluidic platforms, pairing platforms to multi-modal imaging techniques with organelle scale resolution, and recreating the structural complexity of the rhizosphere in a microfluidic habitat. Not only does this thesis introduce novel engineered systems, but the work contained herein also goes beyond proof-of-concept experiments and demonstrates the ability of these platforms to generate hypotheses and answer outstanding biological questions

Modeling root system growth around obstacles

State-of-the-Art models of Root System Architecture (RSA) do not allow simulating root growth around rigid obstacles. Yet, the presence of obstacles can be highly disruptive to the root system. We grew wheat seedlings in sealed petri dishes without obstacle and in custom 3D-printed rhizoboxes containing obstacles. Time-lapse photography was used to reconstruct the wheat root morphology network. We used the reconstructed wheat root network without obstacle to calibrate an RSA model implemented in the R-SWMS software. The root network with obstacles allowed calibrating the parameters of a new function that models the influence of rigid obstacles on wheat root growth. Experimental results show that the presence of a rigid obstacle does not affect the growth rate of the wheat root axes, but that it does influence the root trajectory after the main axis has passed the obstacle. The growth recovery time, i.e. the time for the main root axis to recover its geotropism-driven growth, is proportional to the time during which the main axis grows along the obstacle. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons between experimental and numerical results show that the proposed model successfully simulates wheat RSA growth around obstacles. Our results suggest that wheat roots follow patterns that could inspire the design of adaptive engineering flow networks

Studies in Dhāraṇī Literature II: Pragmatics of Dhāraṇīs

This article is one of a series that reassesses the dhāraṇī texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The article seeks to examine dhāraṇī texts by using the linguistic tools of pragmatics, especially historical pragmatics, to assist the understanding of their statements. Rather than the meaning of the term dhāraṇī as a subject term, the domain of truth-conditional semantics, this paper examines statements in texts labelled dhāraṇī. Pragmatics examines meaning in context, and the categories of speech acts developed by Searle has been especially helpful in mapping out differences within such texts and the formalization of statements across texts. The grammaticalization of specific speech elements, especially interjections, in the context of mantra-dhāraṇīs is also discussed

“The Context Distinction: controversies over feminist philosophy of science”

The “context of discovery” and “context of justification” distinction has been used by Noretta Koertge, Elizabeth Anderson, Richmond Campbell, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson in debates over the legitimacy of feminist approaches to philosophy of science. Koertge uses the context distinction to argue against the possibility of gender, race, class and other social factors being epistemically relevant to knowledge formation. She contends that social factors belong in only the “context of discovery,” where research questions are chosen and pursued. She argues that such factors should be excluded from the “context of justification,” in which evidence for scientific claims is evaluated, to ensure against bias and political distortion. Since the basic assumptions of feminist epistemology violate this context distinction, Koertge argues that the approach of feminist epistemology is misguided. Elisabeth Anderson and Lynn Hankinson Nelson, among others, defend feminist epistemology against these charges. In this paper, I evaluate their defenses and show that in these debates the use of the context distinction is deeply ambiguous and so masks underlying disagreements about when and why philosophers should look to scientific practice and about the aims of philosophy of science more generally. Traditionally, distinctions have been used to dissolve puzzles by showing how the puzzles reduce to shared assumptions, or they have been used to open up a debate to allow for further possibilities. However, in this case, Koertge uses the context distinction to close down the conversation by barring certain approaches, thereby obscuring points of true disagreement about the nature of justification. Nonetheless, Koertge raises important questions that have been too quickly set aside by Anderson and Nelson. I argue that the use of the context distinction masks underlying debates about naturalism and the nature of justification. These issues about what constitutes justification are not essentially feminist, nor do they necessarily turn on views of values and ideology, or Koertge’s worries about biased inquiry. Rather, they depend on determining what method we should use to develop an account of justification: Establish a priori meta-principles, or look in part to scientific practice? The distinction also masks underlying disagreement about the nature of justification: Will we find one universal account of justification (such as falsificationism), or will different episodes in science require unique accounts of how evidence supports a scientific claim? Examining these debates can be fruitful for feminist epistemologists; a disentangling of these ambiguities highlights important concerns that need to be met as those in science studies strive to map how social factors get legitimately incorporated into the evaluation of knowledge claims