Fiction and Thought Experiment - A Case Study

Many philosophers are very sanguine about the cognitive contributions of fiction to science and philosophy. I focus on a case study: Ichikawa and Jarvis’s account of thought experiments in terms of everyday fictional stories. As far as the contribution of fiction is not sui generis, processing fiction often will be parasitic on cognitive capacities which may replace it; as far as it is sui generis, nothing guarantees that fiction is sufficiently well-behaved to abide by the constraints of scientific and philosophical discourse, not even by the minimum requirements of conceptual and logical coherence

Governing land: reflections from IFPRI research

"Land is still among the most important assets of the rural population in the developing world. Land resources are governed by a variety of tenure systems based on statutory, customary, or religious law. At the same time, many national, subnational, and local institutions administer the application and enforcement of these laws, relying on a wide variety of policies, rules, and regulations that promote different practices for using and managing land and land-based resources. IFPRI contributes to land policy debates by demonstrating the importance of land policy and its impact on rural people. This occurs across multiple dimensions, including people's livelihoods, the sustainability of the resource base, and the effectiveness of the institutions that govern land. This brief summarizes findings of relevant IFPRI research on land management and governance to promote strategies and policies targeted toward the achievement of gender equity, poverty reduction, and sustainable resource management." Author's SummaryGovernance, Poverty reduction, Sustainability, Gender equality, Gender, Environmental management, Devolution,

Biting the bullet: how to secure access to drylands resources for multiple users

"Close to one billion people worldwide depend directly upon the drylands for their livelihoods. Because of their climatic conditions and political and economic marginalization drylands also have some of the highest incidents of poverty. Pastoral and sedentary production systems coexist in these areas and both very often use common property arrangements to manage access and use of natural resources. Despite their history of complementary interactions, pastoralists and sedentary farmers are increasingly faced with conflicting claims over land and other natural resources. Past policy interventions and existing regulatory frameworks have not been able to offer lasting solutions to the problems related to land tenure and resource access; problems between the multiple and differentiated drylands resource users, as part of broader concerns over resource degradation and the political and economic marginalization of the drylands. This paper discusses enduring tension in efforts to secure rights in drylands. On the one hand are researchers and practitioners who advocate for statutory law as the most effective guarantor of rights, especially of group rights. On the other side are those who underscore the complexity of customary rights and the need to account for dynamism and flexibility in drylands environments in particular. It explores innovative examples of dealing with secure access to resources and comes to the conclusion that process, rather than content, should be the focus of policy makers. Any attempt to secure access for multiple users in variable drylands environments should identify frameworks for conflict resolution, in a negotiated manner, crafting rules from the ground upwards, in addition to a more generalized or generic identification of rights. Elite capture and exclusion of women and young people continue to pose significant challenges in such decentralized processes. For rights to be meaningfully secured there is need to identify the nature and sources of threats that create insecurities " Author's AbstractProperty rights, Natural resources, Land tenure, Customary rights, Secure access, Environmental management, Devolution, Gender,

Stochastic Motion of an Open Bosonic String

We show that the classical stochastic motion of an open bosonic string leads to the same results as the standard first quantization of this system. For this, the diffusion constant governing the process has to be proportional to \alpha ', the Regge slope parameter, which is the only constant, along with the velocity of light, needed to describe the motion of a string.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. D, 9 pages RevTex, reference removed, no picture

‘Mais la fantaisie est-elle un privilège des seuls poètes?’ Schlick on a ‘Sinnkriterium’ for Thought Experiments

Ever since the term ‘thought experiment’ was coined by Ørsted, philosophers have struggled with the question of how thought experiments manage to provide knowledge. Ernst Mach’s seminal contribution has eclipsed other approaches in the Austrian tradition. I discuss one of these neglected approaches. Faced with the challenge of how to reconcile his empiricist position with his use of thought experiments, Moritz Schlick proposed the following ‘Sinnkriterium’: a thought experiment is meaningful if it allows to answer a question under discussion by imagining the experiences that would confi rm that the thought experimental scenario is actual. I trace this view throughout three exemplary thought experiments of Schlick’s

I\u27ll Try Anything Once : Using the Conceptual Framework of Children\u27s Human Rights Norms in the United States

International human rights law provides norms, concepts, and standards of immediate and practical value to attorneys for court-involved children in the United States. The conceptual framework of the comprehensive rights of the child is broadly congruent with, or closely related to, the strongest aspects of US. constitutional law and practice. The expansive language of children\u27s human rights offers an historic opportunity: new tools and a more comprehensive context in which to change how we think about young people in conflict with the law, children in state custody, and children in related legal settings. The challenge is to use these fresh substantive concepts as terms of reference in our work and our thinking, as a prelude and incentive to integrating the instructive nature of children\u27s international law with the interpretation of our own laws and constitutional traditions. The adoption of the discourse itself can encourage and influence future implementation of enforceable domestic and international law that expands the rights and well-being of children