Neither Logical Empiricism nor Vitalism, but Organicism: What the Philosophy of Biology Was

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse

The reported speech evidential particle in Lamjung Yolmo

Grammatically encoded evidentials that marks ‘reported speech’, ‘hearsay’ or ‘quotation’ are attested in languages from a variety of families, but often receive cursory description. In this paper I give a detailed account of the reported speech particle ló in Lamjung Yolmo, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. This particle is used when the speaker is reporting previously communicated information. This information may be translated from another language, may be a non-verbal interaction turn or may have been an incomplete utterance. Speakers choose to use the reported speech particle in interaction, and the pragmatic effect is usually to add authority to the propositional content. Detailed description of the use of reported speech evidentials in interaction across different languages will provide a better understanding of the range of their function

Language documentation and division: Bridging the digital divide

Contemporary language documentation workflow is a largely digital process. While this has had many benefits for how linguists undertake language documentation projects, it has also lead to a disparity between how the process is conceptualised by academic researchers, and how it is conceptualised by the speakers of endangered languages. In this paper I discuss the nature of this disparity, and illustrate this with my own experience of working with speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages in Nepal. In my own research I have incorporated ongoing discussion regarding digital methods into my working relationships with participants, but other researchers have made digital training a specific feature of their research methodology. I discuss two projects that provide positive models for this kind of digital gap bridging. The first is the Iltyem-iltyem sign website and the second is the Aikuma language documentation phone application. After discussion of these positive developments in digital outreach I discuss some of the challenges that we still face in ensuring that what we do is engaging and relevant for the communities we work with. This discussion is not only relevant for language documentation researchers, but for all who work in the digital humanities, as we need to be more aware of the different needs and levels of digital education of different communities.   L'acheminement du travail de documentation des langues contemporaines est en grande partie un processus numérique. Bien que cela a représenté de nombreux avantages en ce qui concerne la façon dont les linguistes entreprennent les projets de documentation des langues, cela a aussi entraîné une inégalité entre notre compréhension du processus de documentation et la compréhension des locuteurs de langues menacées. Dans cet article, je discute de la nature de cette inégalité, et j'illustre ceci par ma propre expérience de travail avec des locuteurs des langues tibéto-burmanes au Népal. Dans mes propres recherches, j'ai intégré une discussion continue au sujet des méthodes numériques dans mes relations de travail avec les participants, mais pour d'autres chercheurs, la formation numérique est une caractéristique précise de leur méthodologie de recherche. Je discute de deux projets qui offrent un modèle positif afin de combler ces lacunes numériques. Le premier est le site Web des signes Iltyem-iltyem et le deuxième est l'application de téléphonie de documentation du langage Aikuma. Après avoir discuté de ces développements positifs en matière de diffusion numérique, je discute de certains des défis auxquels nous sommes encore confrontés pour nous assurer que ce que nous faisons est stimulant et pertinent pour les collectivités avec lesquelles nous travaillons. Cette discussion est non seulement pertinente pour les chercheurs en documentation des langues, mais pour toutes les personnes qui travaillent dans le domaine des sciences humaines numériques, car nous devons être plus conscients des différents besoins et niveaux en matière d'éducation numérique des collectivités avec lesquelles nous travaillons

Evidentiality in Lamjung Yolmo

Lamjung Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodish branch spoken in Nepal. Like related languages it has a verbal system that includes evidential distinctions. In this paper I look at the role of these evidentials in interaction, and in relation to other features of grammar. These features include their relationship to events, interaction with subject person, endopathic verbs and negative polarity. I also look at constructions with no overt evidential marking, and evidential elision, to give a more rounded representation of the role of evidentiality for speakers of Lamjung Yolmo, and explore its role in audience perception of utterances.Copyright Information: Copyright vested in the author; released under Creative Commons Attribution Licenc

A Portfolio View of a Microsoft Enterprise Architecture

An enterprise architecture (EA) establishes the organization-wide roadmap to achieve an organization’s mission through optimal performance of its core business processes within an efficient information technology (IT) environment. Simply stated, enterprise architectures are “blueprints” for systematically and completely defining an organization’s current (baseline) or desired (target) environment (Schekkerman, 2011). If defined, maintained, and implemented effectively, these blueprints assist in optimizing the interdependencies and interrelationships among the business operations of the enterprise and the underlying IT that support these operations. It has shown that without a complete and enforced EA (Strategic) Business Units, the enterprise run the risk of buying and building systems that are duplicative, incompatible, and unnecessarily costly to maintain and interface. While all the perspectives are key elements of the enterprise architecture, the focus of this project is scoped to three EA perspectives. The first two perspectives are EA’s application and technology architectures, their concepts and key patterns for construction of service oriented and message-based applications that exploit the emerging technology of asynchronous communication services. The third perspective covered is EA’s implementation perspective, which includes the design, development, setup, deployment, and administration of enterprise systems that enable enterprise architecture and modern agile software development and project management

Mapmaking for Language Documentation and Description

This paper introduces readers to mapmaking as part of language documentation. We discuss some of the benefits and ethical challenges in producing good maps, drawing on linguistic geography and GIS literature. We then describe current tools and practices that are useful when creating maps of linguistic data, particularly using locations of field sites to identify language areas/boundaries. We demonstrate a basic workflow that uses CartoDB, before demonstrating a more complex workflow involving Google Maps and TileMill. We also discuss presentation and archiving of mapping products. The majority of the tools identified and used are open source or free to use

Superorganismality and caste differentiation as points of no return:how the major evolutionary transitions were lost in translation

Four decades of sociobiology have left us with multiple superorganism concepts that are mutually inconsistent and uninformative on how superorganismality originates. These ambiguities can be traced to a broadened concept ofeusociality that denied colonies with physically differentiated castes the special statusthat inspired August Weismann, William Morton Wheeler, Ronald A. Fisher and Julian S. Huxley to consider them as organism-analogs. The heuristic definitions of superorganismality that began to emerge in the 1980s have precluded proper appreciation of which social insect lineages made irreversible evolutionary transitions to superorganismality, andwhich did not. This has impeded straightforward connections between inclusive fitness theory and the major evolutionary transitions towards higher organizational complexity. We evaluate the history by which these inconsistencies accumulated, develop a common causeapproach for understanding the origins of all eukaryotic transitions in hierarchical complexity, and argue that they are directly comparable in inclusive fitness terms and do not require potential internal conflicts to be resolved first. We conclude that recurring controversies over the status of inclusive fitness theory emanate from the arbitrarily defined sociobiological concepts of superorganismality and eusociality, not from the theory itself. The sociobiology-inspired definition of eusociality lumps a diverse spectrum of social systems into a single category, which causes fundamental differences in commitment to social life to be overlooked. We argue that behavioral categories need to be defined and delineated from the presence or absence of distinct traits whose evolutionary origin and maintenance can be explained, and suggest that it is meaningless to ask how eusociality and other categories lacking rigorous definition evolved. Early 20th century naturalists and geneticists realized that the key traits for social insects are reproductive altruism and the irreversible acquisition of an unmated worker caste. Hamilton’s rule is almost universally accepted as the best approximate algorithm for understanding the evolution and maintenance of condition-dependent reproductive altruism, and can also be used to explain evolutionary transitions to unconditional differentiation of permanently unmated castes. The origin and elaboration of somatic tissues in multicellular eukaryotes can be understood in a fully analogous way