Pluto and the Platypus: An Odd Ball and an Odd Duck — On Classificatory Norms

Some astronomers believe that we have discovered that Pluto is not a planet. I contest this assessment. Recent discoveries of trans-Neptunian Pluto-sized objects do not require that we exclude Pluto from the planets. But the obvious alternative, that classificatory revision is a matter of arbitrary choice, is also unpalatable. I argue that this classificatory controversy — which I compare to the controversy about the classification of the platypus — illustrates how our classificatory practices are laden with normative commitments of a distinctive kind. I argue that the “norm-ladenness” of classification has philosophically significant ramifications for how we think about scientific disputes and debates in the metaphysics of classification such as the monism/pluralism debate

Trusting the Scientific Community: The Development and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Trust in Science

Trust in the scientific enterprise — in science as an institution — is arguably important to individuals’ and societies’ well-being. Although some measures of public trust in science exist, the recipients of that trust are often ambiguous between trusting individual scientists and the scientific community at large. We argue that more precision would be beneficial — specifically, targeting public trust of the scientific community at large — and describe the development and validation of such an instrument: the Scientific Community Trust Index (SCTI). We show the results of initial field testing to establish instrument reliability and validity. We then demonstrate certain advantages of the SCTI against other measures of trust and deference, and present correlations between the SCTI and participant scores in two trust-in-science scenarios. Our results suggest that the SCTI is a useful and compact tool for measuring public trust in the scientific community

Resilient Understanding: The Value of Seeing for Oneself

The primary aim of this paper is to argue that the value of understanding derives in part from a kind of subjective stability of belief that we call epistemic resilience. We think that this feature of understanding has been overlooked by recent work, and we think it’s especially important to the value of understanding for social cognitive agents such as us. We approach the concept of epistemic resilience via the idea of the experience of epistemic ownership and argue that the former concept has Platonic pedigree. Contrary to longstanding exegetical tradition, we think that Plato solves the “Meno problem” with an appeal to the epistemic resilience characteristic of understanding, not the well-groundedness characteristic of canonical cases of propositional knowledge. Finally, we apply our discussion to the case of science outreach and the challenge of global warming skepticism and conclude with directions for future research

One-instanton test of the exact prepotential for N=2 SQCD coupled to a symmetric tensor hypermultiplet

Using the ADHM instanton calculus, we evaluate the one-instanton contribution to the low-energy effective prepotential of N=2 supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory with N_F flavors of hypermultiplets in the fundamental representation and a hypermultiplet in the symmetric rank two tensor representation. For N_F<N-2, when the theory is asymptotically free, our result is compared with the exact solution that was obtained using M-theory and we find complete agreement.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, no figure

Three essays on nonwage compensation

An employment relationship consists of many dimensions other than monetary compensation. Textbook economic theory implies employers and employees will agree upon an efficient level of such nonwage compensation based on an employee's preferences and the employer's cost. At the same time, most types of nonwage compensation are set in a context of substantial regulation, legal restrictions, and other interventions. This dissertation investigates how regulatory intervention and other changes to the external environment affect firms' decisions regarding two types of nonwage compensation: workplace safety and employment mobility. Chapter One investigates how media coverage of employers caught violating workplace safety and health regulations affects future compliance. Using quasi-random variation in media coverage induced by a policy change at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), I find coverage about one employer leads to significantly higher compliance among other employers likely exposed to it. The results are most consistent with employers acting defensively to avoid their own future publicity. This work contributes to a growing literature investigating how providing information to stakeholders about sellers' quality leads to quality improvements. Chapter Two examines how workplaces respond to health and safety regulatory enforcement inspections. We first analyze the effects of randomized inspections on safety and business outcomes of inspected workplaces. We find inspections lead to significantly fewer injuries and have no detectable effect on business outcomes. We then attempt to identify the types of workplaces where inspections are more or less effective. Chapter Three investigates why employers have employees sign non-compete agreements (NCAs), which contractually limit where the employee can work in the event of a job separation. NCAs may solve hold-up problems that limit incentives to invest in transferable assets (e.g. general human capital). At the same time, NCAs may impose large costs on employees who sign them. We develop a model of how labor market conditions and liquidity constraints can jointly determine the decision to include an NCA in a hiring contract. We find strong support for the model's predictions using a survey we conducted among employers in the high-end hair salon industry, one in which NCAs are a large and growing phenomenon

Latin American-United States Security Relations and the Power Asymmetry Divide

Security relations between Latin American and the United States are generally well explained by hegemonic stability theory. Succinctly stated, hegemonic stability theory explains that in systems with a hegemonic power there is a greater likelihood of security cooperation. This is because a hegemon provides public goods, such as a stable currency or security from outside interference, and in turn, the less powerful states acknowledge the leadership of the dominant state. When compared to other regions it is readily apparent that the U.S. and Latin America do not have major security issues on the level of East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, or even Europe. However, a review of the literature indicates a persistent gap between U.S. and Latin American responses to security related issues such as state sovereignty, arms trade, humanitarian intervention, the illegal narcotics trade, and technology transfer. Hegemonic stability explains the relatively peaceful relations between the U.S. and Latin America; however, it fails to explain the undercurrent of distrust. This study focuses on the degree of power asymmetry between the hegemon and weaker states in the system to explain why the same hegemonic system may create greater levels of cooperation during different periods. A hegemonic system by definition contains a certain level of power asymmetry, however this study asks the question: When power asymmetry becomes more extreme does it erode security cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America? To explore this issue empirical evidence is gathered from the last century of Latin American-U.S. security relations. The ebb and flow of security cooperation is analyzed and reveals that broad patterns in the system emerge over time demonstrating that as the power of the U.S. increases, the likelihood of U.S. leaders to commit to unilateral actions in Latin America increases. During the same time, the likelihood of Latin American leaders to be more sensitive to U.S. policies and search for alternatives to U.S. dominance also increases. Although U.S. hegemony contributes to greater security cooperation as hegemonic stability theory predicts, when U.S. power reaches higher levels compared to Latin American, the gains of hegemonic stability deteriorate and security cooperation becomes more difficult. The dissertation contributes to international relations scholarship in two important ways. First, it demands that when hegemonic stability theory is applied it cannot be assumed that all levels of power asymmetry create security cooperation equally. Second, it applies formal international relations theory to Latin American-U.S. relations, a geographical area in which comparative political theory is more commonly utilized

Instanton effects in supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theories

We investigate nonperturbative effects due to instantons in N = 2 supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills models, with the aim of testing the exact results predicted for these models. In two separate semiclassical calculations we obtain the one-instanton contribution to the Higgs condensate u(_3) = (TrA(^3)) and to the prepotential F. Comparing our results with the exact predictions, we find complete agreement except when the number of flavours of fundamental matter hypermultiplets, N(_f), takes certain values. The source of the u(_3) discrepancy is an ambiguity in the parameterization of the hyperelliptic curves from which the exact predictions are derived when N(_f) ≥ N. This ambiguity can easily be fixed using the results of instanton calculations. The discrepancy associated with T appears in the finite N(_f) = 2N models. For these models we are unable to modify the curves to agree with the instanton calculations when N > 3. Our one-instanton calculation of the prepotential is facilitated by a multi-instanton calculus which we construct, starting from the general solution of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin and Manin. Our calculus comprises: (i) the super-multi-instanton background, (ii) the su persymmetric multi-instanton action and (iii) the supersymmetric semiclassical collective coordinate measure. Our calculus has application to supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with gauge group U(N) or SU(_N). We employ our instanton calculus to derive results at arbitrary k-instanton levels. In N =2 supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory, we derive a closed form expression for the A;-instanton contribution to the prepotential. This amounts to a solution, in quadratures, of the low-energy physics of the theory, obtained from first principles. In supersymmetric SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, we use our calculus to investigate multi-instanton contributions to higher-derivative terms in the Wilsonian effective action. Using a scaling argument, based on general properties of the SU(2) k-instanton action and measure, we show that in the finite, massless N = 2 and N = 4 models, all k-instanton contributions to the next-to- leading higher-derivative terms vanish. This confirms a nonperturbative nonrenormalization theorem due to Dine and Seiberg