Holism and Understanding Sustainability

Epistemological holism without linguistic holism

Epistemological holism is usually associated with linguistic holism, and sometimes the latter is inferred from the former. In this chapter I shall show how the view that the sense of a sentence be its immediate argumental role, though it conforms to the requirement of compositionality and hence involves a denial of linguistic holism, is perfectly compatible with epistemological holism. Thus, by...

Population and Sustainability : Understanding Population , Environment , and

The triple challenge of rapid population growth, declining agricultural productivity, and natural resource degradation are not isolated from one another; they are intimately related. However, strategic planning and development programming tend to focus on individual sectors such as the environment, agriculture, and population; they do not explicitly take into account the compatibilities and inc...

Understanding Sustainability as Knowledge Practice

Semantic holism

A bivalent valuation is snt iff sound (standard PC inference rules take truths only into truths) and non-trivial (not all wffs are assigned the same truth value). Such a valuation is normal iff classically correct for each connective. Carnap knew that there were nion-normal snt valuations of PC, and that the gap they revealed between syntax and semantics could be "jumped" as follows. Let VALS.t...

Holism and Human History

This paper uses a systems-theoretic model to structure an account of human history. According to the model, a process, after its beginning and early development, often reaches a critical stage where it encounters some limitation. If the limitation is overcome, development does not face a comparable challenge until a second critical juncture is reached, where obstacles to further advance are mor...