What Public Debate?

Reducing Arrogance in Public Debate

Law, Hermeneutics, and Public Debate

The Nature-Nurture Debate and Public Policy.

The contentious nature-nurture debate in developmental psychology is poised to reach a rapprochement with contemporary concepts of gene-environment interaction, transaction, and fit. Discoveries over the past decade have revealed how neither genes nor the environment offers a sufficient window into human development. Rather, the most important discoveries have come from unearthing the manner in...

Quantifying asbestos in lung tissue: what debate?

This issue of the European Respiratory Journal contains an article entitled “The asbestos fibre burden in human lungs: new insights into the chrysotile debate” by FEDER et al. [1]. Although respiratory physicians are very familiar with the devastating health effects of past asbestos exposure, many nonspecialist readers probably wonder what this “chrysotile debate” might be and how this article ...

What Is Public about Public Services?

On my first visit to Prague after the 'Velvet' revolution of 1989, I spent a morning discussing the post-communist future of public services with Czech labour leaders. For a while I was perplexed: why were they so sanguine about the prospect of hospitals being privatized? They were baffled too: why would a Londoner favour state control of pubs? It soon dawned on us that we were at cross purpose...