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Viviana Zelizer’s recent book, The Purchase of Intimacy (2005), presents an innovative theory of how social and legal actors negotiate rights and obligations when money changes hands in intimate relationships—a perspective that could change how we understand many things, from valuations of homemaking labor to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. This essay describes Zelizer’s critique of the redu...

The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable vs. non-decidable knowledge domains. A “second Cartesian revolution,” informed by and in awareness of anticipatory processes, should result in scientific metho...

The validity of functional explanations as they are commonly used in psychology has recently come under attack. Kim’s supervenience argument purports to prove that higher-level generalizations have no causal powers of their own, and hence are explanatorily irrelevant. In a nutshell, the supervenience argument forces us to either embrace epiphenomenalism of higherlevel properties, or accept Kim’...

Paradigm shifts in science are often coupled to technological advances. New techniques offer new roads of discovery; but, more than this, they shape the way scientists approach questions. Developmental biology exemplifies this idea both in its past and present. The rise of molecular biology and genetics in the late twentieth century shifted the focus from the anatomical to the molecular, nudgin...

The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the historical development of this new world view, focusing on its philosophical foundations. Determinism was challenged by quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Systems th...

Contemporary classification of human disease derives from observational correlation between pathological analysis and clinical syndromes. Characterizing disease in this way established a nosology that has served clinicians well to the current time, and depends on observational skills and simple laboratory tools to define the syndromic phenotype. Yet, this time-honored diagnostic strategy has si...

In this paper we refine consideration of the topic of ‘sustainability’ through an analysis of its ontological and epistemological assumptions. The concepts of ‘Strong’ and ‘Weak’ sustainability are defined, compared and contrasted in terms of their respective emphases on Complexity and Humanism, and on Reductionism and Rationalism. A model for assessment of these emphases is presented. It is su...