Introduction Decisions increasingly become dilemmas without obvious solutions as worldviews clash, science conflicts, politics polarize, and institutions entrench. Yet decision must be made: Should we sacrifice a species in order to build a road that increases access to health care for people in need? Should we confine pigs and chickens in feeding operations whose efficiencies preserve habitat ...

Mallon, Machery, Nichols and Stich (2009) argue that the use of intuitions in the philosophy of reference is problematic as recent studies show intuitions about reference vary both within and between cultures. I use some ideas from the recent literature on disagreement and truth relativism to shed light on the debate concerning the appropriate reaction to these studies. Mallon et al. argue that...

The Asian immigration debate has become one of the most contentious topics of debate in Australia. Little about the debate is new and most of the arguments, both in favour and against, begin with demographic considerations, then move on to the economic consequences of immigration and the social and cultural ramifications. Delving deeper into the debate, one will realize that there is an underly...

The guiding principle of this reform is what we term critical pluralism. There are two key ideas in this. The first is that truth, or progress towards it, arises only if empirical reality is tested against a multiplicity of theoretical explanations of that reality. Pluralism is thus not a normative or ethically desirable adjunct to science but a necessary prerequisite to producing valid knowled...