Understanding sustainability

Proposed solutions to sustainability often bring different economic sectors into conflict; when a sustainable solution for one sector is non-sustainable for another it creates what we call the dilemma of sustainability. A recent example took place in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest, involving competing notions of sustainability by fisheries and the energy industry. Taking up some ideas of Eger and Lyotard, we criticize the constructivist approach which treats large ecosystems as constructions and the process of resolving conflicts of sustainability as one solely consisting of negotiations involving the trading off of interests. We propose instead to treat such conflict resolution via a Gadamerian-inspired hermeneutics that sees different economic sectors as having different interpretations of sustainability and that aims at common understanding.     

Personal and community sustainability

Many community members reduce their community involvements as they more through midlife. This may be true for community psychologists as well. Yet research evidence suggests that-intellectually, at least-we can function at or near peak levels through our 80s and 90s. How then might we best sustain ourselves and our work through our entire lives? Answers may lie in full exercise of all capacities, in strong support networks, and in actions that meet one's deeper needs, “the needs of the soul”. These same principles may sustain community life as well, for some key principles of personal and community sustainability may be similar. Applications of these ideas to communities and to community psychology are discussed.     

Understanding Narratively,Understanding Alterity

Phenomenology's systematic exploration of how a world comes into existence for knowers – knowers who are often conceptualized as individual and ostensibly isolated – requires that it provide some account of the constitution of alterity. In this paper, I address this issue by arguing that we apperceive alterity in terms of the intentionality of behavior. A corollary of this argument is that the apperception of an alter as specifically human is a secondary attribution, following the primary apperception of intention. I further argue that the intentionality of behavior is understood through the projection of a narrative frame, or a “protonarrative,” onto the alter's behavior. I suggest that protonarrativity is the form that experience takes as its ontological condition. Our living is not simply known to us reflectively as protonarrative; rather, experience is lived as protonarrative.This essay is based on a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Memphis, Tennessee, October 28–30, 2004.     

Environmental and sustainability ethics in supply chain management

Environmentally Conscious Supply Chain Management (ECSCM) refers to the control exerted over all immediate and eventual environmental effects of products and processes associated with converting raw materials into final products. While much work has been done in this area, the focus has traditionally been on either: product recovery (recycling, remanufacturing, or re-use) or the product design function only (e.g., design for environment). Environmental considerations in manufacturing are often viewed as separate from traditional, value-added considerations. However, the case can be made that professional engineers have an ethical responsibility to consider the immediate and eventual environmental impacts of products and processes that they design and/or manage. This paper describes ECSCM as a component of engineering ethics, and highlights the major issues associated with ethical decision-making in supply chain management.     

Understanding Truth

Book Information Understanding Truth. By Soames Scott. Oxford University Press. New York. 1999. Pp. ix + 268. Cloth.     

Understanding Beliefs

Beliefs are central to political psychology, but in many ways remain undertheorized. A good starting place for further thought is the typology of Smith, Bruner, and White that separates reality testing from the social and psychological functions of beliefs. The concept of beliefs has several connotations, some of which involve faith and emotions. It is often difficult to grasp others' beliefs, especially when they are foreign to us or morally repugnant. It is even more difficult to determine whether beliefs are powerful in the sense of determining behavior and autonomous in the sense of not being directly derivable from other factors. The Smith, Bruner, and White typology is useful here, helps us understand the operation of biases, and points to the multiple roles that beliefs play in people's lives, including managing trade-offs and generating what looks to others like hypocrisy.     

Understanding anthropologists

In this paper I show how to treat problems in the philosophy of the social sciences, in particular anthropology, without the need to settle questions in the theory of meaning about realism and anti‐realism. In doing this, I show how it is possible, contrary to received opinion, to ward off conceptual relativism without adoption of realist semantics. The argument involves sketching the feasibility of a viable non‐realist concept of objectivity. Having distinguished the required notion of objectivity, I then bring this to bear on issues that have dominated the philosophy of anthropology in recent years: the translatability of ritual beliefs; the adequacy of symbolist anthropology; the concept of rationality. I offer a new way of handling these issues which supports an anti‐realist, but intellectualist, account of ritual belief.     

Understanding microworlds

Little is known about how individuals understand change in complex systems. In the natural world, for instance, the effects of change need to be understood in terms of two-way (interdependent) causal processes. Based on subject's ratings of the causal likelihood that a given change will yield a target effect and on subjects' ratings of the impact of a given change on specified populations in a microworld, White (1997, 2000) argued that individuals in fact understand change in terms of one-way causal processes and assume that causal effects decline with distance from the source of the change. An alternative view is that the ratings reflect individuals' mental simulations of change as elicited by the tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 confirm that such ratings are task dependent and that individuals make no general assumption that causal effects decrease with distance. Experiment 3 shows that when required to explain a pattern of change in the size of a population individuals can construct two-way causal explanations consistent with this mental simulation proposal.     

Understanding causation

Synthese - In Part I of ‘Causality and Determination” (CD), Anscombe writes that (1) we understand causality through understanding specific causal expressions, (2) efficient causation...