Discipline or permissiveness?

Epistemic Permissiveness

A rational person doesn’t believe just anything. There are limits on what it is rational to believe. How wide are these limits? That’s the main question that interests me here. But a secondary question immediately arises: What factors impose these limits? A first stab is to say that one’s evidence determines what it is epistemically permissible for one to believe. Many will claim that there are...

Plastic surgery: technique or discipline?

The definition of “plastic surgery” has been subject to a variety of interpretations. To the practitioner who has completed formal training in plastic surgery, it is defined and inherently recognized as a specialty that encompasses a vast body of knowledge and that requires a comprehension of fundamental principles and concepts that allows one to plan and execute a particular operation. In othe...

Primary care: political favourite or scientific discipline?

Permissiveness in Transactional Memories

We introduce the notion of permissiveness in transactional memories (TM). Intuitively, a TM is permissive if it never aborts a transaction when it need not. More specifically, a TM is permissive with respect to a safety property p if the TM accepts every history that satisfies p. Permissiveness, like safety and liveness, can be used as a metric to compare TMs. We illustrate that it is impractic...

Translation Studies: Pre-Discipline, Discipline, Interdiscipline, and Post-Discipline

In the West, Translation Studies as a discipline has a very short but lively history. Founded in the early 1970s in the Low Countries—Holland and Belgium—translation studies is a fairly new field. Yet, today some theorists suggest that the discipline is too limited to translated texts and excludes much translation data being generated from other fields of inquiry, including theater, art, archit...