In his fifth Locke Lecture (2006)1 Robert Brandom has presented a new type of semantics for propositional classical and modal logic (‘incompatibility semantics’) that is embedded in his quite general programme (‘inferential pragmatism’) addressing major challenges to analytic philosophy. Inferential pragmatism is an important, comprehensive, and widely discussed contribution to contemporary phi...

The synergism among the traditional disciplines of ontology, epistemology, logic, and linguistics and their potential for enhancing conceptual-modeling applications is not fully understood. Better understanding how to adapt ideas from these disciplines should lead to improved serviceability of conceptual modeling. We argue in this position paper, however, that application objectives, rather tha...

Central to the controversy regarding the practical utility of academic research is the academic–practitioner gap, which is characterized by the opposition between ‘rigor’ and ‘relevance’. We contribute to this discussion by proposing Dewey’s pragmatism as a perspective that helps resolve the rigor–relevance divide. If the rigor–relevance dichotomy is to be eliminated, there are philosophical, t...

This article articulates a neo-pragmatist theory of human rights by drawing and expanding upon the American classical pragmatism of G.H. Mead. It characterizes this neo-pragmatist theory of rights by its anti-foundationalist, relational, fictive, and constitutive nature, and begins by providing a reconstruction of Mead’s social pragmatist approach to rights, a contribution systematically ignore...

The history of occupational therapy may be understood as a continual transaction between two cultural discourses: pragmatism and structuralism. Pragmatism is a way of thinking that presupposes humans are agentic by nature and knowledge is tentative and created within particular contexts. Structuralism is a way of thinking that assumes humans are composites of recurring general frameworks and th...

It is difficult to harmonise faith and the desire to follow religious teachings and obligations on the one hand, and scientific advances and their use for the benefit of suffering humanity on the other. This is an especially delicate matter for patients and health professionals in reproductive medicine. It deals with the conflicting issues of contraception, termination of pregnancy, assisted re...

In recent years, Hjørland has developed a typology of basic epistemological approaches to KO that identifies four basic positions—empiricism, rationalism, historicism/hermeneutics, and pragmatism—with which to characterize the epistemological bases and methodological orientation of KOSs. Although scholars of KO have noted that the design of a single KOS may incorporate epistemological-methodolo...

This chapter presents a translational approach to socio-technical design, as a new approach to the theorybased design of user interfaces, supported by a multi-stage process. A survey of the early work on theorybased design in HCI identifies the strengths and limitations of this approach. This new approach extends HCI with a socio-cultural perspective, and adopts creative practices from the fiel...

On 17 June 1899 the Göttingen society took part in the festive unveiling of the Gauss-Weber monument in memory of the great mathematical and physical tradition of the University of Göttingen. On the occasion of this event a commemorative volume was published containing two contributions: Emil Wiechert’s paper on the foundation of electrodynamics (Wiechert 1899 ) and David Hilbert’s paper on the...