Rights over land and other natural resources play a fundamental role in human society. The distribution of wealth and poverty is a reflection of underlying property rights. But reforming property rights to give poor women and men greater access to and greater control over resources is not an easy task. This chapter explains why property rights are important for poverty reduction, describes the ...

Cognitive science recognizes two kinds of systematicity: (1) as the property where certain cognitive capacities imply certain other related cognitive capacities (Fodor and Pylyshyn); and (2) as the principle that analogical mappings based on collections of connected relations are preferred over relations in isolation (Gentner). Whether these kinds of systematicity are two aspects of a deeper pr...

We can observe a connection between some serious environmental problems caused by the overexploitation of environmental resources and the particular conceptions of property rights that are claimed to hold with regard to these resources. In this paper, I investigate whether Kant's conception of property rights might constitute a basis for justifying property regimes that would overcome some of t...

to complete “the use theory of meaning”, paul horwich put forward a new thesis upon which some usages of a word have explanatory role and justify the overall use-regularities of that word. these specific usages have a basic acceptance property which makes them believable in user’s belief system and, like a semantic axiom, make other usages justified. but, there are still some usages that cannot...

Although the “tragedy of the commons” is common currency in popular accounts of problems arising in human–environment relations, empirical research has shown that common-property systems do not always lead to tragic outcomes. Moreover, systems of private property or public property, often proposed as solutions to the tragedy of the commons, can generate tragedies of their own that are equally s...