One perspective of a design process in the engineering design community is that it is largely a process marked and defined by a series of decisions. The fundamental assumption in most developed design decision support methodologies is that decision makers make rational choices; that is, choices that maximize the payoff for the predicted outcome. Decisions that do not maximize the predicted payo...

The purpose of this paper is to show that arguments for and against cloning fail to make their case because of one or both of the following reasons: 1) they take for granted customary beliefs and assumptions that are far from being unquestionable; 2) they tend to ignore the context in which human cloning is developed. I will analyze some of the assumptions underlying the main arguments that hav...

Four specific forms of theoretical reductionism within economics are addressed in the paper, whose main purpose is to foster a climate for change. The addressed forms are, relations among human beings are reduced to relations of equivalents; economic rationality is reduced to rational choice; the category of happiness is reduced to that of utility; trust is reduced to reputation. © 2000 Elsevie...