This paper shows that William Stanley Jevons was not precursor of logical positivism despite his attempt to build up a unified science. His mechanical reductionism was directed towards this project, and Jevons tried to found mathematics on logic through the development of a theory of number. We show that his attempts are unsuccessful, and that his errors remain visible within the totality of hi...

W illiam Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is best known as a British economist who was one of the pioneers of contemporary neoclassical economic analysis, with its subjective value theory rooted in marginal utility. His applied economics and theoretical insights marked new points of departure for later economists who would more fully shape the neoclassical tradition. But Jevons is also remembered as ...

The sustainability of archival institutions will be greatly affected by attempts to mitigate their carbon footprint to meet the challenges of global climate change. This paper explores how recordkeeping practices may enhance or undermine the sustainability of archives. To enhance sustainability, it is a common practice to increase the efficiency of recordkeeping practices. However, increases to...

The paper discusses the recent decision of the UK's Office for National Statistics to replace the controversial Carli index with the Jevons index in a new version of the retail price index-RPIJ. In doing so we make three contributions to the way that price indices should be selected for measures of consumer price inflation when quantity information is not available (i.e. at the 'elementary' lev...

Here I draw attention to two socio-ecological paradoxes. The Jevons Paradox is based on the observation that an improvement in the efficiency with which a natural resource is used is often associated with an increase in the consumption of that resource. Similarly, the Paperless Office Paradox is based on the observation that the development of substitutes for a natural resource is not always as...

In this paper, we describe a formal language for a class of logical expressions. We then present a Finite State Machine for recognition and evaluation of this language. The main interest of the language is its historical characteristic. This language invented by the British scholar W. Stanley JEVONS in 1865 is probably the earliest language in which expressions were evaluated by a Finite State ...

The economic activity in arid/semiarid areas of the western United States would seem to be much more influenced by weather than humid/semi humid areas since they are located marginally closer to major drought conditions at any moment in time. This paper reexamines the original “sunspot” theory of business cycles of William Stanley Jevons, the contributions of his son H. S. Jevons, and the furth...