:: wikimiki.org ::

Whole

Whole

Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning whole) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. The word, along with the adjective holistic, was coined in the early 1920s by Jan Smuts. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Smuts defined holism as "The tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution." Holism (or nonreductionism) is sometimes described as the opposite of reductionism, although proponents of scientific reductionism state that it is better regarded as the opposite of greedy reductionism. It may also be contrasted with atomism.

Responses to holism

Holism, especially in its metaphysical varieties, is controversial. Many scientists and philosophers regard some of these claims as unfalsifiable or less meaningful than holism's proponents do. Others see them as incorrect or as pseudoscience. Some forms, however, like epistemological and confirmation holism, are mainstream ideas in contemporary philosophy. Similarly mainstream, complexity theory (sometimes referred to as "complexity science", such as at the Santa Fe Institute), comprises a holistic, 'top-down' approach towards understanding complex adaptive systems and as such its approach towards the growth of knowledge can be construed as being a polar opposite to reductionist science. A general theory of complexity has been realized, and numerous complexity institutes and departments have sprung up around the world. See also philosophy of language.

Holistic healing

A holistic approach to healing recognizes that the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical elements of each person comprise a system, and attempts to treat the whole person, concentrating on the cause of the illness as well as symptoms. This approach often focuses on traditional medicine and avoid pharmaceutical drugs. Examples of holistic therapies include Reflexology, Indian Head Massage, Reiki and Acupuncture.

External links

- [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=define%3Aholism Definitions of "holism" on Google]
- [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=define%3Aholistic Definitions of "holistic" on Google]
- [http://www.ecotao.com/holism/ Of Nature's Holism - coevolution in ecosystems.]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-holism/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article: "Holism and Nonseparability in Physics"]
- [http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/holism.html U of Oregon Physics Dept on Holism]
- [http://www.mech.kuleuven.be/pma/project/goa/hms-int/history.html History of 'Holons']
- [http://www.kahc.co.uk/holism.html Holism in Ayurveda]
- [http://www.bodysoulspiritexpo.com/expo Holistic Lifestyle Tradeshow and Conference] featuring the latest in holistic treatments, products and therapies. Canadian Cities Host this event, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto. Category:Philosophy of science

Greek language

Greek (Greek Ελληνικά, IPA – "Hellenic") is an Indo-European language with a documented history of 3,500 years. Today, it is spoken by 15 million people in Greece, Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, particularly The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania and Turkey. There are also many Greek emigrant communities around the world, such as those in Melbourne, Australia which is the third-largest Greek-populated city in the world, after Athens and Thessaloniki. Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet, the first true alphabet, since the 9th century B.C. and before that, in Linear B and the Cypriot syllabaries. Greek literature has a long and rich tradition.

History

This article does not cover the reconstructed history of Greek prior to the use of writing. For more information, see main article on Proto-Greek language. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan Peninsula since the 2nd millennium BC. The earliest evidence of this is found in the Linear B tablets dating from 1500 BC. The later Greek alphabet (q.v.) is unrelated to Linear B, and was derived from the Phoenician alphabet (abjad); with minor modifications, it is still used today. Greek is conventionally divided into the following periods:
- Mycenean Greek: the language of the Mycenean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 16th century BC onwards.
- Classical Greek (also known as Ancient Greek): In its various dialects was the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman empire. Classical Greek fell into disuse in western Europe in the Middle Ages, but remained known in the Byzantine world, and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople and Greek migration to Italy.
- Hellenistic Greek (also known as Koine Greek): The fusion of various ancient Greek dialects with Attic (the dialect of Athens) resulted in the creation of the first common Greek dialect, which gradually turned into one of the world's first international languages. Koine Greek can be initially traced within the armies and conquered territories of Alexander the Great, but after the Hellenistic colonisation of the known world, it was spoken from Egypt to the fringes of India. After the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial diglossy of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. Through Koine Greek it is also traced the origin of Christianity, as the Apostles used it to preach in Greece and the Greek-speaking world. It is also known as the Alexandrian dialect, Post-Classical Greek or even New Testament Greek (after its most famous work of literature).
- Medieval Greek: The continuation of Hellenistic Greek during medieval Greek history as the official and vernacular (if not the literary nor the ecclesiastic) language of the Byzantine Empire, and continued to be used until, and after the fall of that Empire in the 15th century. Also known as Byzantine Greek.
- Modern Greek: Stemming independently from Koine Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the late Byzantine period (as early as 11th century). Two main forms of the language have been in use since the end of the medieval Greek period: Dhimotikí (Δημοτική), the Demotic (vernacular) language, and Katharévousa (Καθαρεύουσα), an imitation of classical Greek, which was used for literary, juridic, and scientific purposes during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Demotic Greek is now the official language of the modern Greek state, and the most widely spoken by Greeks today. It has been claimed that an "educated" speaker of the modern language can understand an ancient text, but this is surely as much a function of education as of the similarity of the languages. Still, Koinē , the version of Greek used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint, is relatively easy to understand for modern speakers. Greek words have been widely borrowed into the European languages: astronomy, democracy, philosophy, thespian, etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as a basis for coinages: anthropology, photography, isomer, biomechanics etc. and form, with Latin words, the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary. See English words of Greek origin, and List of Greek words with English derivatives.

Classification

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient languages which were probably most closely related to it, Ancient Macedonian language (which may be regarded as a dialect of Greek) and Phrygian, are not well enough documented to permit detailed comparison. Among living languages, Armenian seems to be the most closely related to it.

Geographic distribution

Modern Greek is spoken by about 15 million people mainly in Greece and Cyprus. There are also Greek-speaking populations in Georgia, Ukraine, Egypt, Turkey, Albania, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Southern Italy. The language is spoken also in many other countries where Greeks have settled, including Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Official status

Greek is the official language of Greece where it is spoken by about 99.5% of the population. It is also, alongside Turkish, the official language of Cyprus. Due to the membership of Greece and Cyprus, Greek is one of the 20 official languages of the European Union.

Phonology

This section generally describes the post-Classic phonology of the Greek language. :All phonetic transcriptions in this section use the International Phonetic Alphabet

Vowel sounds

Greek has 5 vowel sounds, all phonemic:

1920s

Sometimes referred to as the "Jazz Age" or primarily in North America and in Australia as the "Roaring Twenties" . In Europe it is sometimes refered to as the Golden Twenties. See 1920s Berlin. ----

Events and trends

Since the closing of the 20th Century, the 1920s has drawn close associations with the 1990s, especially in the United States. This due to the fact both decades were considered very economically prosperous times, and a prosperity which lasted throughout almost the entire decade following a tremendous event at the closing of the previous decade (World War I and Spanish flu in the late 1910s, and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s). In Australia, this decade was known as the Roaring Twenties. Despite the comparisons, however, there were a number of differences. First of all, Germany, like many other European countries, had to face a severe economic downturn in the opening years of the decade, due to the enormous debt caused by the war as well as the one-sided Treaty of Versailles. Such a crisis would culminate with a devaluation of the Mark in 1923, eventually leading to economic prosperity during the remainder of the period. Second, the decade was characterized by the rise of radical political movements, especially in regions that were once part of empires. Communism began attracting large numbers of followers following the success of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks' determination to win the subsequent Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks would eventually adopt semi-capitalist policies-- New Economic Policy-- from 1921 to 1928. The 1920s also experienced the rise of the far-right in Europe and elsewhere, starting with Italy, and were perceived by some in the Western world as an antidote to Communism. The Stock Market collapsed during October 1929 (see Black Tuesday) and drew a line under prosperous 1920s.

Technology

- John T. Thompson invents Thompson submachine gun, also known as "Tommy gun"
- John Logie Baird invents the first working mechanical television system (1925)
- Charles Lindbergh becomes the first person to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean (20 May-21 May 1927)
- Penicillin is discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming (1928)
- Philo T. Farnsworth invents the modern electronic CRT television
- Insulin is discovered by Frederick Banting during the winter of 1921-1922

Science

- Great advances in quantum mechanics
- Wave mechanics and the Schrödinger equation
- Werner Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle
- Paul Dirac's unification of quantum mechanics with special relativity
- Prediction and discovery of the expanding universe

War, peace and politics

- Rise of communism after World War I
- The Red Scare in the United States (1920-1921)
- In the United States, peak of the Ku Klux Klan (about five million members)
- In the United States, KKK auxiliaries established.
- Irish Civil War
- The Irish Free State gains independence from the United Kingdom in 1922
- Marie C. Brehm becomes temperance movement leader.
- Turkish War of Independence
- Moderation League of New York worked for repeal of prohibition.
- Polish-Soviet war
- First Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald formed in the United Kingdom
- Kellogg-Briand Pact to end war
- Prohibition leaders were at the height of their power.

Economics

- Economic boom ended by "Black Tuesday" (October 29, 1929); the stock market crashes, leading to the Great Depression

Culture, religion

- Prohibition — legal attempt to end consumption of alcohol in Canada, the USA, and Finland
- Youth culture of The Lost Generation; flappers, the Charleston, and bobbed hair
- "The Jazz Age" — jazz and jazz-influenced dance music widely popular
- Women's suffrage movement continues to make gains as women obtain full voting rights in the United States in 1920, in Denmark in 1921, and in England in 1928; and women begin to enter the workplace in larger numbers
- In the US, gangsters and the rise of organized crime, often associated with bootleg liquor, in defiance of Prohibition.
- Rum rows are established to import bootleg alcoholic beverages into U.S.
- First commercial radio station in the U.S. goes onair in Pittsburgh, in 1920, and radio quickly becomes a popular entertainment medium
- Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals defends alcohol prohibition in U.S.
- Start of motion pictures with sound tracks in 1927
- Beginning of surrealist movement
- Beginning of the Art Deco movement
- Fads such as dance marathons, mah-jongg, crossword puzzles and pole-sitting are popular
- The height of the clip joint
- The Harlem Renaissance
- The Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) which questioned evolution, creationism, and the right to teach
- Bishop James Cannon, Jr. becomes a U.S. temperance movement leader.
- The Group of Seven (artists)
- Repeal organizations organized to fight national prohibition in U.S.
- Minister Daisy Douglas Barr heads Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK).

People

World leaders

- Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (Canada)
- President Sun Yat-sen (Republic of China)
- President Chiang Kai-shek (Republic of China)
- President Paul von Hindenburg (Germany)
- King Victor Emmanuel III (Italy)
- Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (Italy)
- President W.T. Cosgrave (Irish Free State)
- President Mustafa Kemal(Attaturk) (Turkey)
- Emperor Hirohito (Japan)
- Pope Pius XI
- Vladimir Lenin (Soviet Union)
- Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union)
- King George V (United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister David Lloyd George (United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law (United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (United Kingdom)
- President Woodrow Wilson (United States)
- President Warren G. Harding (United States)
- President Calvin Coolidge (United States)
- President Herbert Hoover (United States)
- Prime Minister Jason Bailey (Canada)
- Peebodie Mike Hawk (Guatamala)

Entertainers

- Charlie Chaplin
- George Gershwin
- Duke Ellington
- Fletcher Henderson
- Al Jolson
- Jelly Roll Morton
- Cole Porter
- Bessie Smith
- Rudy Vallee
- Paul Whiteman
- Louis Armstrong
- Eddie Cantor
- Helen Kane
- Buster Keaton

Sports figures

- Alex James (Arsenal & Scotland footballer)
- Babe Ruth (American baseball player)
- Bill Tilden (American tennis player)
- Bobby Jones (American golfer)
- Gordon Coventry (Australian Rules Football player)
- Herbert Sutcliffe (Yorkshire & England cricketer)
- Jack Dempsey (American boxer)
- Jack Hobbs (Surrey & England cricketer)
- Red Grange (American football player)
- Warwick Armstrong (Australian cricket captain)
- Wilfred Rhodes (Yorkshire & England cricketer)
- Helen Wills Moody (American tennis player)

External links

- [http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/keys/games/game_0_1920s/ Quiz: Life in the Roaring Twenties] Category:1920s ko:1920년대 ja:1920年代 simple:1920s

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a comprehensive dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). Often regarded as the definitive dictionary of the English language, it includes about 301,100 main entries, as of November 30, 2005, comprising over 350 million printed characters. In addition to the headwords of main entries, the OED contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives in bold type, and 169,000 phrases and combinations in bold italic type, making a total of 616,500 word-forms. There are 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and 2,412,400 illustrative quotations. The policy of OED is to attempt to record all known uses and variants of a word in all varieties of English, worldwide, past and present. To quote the 1933 Preface: :The aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang. The OED is the starting point for much scholarly work regarding words in English. Its choice of the order in which to list variant spellings of headwords is influential on written English in many countries.

Origins

The dictionary had no university connection originally; it was conceived in London as a project of the Philological Society, when Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall had become dissatisfied with the available dictionaries of English. In June 1857 they formed an "Unregistered Words Committee" with the goal of finding words not listed and defined in existing dictionaries. But the report that Trench presented that November was not a simple list of unregistered words; it was a study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries. These, he said, were sevenfold:
- Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
- Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
- Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
- History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
- Inadequate distinction between synonyms
- Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
- Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content Trench suggested that nothing short of a new and truly comprehensive dictionary would do: one that would be based on contributions from a large number of volunteer readers, who would read books, copy out passages illustrating various actual uses of words onto quotation slips, and mail them to the editor. In 1858 the Society agreed in principle to the project: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED).

The first editors

Trench played a key role in the first months of the project, but his ecclesiastical career meant that he could not give the dictionary the continued attention that it needed over a period that, it was realized, might easily be as long as ten years. So Trench withdrew, and it was Herbert Coleridge who became the dictionary's first editor. On May 12, 1860, Coleridge's plan for the work was published, and the research was set in motion. His home became the first editorial office; he ordered a grid of 54 pigeon-holes in which could eventually be arrayed 100,000 quotation slips. In April 1861, the first sample pages of the dictionary were published... and then Coleridge, aged just 31, died of tuberculosis. The editorship then fell to Furnivall, who had great enthusiasm and knowledge, but definitely lacked the temperament for such a long-term project. His energetic start saw many assistants recruited and two tons of readers' slips and other materials delivered to his house, and in many cases passed on to these assistants. But as months and years passed, the project languished. Furnivall began to lose track of his assistants, some of whom assumed that the project was abandoned; others died and their slips were not returned. The entire set of quotation slips for words starting with H was later found in Tuscany; others were assumed to be waste paper and burned as tinder. In the 1870s Furnivall approached Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him, but neither one accepted the post. But then, at a Society meeting in 1876, James Murray declared his willingness to try.

The Oxford editors

At the same time the Society had become concerned about the publication of what it was now clear would have to be an immensely large book. Various publishers had been approached over the years, either to produce sample pages or for the possible publication of the whole, but no agreements had been reached. These had included both the Cambridge and the Oxford University Press (OUP). Finally in 1879, after two years of negotiations involving Sweet and Furnivall as well as Murray, the Oxford University Press agreed not only to publish the dictionary, but also to pay Murray (who by this time was also president of the Philological Society) a salary as editor. They hoped that the work would now be completed in another ten years. It was Murray who really got the project off the ground and was able to tackle its true scale. Because he had many children, he chose not to use his house (in the London suburb of Mill Hill) itself as a workplace; a kit-form iron outbuilding, lined with deal, which he called the "Scriptorium", was erected for him and his assistants. It was provided with 1,029 pigeon-holes and many bookshelves. Murray now tracked down and regathered the slips already collected by Furnivall, but he found them inadequate because readers had focused on rare and interesting words: he had ten times more quotations for abusion than for abuse. He therefore issued a new appeal for readers, which was widely published in newspapers and distributed in bookstores and libraries. This time readers were specifically asked to report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" as well as all of those that seemed "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way." Murray arranged for the Pennsylvanian philologist, Francis March, to manage the process in North America. Soon 1,000 slips per day were arriving at the Scriptorium, and by 1882 there were 3,500,000 of them. It was February 1, 1884, 23 years after Coleridge's sample pages, when the first portion, or fascicle, of the actual dictionary was finally published. The full title had now become A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society, and the 352 pages, covering words from A to Ant, were priced at 12s.6d. in Britain (today this fraction of a pound would be written 62.5p) or $3.25 US. The total sales were a disappointing 4,000 copies. It was now clear to OUP that it would take much too long to complete the work if the editorial arrangements were not revised. Accordingly they supplied additional funding for assistants, but made two new demands on Murray in return. The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford, which he did in 1885. Again he had a Scriptorium built on his property (to appease a neighbour, this one had to be half-buried in the ground), and the Oxford post office paid his work the compliment of installing a new pillar box (mailbox) directly in front of his house. Murray was more resistant to the second requirement: that if he could not meet the desired schedule, then he must hire a second senior editor who would work in parallel, outside of his supervision, on words from different parts of the alphabet. He did not want to share the work, and felt that it would eventually go faster as he gained experience. But it didn't, and eventually Philip Gell of the OUP forced his hand. Henry Bradley, who Murray had hired as his assistant in 1884, was promoted and began working independently in 1888, in a room at the British Museum in London. In 1896 Bradley similarly moved to Oxford, working at the university itself. Gell continued to harass both editors with the commercial goal of containing costs and speeding production, to the point where the project seemed likely to collapse; but once this was reported in the press, public opinion backed the editors. Gell was then fired, and the university reversed his policies on containing costs. If the editors felt that the dictionary would have to grow larger than had been anticipated, then it would; it was an important enough work that the time and money necessary to finish it properly should be spent. But neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it done. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A-D, H-K, O-P, and T, or nearly half of the finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having done E-G, L-M, S-Sh, St, and W-We. By this time two additional editors had also been promoted from assistant positions to work independently, so the work continued without too much trouble. William Craigie, starting in 1901, was responsible for N, Q-R, Si-Sq, U-V, and Wo-Wy; whereas the OUP had previously felt that London was too far from Oxford for the editors to work there, after 1925 Craigie's work on the dictionary was done in Chicago, Illinois, where he had accepted a professorship. The fourth editor was C. T. Onions, who, starting in 1914, covered the remaining ranges, Su-Sz, Wh-Wo, and X-Z.

The fascicles

By early 1894 a total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A-B, five for C, and two for E. Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which would eventually become a volume break). At this point it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments: once every three months, beginning in 1895, there would now be a fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s.6d. (12.5p) or $1 US. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained thereafter until World War I forced reductions in staff. (The same material was also published in the original larger fascicles for those who might prefer them, each time enough consecutive pages were available.) A second change in 1895 was the adoption of the title Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but only on the outer covers of the fascicles. The original title was still the official one and appeared everywhere else. The 125th and last fascicle, covering words from Wise to the end of W, was published on April 19, 1928, and the full dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately.

The First Edition and the first Supplement

It had been planned to publish the New English Dictionary in 10 volumes, respectively starting with A, C, D, F, H, L, O, Q, Si, and Ti; but as the project proceeded, the later volumes became larger and larger, and while the full 1928 edition officially retained the intended numbering, Volumes IX and X were actually published as two "half-volumes" each, split at Su and V respectively. The entire edition was also available as a set of 20 half-volumes, with two choices of binding. The price was 50 or 55 guineas (£52.50 or £57.75) depending on the format and binding. It had been 44 years since the publication of A-Ant and, of course, the English language had continued to develop and change. So by this time the early volumes were noticeably out of date. The solution was for the same teams to now produce a Supplement, listing all words and senses that had developed since the relevant pages were first printed; this also gave the opportunity to correct any errors or omissions already noted. Purchasers of the 1928 edition were promised a free copy of the supplement when it appeared. The supplement was again produced by two editors working in parallel. Craigie, now being in the United States, did most of the research on American English usages; he also edited L-R and U-Z, while Onions did A-K and S-T. The work took another five years. In 1933 the entire dictionary was reissued, now officially under the title of Oxford English Dictionary for the first time. The volumes after the first six were adjusted to equalize them somewhat and eliminate the "half-volume" numbering: the main dictionary now consisted of twelve volumes, numbered as such, and respectively starting at A, C, D, F, H, L, N, Poyesye, S, Sole, T, and V. The supplement was included as the 13th volume. The price of the dictionary was now reduced to 20 guineas (£21), which must have dismayed the buyers from 1928 as they received their free supplements.

The second Supplement and the Second Edition

In 1933 Oxford University had finally put the great dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. But of course the English language continued to change, and by the time 20 years had passed, the outdatedness of the dictionary began to be bothersome. There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would be to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement, of perhaps one or two volumes; but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. Or the existing supplement could be combined with the new material to form a larger supplement. The most convenient choice for the dictionary user would be for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset, with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but of course this would be most expensive, with perhaps 15 volumes to be produced. The OUP chose the middle approach, replacing the supplement with a new one. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit it; Onions, who turned 84 that year, was still able to make some contributions as well. The work was expected to take seven to ten years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement had grown to four volumes, starting with A, H, O, and Sea. They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement. But by this time it was clear that the full text of the dictionary now belonged online. Achieving this would still require rekeyboarding it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching—as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. searching And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project was begun. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML; and a specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under a 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at a Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary led by F.W. Tompa and Gaston Gonnet; this search technology would go on to be the basis for Open Text Corporation. Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM; the colour syntax-directed editor for the project, [http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0/bc33186c36e05a9e85256bfa0067f698?OpenDocument LEXX], was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. By 1989 the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and editors Edmund Weiner and John Simpson, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the Second Edition of the OED, or the OED2, was published. (And, naturally, the first edition retronymically became the OED1.) OED2 was printed in 20 volumes. For the first time there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes respectively started with A, B.B.C., Cham, Creel, Dvandra, Follow, Hat, Interval, Look, Moul, Ow, Poise, Quemadero, Rob, Ser, Soot, Su, Thru, Unemancipated, and Wave. Although the content of OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the dictionary user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. And whereas Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard one at the time, the OED2 adopted today's International Phonetic Alphabet. New material was published in the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, two small volumes in 1993, and a third in 1997, bringing the dictionary to a total of 23 volumes. However, no more Additions volumes are planned, and it is not expected that any part of the Third Edition, or OED3, will be printed in fascicles.

The Compact Editions

Meanwhile, in 1971, the full content of the 13-volume OED1 from 1933 was reprinted as a Compact Edition of just two volumes. This was achieved by photographically reducing each page to 1/2 its original linear dimensions, so that four original pages were shown on each page ("4-up" format). The two volumes started at A and P, with the Supplement included at the end of the second volume. The Compact Edition was sold in a case that also included, in a small drawer, a magnifying glass to help users read the reduced type. Many copies were sold through book clubs, which distributed them cheaply as premiums to their members. In 1987 the second Supplement was published as a third volume in the same Compact Edition format. For the OED2, in 1991, the Compact Edition format was changed to 1/3 of the original linear dimensions (9-up), requiring stronger magnification but also allowing the entire dictionary to be published in a single volume for the first time. Even after these volumes had been published, though, book club offers commonly continued to feature the two-volume 1971 Compact Edition.

The electronic versions

1991 Now that the text of the dictionary was digitized and online, it could also be published on CD-ROM. There have been three versions so far. Version 1 (1992) was identical in content to the printed Second Edition, and the CD itself was not copy-protected. Version 2 (1999) had some additions to the corpus, and updated software with improved searching features, but had clumsy copy-protection that made it difficult to use and would even cause the program to deny use to OUP staff in the middle of demonstrations of the product. Version 3 (2002) has additional words and software improvements, though its copy-protection is still as unforgiving as that of the earlier version. Despite the attempts at copy-protection, one can still download the newest CD-ROM dictionary from Usenet for free. 2002 In March 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) became available to subscribers. The online database contains the entire OED2 and is also updated quarterly with revisions which will be included in the OED3 (see below). The online edition is the most up-to-date one available. As the price for an individual to use this edition, even after a reduction in 2004, is £195 or $295 every year, most subscribers are large organizations such as universities. Some of them do not use the Oxford English Dictionary Online portal and have legally downloaded the entire database into their organization's computers. Some public libraries and companies have subscribed as well. A slightly more appealing method of payment was also introduced in 2004, offering residents of North or South America the opportunity to pay $29.95 US a month in order to access the online site. This allows people who have a less frequent pattern of usage to save versus the yearly plan.

The Third Edition

The planned Third Edition, or OED3, is intended as a nearly complete overhaul of the work. Currently (as of 2005) John Simpson is the Chief Editor. Since the first work by each editor tends to require somewhat more revision than his later, more polished work, it was decided to balance out this effect by performing the early, and perhaps itself less polished, work of this revision pass at a letter other than A. Accordingly, the main work of the OED3 has been proceeding in sequence from the letter M. When the OED Online was launched in March 2000, it included the first batch of revised entries (officially described as draft entries), stretching from M to mahurat, and successive sections of text have since been released on a quarterly basis; by September 2005, the revised section reached as far as perfay. As new work is done on words in other parts of the alphabet, this is also included in each quarterly release. New content can be viewed through the OED Online (by subscription or at libraries offering this service) or on the periodically updated CD-ROM edition. It is even possible that OED3 will never be printed conventionally, but will only ever be available through the medium of a computer. That will be a decision for the future, when it is nearer completion. The actual production of the new edition, of course, takes full advantage of computers, and not just for text editing. The Internet can now be searched for evidence of current usage, and submissions from readers, and the general public, now often arrive by e-mail.

Spelling

The OED lists British spellings for headwords first (for example, labour and centre), followed by other variants (labor, center, etc.). OUP policy also dictates that -ize suffixes be used (instead of -ise) for many words more commonly ending in -ise, even if the root is Latin rather than Greek. The sentence "The group analysed labour statistics published by the organization" is an example of OUP practice. This spelling (which can be indicated by the registered IANA language tag en-GB-oed) is used by the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Organization for Standardization and other organizations, as well as many academic publications, such as Nature, Advances in Physics and the Times Literary Supplement.

Miscellanea

- J. R. R. Tolkien was once an employee of the OED (researching etymologies in the range from Waggle to Warlock), and gently parodied the four principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in his story Farmer Giles of Ham.
- Julian Barnes was also an employee, but he did not like the work.
- The early modern English prose of Sir Thomas Browne is the most frequently quoted source of neologisms.
- William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer.
- George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) is the most-quoted female.
- Cursor Mundi, a religious epic written around 1300, is the most-quoted work.
- One of the most prolific early contributors as a reader, Dr. W. C. Minor, was at the time imprisoned in a criminal lunatic asylum. He invented his own system of tracking quotations so he could send in his slips only when the editors requested, or were ready to use them.
- Tim Bray, co-creator of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the inspiration behind the development of the next-generation web language.

External links

- The [http://www.oed.com/ Oxford English Dictionary's official website]
- Their [http://oed.com/archive/ Archive of documents] (as page images), which includes Trench's original "Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries" [http://dictionary.oed.com/archive/paper-deficiencies/] paper and Murray's original appeal for readers [http://dictionary.oed.com/archive/appeal-1879-04/]
- Their [http://oed.com/about/facts.html page of OED statistics], and [http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/oed/facts/ another such page].
- Their page on [http://dictionary.oed.com/about/contributors/tolkien.html Tolkien]
- [http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/?view=uk AskOxford Compact Oxford English Dictionary Search]
- [http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/ Examining the OED]: Charlotte Brewer's analysis of the principles and practices used by OED editors Category:Dictionaries Category:Non-fictional British literature Category:British culture ko:옥스포드 영어 사전 ja:オックスフォード英語辞典

Reductionism

Reductionism in philosophy describes a number of related, contentious theories that hold, very roughly, that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to (be explained by) simpler or more fundamental things. This is said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings. In short, it is philosophical materialism taken to its logical consequences. Roughly this means that chemistry is based on physics, biology is based on chemistry, psychology and sociology are based on biology. The first of these are commonly accepted but the last step is controversial and therefore the frontier of reductionism: evolutionary -psychology and -sociology vs. those who claim people have a soul or another quality that separates them from the material world. Reductionists believe that the behavioral-sciences should become a genuine scientific discipline by being based on genetic biology. A very typical reductionistic book is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It argues that because genes are the fundamental elements of life, all life and all natural behavior can best be understood by studying genetic mechanisms. This way all life is best regarded as temporary accommodation and a reproduction device for the genes. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins introduced the term "hierarchic reductionism". This means that reductionism can only work when it is used one level at a time. For example: when you throw Stephen Gould out of a window, his fall can be explained by classical mechanics. But you should not try to understand his work from such elementary principles. (The term is also sometimes used to criticize an imagined position rather than to describe a real one.)
- Ontological reductionism is the idea that everything that exists is made from a small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways (compare to monism).
- Methodological reductionism is the idea that explanations of things, such as scientific explanations, ought to be continually reduced to the very simplest entities possible (but no simpler). Occam's Razor forms the basis of this type of reductionism.
- Theoretical reductionism is the idea that older theories or explanations are not generally replaced outright by new ones, but that new theories are refinements or reductions of the old theory in greater detail.
- Scientific reductionism has been used to describe all of the above ideas as they relate to science, but is most often used to describe the idea that all phenomena can be reduced to scientific explanations.
- Linguistic reductionism is the idea that everything can be described in a language with a limited number of core concepts, and combinations of those concepts. (See Basic English and the constructed language Toki Pona).
- The term "greedy reductionism" was coined by Daniel Dennett to condemn those forms of reductionism that try to explain too much with too little.
- Analytical reductionism as used in [http://www.dialogweb.org/Contribute/Reductionism%20UPI2203.htm "Is Reductionism A Good Approach In Science?"] "is the underlying a priori of ontological reductionism". The denial of reductionist ideas is holism; the idea that things can have properties as a whole that are not explainable from the properties of their parts. Phenomena such as emergence and work within the field of complex systems theory is considered to bring forth possible objections to reductionism. Category:Philosophy of science ja:還元主義

Scientific reductionism

The term scientific reductionism has been used to describe various reductionist ideas about science. These ideas can often be conflicting.

Reductionist Ideas

One version is simply the idea that all of nature can eventually be described scientifically; that there are no inherently unknowable facts. Sometimes it is used to describe science (particularly physics) as a basis for ontological reductionism—the idea that everything that exists can be explained as the interactions of a small number of simple things (such as fundamental particles like quarks and leptons interacting through gauge bosons) obeying physical laws. Superstitious world-views have however been largely abandoned in the scientific community in exchange for more naturalistic approaches with empirical evidence to support them. One attack against this form of reductionism, which is popular among solid-state physicists, argues that it is incorrect to regard the laws which govern the components of structures to be more fundamental than the laws which govern the structures. For example, it has been argued that a traffic jam contains patterns of behavior which cannot be reduced to the behavior of an individual car. Similarly metals undergo collective behavior and interactions that are not reducible to the behavior of an individual atom within that metal, and it has been argued that the laws which describe this collective behavior are no less fundamental than the laws that describe the atoms themselves. Another attack against the idea of reductionism comes from supporters of the anthropic principle. Some believe that the laws of physics may be randomly determined and explain the fact that we observe certain physical laws by postulating that only a small subset of laws allow for conscious observers. Seen this way, consciousness does not arise from the laws of physics, but rather the observed laws of physics exist because of consciousness. Daniel Dennett defends this basic kind of reductionism, which he says is really little more than materialism, by making a distinction between this and what he calls "Greedy reductionism": the idea that every explanation in every field of science should be reduced all the way down to particle physics or string theory. Greedy reductionism, he says, deserves some of the criticism that has been heaped on reductionism in general because the lowest-level explanation of a phenomenon, even if it exists, is not always the best way to understand or explain it. Richard Dawkins describes the alternative as "hierarchical" reductionism: organisms can be described in terms of DNA, DNA in terms of atoms, atoms in terms of sub-atomic particles; but there is no need to deal with details of sub-atomic particles to explain animal behavior if one can make adequate explanations and predictions at a higher level. Some physicists argue that large structures undergo collective behaviors which are not most usefully described in terms of the behavior of their constituents (see for example emergence) and therefore there is no reason to label the lower-level behaviors as more fundamental. Both Dennett and Steven Pinker argue that too many people who are opposed to science use the words "reductionism" and "reductionist" less to make coherent claims about science than to convey a general distaste for the endeavor. Furthermore, these opponents often use the words in a rather slippery way, to refer to whatever they dislike most about science. Dennett suggests that critics of reductionism may be searching for a way of salvaging some sense of a higher purpose to life, in the form of some kind of non-material / supernatural intervention. Dennett terms such aspirations "skyhooks," in contrast to the "cranes" that reductionism uses to build its understanding of the universe from solid ground. He writes :- :The term that is most often bandied about in these conflicts, typically as a term of abuse, is "reductionism." Those who yearn for skyhooks call those who eagerly settle for cranes "reductionists," and they can often make reductionism seem philistine and heartless. But like most terms of abuse, "reductionism" has no fixed meaning. (Dennett 1995, p. 80) As Pinker puts it, :Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or "determinist." The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad. (Pinker 2002, p. 10) In light of this, it might be wise to make some effort to distinguish between rabble-rousing uses of these words, and efforts to make serious claims with them.

Alternatives to Reductionism

In recent years, the development of systems thinking has provided methods for tackling issues in a holistic rather than a reductionist way.

References and further reading

- Daniel Dennett (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. ISBN 0-684-80290-2
- Steven Pinker (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Viking Penguin.
- Steven Weinberg (2002) describes what he terms the culture war among physicists in his [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15762 review] of A New Kind of Science
- [http://www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/scerri/index.html Eric Scerri] The reduction of chemistry to physics has become a central aspect of the philosophy of chemistry. See several articles by this author. Category:Reductionism Cateogry:Philosophy of science

Greedy reductionism

Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes when the thing we are trying to understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain any additional understanding of the original target. For example, we can reduce temperature to average kinetic motion without denying that temperature exists, so this is good reductionism. In contrast, when we consider the question of why clicking on a hyperlink takes us to one website and not another, any answer that says that it all comes down to electrons and that hyperlinks don't really exist anyhow is a greedy attempt to explain away the problem without solving it. Another example of greedy reductionism is B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, which not only reduced all mental attributes, such as beliefs and feelings, to behavior, but went on to deny that anything mental exists, thus failing to answer the questions it was supposed to. Instead of being able to explain behavior in terms of things such as beliefs, it casts everything in terms of conditioning. This example is particularly relevant because Dennett himself can be categorized as a type of behaviorist, but not the extreme sort who denies what they're supposed to be explaining. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that, without denying that human consciousness exists, we can understand it as coming about from the coordinated activity of many components in the brain that are themselves unconscious. In response, critics accused him of explaining away consciousness because he disputes the existence of certain conceptions of consciousness that he considers overblown and incompatible with what is physically possible. This is likely what motivated Dennett to make the greedy/good distinction in his follow-up book, to freely admit that reductionism can go overboard while pointing out that not all reductionism goes this far. The opposite extreme from greedy reductionism is throwing up your hands and denying that a reductionistic analysis of a complex system can work at all. This tactic is found in some theories that say consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon that cannot be further reduced. Dennett's response is to call such notions mysterian.

Santa Fe Institute

The Santa Fe Institute [SFI] is a non-profit research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico founded by Murray Gell-Mann in 1984 to study complex systems and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study of complexity theory, referred to at SFI as "complexity science." SFI has recently announced that its original mission to develop and disseminate a general theory of complexity has been realized (noting that numerous complexity institutes and departments have sprung up around the world -- cf. [http://www.ccs.fau.edu/ CCS], [http://cscs.umich.edu/ CSCS] at the University of Michigan, the [http://cse.ucdavis.edu/ CSE] at UC-Davis and the NECSI), and that it was working on updating its mission for the coming fifty years.

Scientists associated with the Santa Fe Institute

- W. Brian Arthur
- Per Bak
- Jim Crutchfield
- J. Doyne Farmer
- Murray Gell-Mann
- John H. Holland
- Stuart Kauffman
- Christopher Langton

External links

- [http://www.santafe.edu/ Official SFI site]
- [http://www.ccs.fau.edu/ The Center for Complex Systems]
- [http://cscs.umich.edu/ The Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) at University of Michigan]
- [http://cse.ucdavis.edu/ Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) at UC-Davis]
- [http://necsi.org/html/iccs.html First International Conference on Complex Systems]
- [http://www.ams.org/mathcal/info/2004_sep19-22_cherbourg.html YA "first" international conference on complex systems]
- [http://www.bandungfe.net Bandung Fe Institute] Research Institute for Social Complexity Studies in Indonesia

Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language. Its primary concerns include the nature of linguistic meaning, reference, language use, language learning and creation, language understanding, truth, thought and experience (to the extent that both are linguistic), communication, interpretation, and translation. At heart, the discipline is concerned with five fundamental issues.
- How are sentences composed into a meaningful whole, and what are the meanings of the parts of sentences?
- What is the nature of meaning? (What exactly is a meaning?)
- What do we do with language? (How do we use it socially? What is the purpose of language?)
- How does language relate to the mind, both of the speaker and the interpreter?
- How does language relate to the world?

Overview

translation Philosophers of language are not much concerned with what individual words or sentences mean. The nearest dictionary or encyclopedia may solve the problem of the meaning of words, and to speak a language correctly is generally to know what most sentences mean. What is more interesting for philosophers is the question of what it means for an expression to mean something. Why do expressions have the meanings they have? Which expressions have the same meaning as other expressions, and why? How can these meanings be known? And the best, and simplest, question might be, "what does the word 'meaning' mean?" In a similar vein, philosophers wonder about the relationship between meaning and truth. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are actually true, and more with what kinds of meanings can be true or false. Some examples of questions a truth-oriented philosopher of language might ask include: Can meaningless sentences be true or false? What about sentences about things that don't exist? Is it sentences that are true or false, or is it the usage of sentences? Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth are important not just because they are used in everyday life; language shapes human development, from earliest childhood and continuing to death. Knowledge itself may be intertwined with language. Notions of self, experience, and existence may depend entirely on how language is used and what is learned through it. The topic of learning language leads to all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to have any thoughts without having a language? What kinds of thoughts need a language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how one acts in it? Can anyone reason at all without using language? The philosophy of language is important because, for all of the above reasons, language is important, and language is important because it is inseparable from how one thinks and lives. People in general have a set of vital concepts which are connected with signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," everyone has shaped (or has had shaped for us) a view of the universe and how they have "meaning" within it. Set for the task, many philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology. Some philosophers -- for instance some semiotic outlooks, and some works by linguist Noam Chomsky -- worry that the term "language" is too vague. Entire systems have been developed to clarify the field.

History

The inquiry into language stretches back to the beginnings of western philosophy with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Plato argued in the dialogue Cratylus that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. For example, it is obviously wrong to say that the term "houseboat" is any good when referring to, say, a cat, because cats have nothing to do with houses or boats. He also argued that primitive names (or morphemes) also had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, the letter and sound of "l" for Plato represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of the Cratylus, he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. (A link to the full text of the Cratylus can be found [http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.html here], courtesy of M.I.T.) Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into notions of species and genus. He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This is called a theory of nominalism (see the section below for more details). Medieval philosophers also had some interest in the subject -- for many of them, the interest was provoked by a dependence upon their job of translating Greek texts. Of particular interest is the work of Peter Abelard, noteworthy for his remarkable anticipation of modern ideas of language. Many modern western philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Ferdinand de Saussure, J.L. Austin, J. R. Searle, Leibniz, John Locke, Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Charles Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche also saw the field as important. Though philosophers had always discussed language, it took on a central role in philosophy beginning in the late nineteenth century, especially in the English speaking world and parts of Europe. The philosophy of language was so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood to be a matter of mere philosophy of language. In the 20th century, "language" became an even more central 'theme' within the most diverse traditions of philosophy. The phrase "the linguistic turn", was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that modern-day philosophers put upon language.

Major problems and sub-fields

Composition and parts

A major question in the field - perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers - is, "how does the meaning of a sentence emerge out of its parts?"

Principle of compositionality

Much about composition of sentences is addressed in the work of linguistics of syntax. More logic-oriented semantics tend to look towards the principle of compositionality in order to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the parts of the sentence (words) along with an understanding of its structure.

Problem of universals and composition

One debate that has captured the interest of many philosophers is the debate over the meaning of universals. One might ask, for example, "when people say the word, "rocks", what do they mean?" Two general answers have emerged to this question. Some have said that the expression stands for some real entity out in the world called "rocks". Others have said that it stands for some collection of particular rocks that we put into a common category. The former position has been called philosophical realism, and the latter has been called nominalism. From the radical realist's perspective, the connection between S and M is a connection between two abstract entities. There is an entity, "man", and an entity, "Socrates". These two things connect together in some way or overlap one another. Plato's theory of forms was an instance of this. From a nominalist's perspective, the connection between S and M is the connection between a particular entity (Socrates) and a vast collection of particular things (men). To say that Socrates is a man is to say that Socrates is a part of the class of "men". Another perspective is to consider "man" to be a property of the entity, "Socrates". A property is a characteristic of the thing. Still another perspective considers "man" to be the product of a propositional function. A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (Socrates) and outputs a proposition. In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of man is whatever takes the entity, "Socrates", and turns it into the statement, "Socrates is a man".

The nature of meaning

The answer to the question, "What is the meaning of meaning?", is not immediately obvious. One section of philosophy of language tries to answer this very question.

Types of meaning

Geoffrey Leech posited that there are two essentially different types of linguistic meaning: conceptual and associative. The conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind of meaning is treated by using a technique called the semantic feature analysis. The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension" in the literature) and extension (also called "denotation"). The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic (Mwihaki 2004).

Vagueness

One issue that has bothered philosophers and ordinary people for as long as there have been words is the problem of the vagueness of words. Often, meanings expressed by the speaker are not as explicit as the listener would like them to be. The consequences of vagueness can be disastrous to classical logic because they give rise to the Sorites paradox.

Ideas and meaning

To the question, "what is meaning?", some have answered "meanings are ideas". By such accounts, "ideas" are used to refer to images as held in the mind, or to mental activity in general. Each idea is understood to be necessarily about something external and/or internal, real or imaginary. For example, in contrast to the abstract meaning of the universal "dog", the referent "this dog" may mean a particular real life chihuahua. In both cases, the word is about something, but in the former it is about the class of dogs as generally understood, while in the latter it is about a very real and particular dog in the real world.

Empiricism and words

The classical empiricists are usually taken to be the most strident defenders of idea theories of meaning. David Hume is well-known for his belief that thoughts were kinds of imaginable entities. (See his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 2). It might be inferred that this perspective also applied to his theory of meaning. His forebearer, Locke, seemed a bit more skeptical, considering all ideas to be both imaginable objects of sensation and the very unimaginable objects of reflection. He stressed, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that words are used both as signs for ideas -- but also to signify the lack of certain ideas. Mental images, sounds, and recollections have been called "mental representations" in current literature. Those who defend this view are called representationalists.

Critique of idea theories

Over the past century, idea theories of meaning have been criticized by many philosophers for several reasons. One criticism made as early as George Berkeley and as late as Ludwig Wittgenstein, was that ideas alone are unable to account for the different variations within a general meaning. For example, any hypothetical image of the meaning of "dog" has to include such varied images as a chihuahua, a pug, and a Black Lab; and this seems impossible to imagine, all of those particular breeds looking very different from one another. Another way to see this point is to question why it is that, if we have an image of a specific type of dog (say of a chihuahua), why it should be entitled to represent the entire concept. Another criticism is that some meaningful words, known as non-lexical items, don't have any meaningfully associated image. For example, the word "the" has a meaning, but one would be hard-pressed to find a mental representation that fits it. Another is a problem of composition - that it is difficult to explain how words and phrases combine into sentences if only ideas were involved in meaning. Still another objection lies in the observation that certain linguistic items name something in the real world, and are meaningful, yet which we have no mental representations to deal with. For instance, it is not known what Bismarck's mother looked like, yet the phrase "Bismarck's mother" still has meaning.

A cognitive idea theory

Ludwig Wittgenstein But the idea theory of meaning has lately been defended in new form. Called the theory of prototypes, it suggests that classes are understood on the basis of the ideas we might have about particular, ideal member(s) of the class. For example, the category of "birds" may have the idea of a robin as the prototype -- the ideal kind of bird. With experience, we come to grade the members of the class as being more or less bird-like by comparing the members to the prototype. So, for example, a penguin or an ostrich would sit at the edge of the meaning of "bird", because a penguin is unlike a robin. If true, then this theory would account for the concern expressed by Wittgenstein (above). In which case, one of the more decisive criticisms against the idea theory of meaning would be overcome. This theory of prototypes has been defended by contemporary cognitive scientists Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff.

Truth and meaning

Some have asserted that meaning is nothing substantially more or less than the truth conditions they involve. For such theories, an emphasis is placed upon reference to actual things in the world to account for meaning, with the caveat that reference more or less explains the greater part (or all of) meaning itself.

Logic and language

A set of philosophers who advocated a truth-theory of meaning were the logical positivists, putting stock in the notion that the meaning of a statement arose from how it is verified. In their analysis, logic was at the core of understanding truth and meaning. To understand this insight, some explanation of the history of logic is necessary. Classical logicians had known since Aristotle how to codify certain common patterns of reasoning. But the turn toward language philosophy is tied closely to the development of modern logic. It began with the work of the German logician Gottlob Frege in the late nineteenth century. Frege, simultaneously with George Boole and Charles Sanders Peirce, advanced logic significantly by showing how to codify inferences using Sentential connectives, like and, or and if-then, and quantifiers like all and some. Much of this work was made possible by the development of set theory. Logical analysis was further advanced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their groundbreaking Principia Mathematica, which attempted to produce a formal language with which the truth of all mathematical statements could be demonstrated from first principles. Russell differed from Frege greatly on many points, however. He rejected (or perhaps misunderstood) Frege's sense-reference distinction. He also disagreed that language was of fundamental significance to philosophy, and saw the project of developing formal logic as a way of eliminating all of the confusions caused by ordinary language, and hence at creating a perfectly transparent medium in which to conduct traditional philosophical argument. He hoped, ultimately, to extend the proofs of the Principia to all possible true statements, a scheme he called logical atomism. For a while it appeared that his pupil Wittgenstein had succeeded in this plan with his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". Russell's work, and that of his colleague G. E. Moore, developed in response to what they perceived as the nonsense dominating British philosophy departments at the turn of the century, a kind of British Idealism most of which was derived (albeit very distantly) from the work of Hegel. In response Moore developed an approach ("Common Sense Philosophy") which sought to examine philosophical difficulties by a close analysis of the language used in order to determine its meaning. In this way Moore sought to expunge philosophical absurdities such as "time is unreal". Moore's work would have significant, if oblique, influence (largely mediated by Wittgenstein) on Ordinary language philosophy.

Davidson, Tarski, and truth theories

The Vienna Circle, a famous group of logical positivists from the early 20th century (closely allied with Russell and Frege), adopted the verificationist theory of meaning. The verificationist theory of meaning (in at least one of its forms) states that to say that an expression is meaningful is to say that there are some conditions of experience that could exist to show that the expression is true. As noted, Frege and Russell were two proponents of this way of thinking. A semantic theory of truth was produced by Alfred Tarski for the semantics of logic. According to Tarski's account, meaning consists of a recursive set of rules that end up yielding an infinite set of sentences, "'p' is true if and only if p", covering the whole language. His innovation produced the notion of propositional functions discussed on the section on universals (which he called "sentential functions"), and a model-theoretic approach to semantics (as opposed to a proof-theoretic one). Finally, some links were forged to the correspondence theory of truth (Tarski, 1944). Perhaps the most influential current approach in the contemporary theory of meaning is that sketched by Donald Davidson in his introduction to the collection of essays Truth and Meaning in 1967. There he argued for the following two theses:
- Any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions--as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms.
- Giving the meaning of a sentence, he further argued, was equivalent to stating its truth conditions. He proposed that it must be possible to account for language as a set of distinct grammatical features together with a lexicon, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences built up from these. The result is a theory of meaning that rather resembles, by no accident, Tarski's account. Davidson's account, though brief, constitutes the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics. He proposed simply translating natural languages into first-order predicate calculus in order to reduce meaning to a function of truth.

Critiques of truth-theories of meaning

Quine attacked both verificationism and the very notion of meaning in his famous essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". In it, he suggested that meaning was nothing more than a vague and dispensable notion. Instead, he asserted, what was more interesting to study was the synonymy between signs. He also pointed out that verificationism was tied to the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and asserted that such a divide was defended ambiguously. He also suggested that the unit of analysis for any potential investigation into the world (and, perhaps, meaning) would be the entire body of statements taken as a collective, not just individual statements on their own. Other criticisms can be raised on the basis of the limitations that truth-conditional theorists themselves admit to. Tarski, for instance, recognized that truth-conditional theories of meaning only make sense of statements, but fail to explain the meanings of the lexical parts that make up statements. Rather, the meaning of the parts of statements is presupposed by an understanding of the truth-conditions of a whole statement, and explained in terms of what he called "satisfaction conditions". Still another objection (noted by Frege and others) was that some kinds of statements don't seem to have any truth-conditions at all. For instance, "Hello!" has no truth-conditions, because it doesn't even attempt to tell the listener anything about the state of affairs in the world. In other words, different propositions have different grammatical moods. Deflationist accounts of truth, sometimes called 'irrealist' accounts, are the staunchest source of criticism of truth-conditional theories of meaning. According to them, "truth" is a word with no serious meaning or function in discourse except to affirm an expression. For instance, for the deflationist, the sentences "It's true that Tiny Tim is trouble" and "Tiny Tim is trouble" are equivalent. In consequence, for the deflationist, any appeal to truth as an account of meaning has little explanatory power. The sort of truth-theories presented here can also be attacked for their formalism both in practice and principle. The principle of formalism is challenged by the informalists, who suggest that language is largely a construction of the speaker, and so, not compatible with formalization. The practice of formalism is challenged by those who observe that formal languages (such as present-day quantificational logic) fail to capture the expressive power of natural languages (as is arguably demonstrated in the awkward character of the quantificational explanation of definite description statements, as laid out by Bertrand Russell). Finally, over the past century, forms of logic have been developed that are not dependent exclusively on the notions of truth and falsity. Some of these types of logic have been called modal logics. They explain how certain logical connectives such as "if-then" work in terms of necessity and possibility. Indeed, modal logic was the basis of one of the most popular and rigorous formulations in modern semantics called the Montague grammar. The successes of such systems naturally give rise to the argument that these systems have captured the natural meaning of connectives like if-then far better than an ordinary, truth-functional logic ever could.

Usage and meaning

Wittgenstein's turn

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was originally an artificial language philosopher, following the influence of Russell, Frege, and the Vienna Circle. However, as he matured, he came to appreciate more and more the phenomenon of natural language. Philosophical Investigations, published after his death, signalled a sharp departure from his earlier work with its focus upon ordinary language use. His work would come to inspire future generations and spur forward a whole new discipline, which explained meaning in a new way. Meaning in natural languages was seen as primarily a question of how the speaker uses language to express intentions. This close examination of natural language proved to be a powerful philosophical technique. Practitioners who were influenced by Wittgenstein's approach have included an entire tradition of thinkers, featuring J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Paul Grice, R. M. Hare, R. S. Peters, and Jürgen Habermas.

Peter Strawson, Keith Donnellan, and usage

Past philosophers had understood reference to be tied to words themselves. However, Sir Peter Strawson disagreed in his seminal essay, "On Referring", where he argued that there is nothing true about statements on their own; rather, only the uses of statements could be considered to be true or false. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the ordinary use perspective is its insistence upon the distinctions between meaning and use. "Meanings", for ordinary language philosophers, are the instructions for usage of words - the common and conventional definitions of words. Usage, on the other hand, is the actual meanings that individual speakers have - they things that an individual speaker in a particular context wants to refer to. The word "dog" is an example of a meaning, but pointing at a nearby dog and shouting "This dog smells foul!" is an example of usage. From this distinction between usage and meaning arose the divide between the fields of Pragmatics and Semantics. Yet another distinction is of some utility in discussing language: "mentioning". Mention is when an expression refers to itself as a linguistic item, usually surrounded by quotation marks. For instance, in the expression "'Opopanax' is hard to spell", what is referred to is the word itself ("opopanax") and not what it means (an obscure gum resin). Frege had referred to instances of mentioning as "opaque contexts". In his essay, "Reference and Definite Descriptions", Keith Donnellan sought to improve upon Strawson's distinction. He pointed out that there are two uses of definite descriptions: attributive and referential. Attributive uses provide a description of whoever is being referred to, while referential uses point out the actual referent. Attributive uses are like mediated references, while referential uses are more directly referential.

Paul Grice

The philosopher Paul Grice, working within the ordinary language tradition, understood "meaning" to have two kinds: natural and non-natural. Natural meaning had to do with cause and effect, for example with the expression "these spots mean measels". Non-natural meaning, on the other hand, had to do with the intentions of the speaker in communicating something to the listener. In his essay, Logic and Conversation, Grice went on to explain and defend an explanation of how conversations work. His guiding maxim was called the cooperative principle, which claimed that the speaker and the listener will have mutual expectations of the kind of information that will be shared. The principle is broken down into four maxims: Quality (which demands truthfulness and honesty), Quantity (demand for just enough information as is required), Relation (relevance of things brought up), and Manner (lucidity). This principle, if and when followed, lets the speaker and listener figure out the meaning of certain implications by way of inference. The works of Grice led to an avalanche of research and interest in the field, both supportive and critical. One spinoff was called Relevance theory, developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson during the mid-1980s, whose goal was to make the notion of relevance more clear.

Jurgen Habermas

In his work, "Universal pragmatics", Habermas began a program that sought to improve upon the work of the ordinary language tradition. In it, he laid out the goal of a valid conversation as a pursuit of mutual understanding.

Conceptual and inferential role semantics

Main article: Inferential role semantics Michael Dummett argued against the kind of truth-conditional semantics presented by Davidson; instead he argued that basing semantics on assertion conditions avoids a number of difficulties with truth-conditional semantics, such as the transcendental nature of certain kinds of truth condition. He leverages work done in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a kind of inferential role semantics, where:
- The meaning of sentences and grammatical constructs is given by their assertion conditions; and
- Such a semantics is only guaranteed to be coherent if the inferences associated with the parts of language are in logical harmony. A semantics based upon assertion conditions is called a verificationist semantics: cf. the verificationism of the Vienna Circle. Other work has been done by Gilbert Harman on the closely related subject of conceptual role semantics.

Critiques of use theories of meaning

Cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor has noted that use theories (of the Wittgensteinian kind) seem to be committed to the notion that language is a public phenomenon -- that there is no such thing as a "private language". Fodor criticizes such claims because he thinks it is necessary to create or describe the language of thought, which would seemingly require the existence of a "private language". Philosopher of language Christopher Gauker has indirectly attacked use theories of meaning by denying that intention matters in communication.

Consequences and meaning

Still another perspective comes courtesy of the Pragmatists, who insist that the meaning of an expression lies in its consequences. Philosopher and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce wrote the following: "The whole function of thought is to produce habits of action... To develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves. Now, the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they may be." "...I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves." (from the essay "[http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html How to Make Our Ideas Clear]", hosted courtesy of peirce.org). In a sense, Peirce adovates a theory of meaning that is somewhat like verificationism in these statements, but is unique in how he arrives at that point. Outside of the Pragmatic tradition was Canadian 20th century philosopher of media Marshall McLuhan. His famous dictum, "the medium is the message", can be understood to be a consequentialist theory of meaning. His idea was that the medium which is used to communicate carries with it information: namely, the consequences that arise from the fact that the medium has become popular. For example, one "meaning" of the lightbulb might be the idea of being able to read during the night. The controversial social psychologist and ethicist Thomas Szasz also seemed to hold this view, stating that "a word means its consequences" [http://www.szasz.com/isdepressionadiseasetranscript.html in debate].

Language and the world

Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called "theories of reference".
- Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory, which appealed to the sense of a referent (the sense being the way the referent is presented).
- By contrast, in response to British idealism, Bertrand Russell sought to scrap all "unreal" things from language. To do this, he created a direct reference theory. Frege's mediated reference theory seems to differ from Russell's direct reference theory in that the former seems to leave room for senses, while the latter does not. This is problematic because it seemingly fails to recognize the difference in meaning between two statements that have the same referent but have different meanings. For example, "The President of the United States in 2004" and "George W. Bush" refer to the same thing, but in one case the person is presented in a certain light - as the President - while in the other they are presented just by name. There has to be something in between that accounts for this meaningful difference.

Mind and language

Innateness and learning

Some of the major issues in the philosophy of language that deal with the mind are paralleled by modern psycholinguistics. Some important questions: how much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What's the connection between thought and language? There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning:
- The behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning;
- The hypothesis testing perspective, which states that syntactic rules and meanings are triangulated by a child using hypotheses, in much the same way that any learning occurs;
- The innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired. There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language, as well:
- Connectionist models, which emphasize the idea that person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of network;
- Nativist models, which assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition;
- Computation models, which emphasize the work done related to logic-like processing of the mind;
- Emergentist models, which focus upon the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge out of simpler biological parts;
- Reductionist models

Language and thought

Another important question relating to language and the mind is, to what extent does language influence thought (and vice-versa)? There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, ranging across a number of suggestions. For example, linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a linguistic community can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell's novel "1984"). To a lesser extent, issues in the philosophy of rhetoric (including the notion of framing of debate) suggest the influence of language upon thought. There is also some controversy about the very meaning of a "thought". Gottlob Frege believed that thought occupied a "third realm", that was neither psychological nor a part of the universe, and believed that his Begriffsschrift calculus was a theory of thought. By contrast, Wittgenstein - in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - considered thought to be a "significant proposition".

Social interaction and language

Metasemantics is a term of art used to describe all those fields that examine the social conditions that give rise to meanings and languages. Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and Stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two examples of metasemantic fields.

Meaning and social structures

One of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism, is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings.

Common ground

Common ground is a key notion in Pragmatics, given popular formulation by Herbert Clark. He investigates how all communication depends on a store of common knowledge between speaker and listener.

Rhetoric and discourse analysis

Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use in order to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, teach, etc. Some offshoots include:
- The examination of propaganda and didacticism;
- The examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behavior of others, and defines relationships);
- The effects of gendered language;
- Linguistic transparency, or speaking in an accessible manner, inspired by George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language;
- Performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"), pioneered by J.L. Austin's book, How to Do Things With Words.
- The logical concept of the domain of discourse.

Literary theory

Literary theory is a discipline that overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, being an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics.

Miscellaneous

In 1950s, an artificial language loglan was invented that is based on first order predicate logic.

Important theorists

Among the most important theorists in the philosophy of language are:
- Plato and Aristotle - classical philosophers
- Ferdinand de Saussure - founder of linguistic Structuralism
- John Stuart Mill - influential in theories of reference
- Ludwig Wittgenstein - creator of the "meaning is use" dictum
- Ernst Cassirer - theory of language as part of a general theory of symbolic forms
- Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger - philosophers tied to the Humboldtian tradition
- Valentin Voloshinov, Rossi-Landi - Marxist theoreticians of language
- Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida - Post-structuralist figures
- Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler - feminist theoreticians of language
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man - Theoreticians of literature whose work is of philosophical relevance
- Charles Peirce, Umberto Eco - advocates of philosophically oriented forms of semiotics
- Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague - analytical philosophers of language rooted in logic-like analysis of language
- Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor - syntactic, computational, and knowledge-oriented perspectives
- Keith Donnellan, Jürgen Habermas, J.L. Austin, H. P. Grice, and John Searle - use-oriented theorists

Important topics and terms

- Fields of interest
- Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Semantics, Semiotics, Syntax
- Semantics of logic
- General semantics
- Symbolic interactionism
- Parts of speech
- Speaker / (or "Encoder")
- Interpreter / (or "Decoder")
- Intentionality
- Signs and Phonemes
- Tone
- Truth conditions (and / or satisfaction conditions)
- Meaning
- Ideas
- Sense and reference
- Speech acts
- Linguistic Context (see also deixis)
- Linguistic community
- Essential aspects of meaning
- Concepts
- Categories, sets, classes, and Natural kinds
- Types and tokens
- Genus and Species
- Connotation and denotation (intension and extension)
- Statements and propositions
- Subject and predicate
- Synonyms, antonyms, and all other -onyms
- Essential aspects of reference
- Entities
- Properties
- Relations
- Deixis
- Referential use
- Attributive use
- Linguistic phenomena
- Demonstratives and Indexicals
- Descriptions, esp. Definite descriptions
- Proper names
- Metaphor
- "Is" (of identity, predication, existence)
- Sentences (Commandative, Indicative, and Performative)

References

- Collins, John. (2001). http://www.sorites.org/Issue_13/collins.htm
- Gauker, Christopher. Zero Tolerance for Pragmatics. http://asweb.artsci.uc.edu/philosophy/gauker/ZeroTolerance.pdf
- Greenberg, Mark and Harman, Gilbert. (2005). Conceptual Role Semantics. http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/CRS.pdf
- Hale, B. and Crispin Wright, Ed. (1999). Blackwell Companions To Philosophy. Malden, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers.
- Lycan, W. G. (2000). Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, Routledge.
- Miller, James. (1999). http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1999m12.1/msg00185.htm
- Mwihaki, Alice. (2004). http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/SwaFo/SF11Mwihaki.pdf
- Stainton, Robert J. (1996). Philosophical perspectives on language. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press.
- Tarski, Alfred. (1944). The Semantical Conception of Truth. http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html
- Glossary of Linguistic terms. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm Category:Linguistics Category:Branches of philosophy ko:언어철학 ja:言語哲学

Gestalt

Gestalt is a German word meaning shape or form. The word also bears connotations to creativity (Gestaltung). In English gestalt refers to the concept where an entity's properties cannot be discovered from the total properties of its parts. The more general English equivalents are synergy, holism, emergence, and variations on the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
- In psychology, Gestalt can refer to:
- Gestalt psychology (Gestalt theory), and Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy
- Gestalt therapy
- The Gestalt effect
- Gestalt was also the name of an environment-query function in Mac OS.
- Gestalt is also a term used in Dungeons and Dragons to represent a warrior/arcane mage multiclass combination or character concept, although the term can be more generally used to describe when the features of two or more classes are combined to create a 'mixed' class at first level (also known as taking apprentice levels). In Dungeons and Dragons v3.5, gestalt is a variant rule from the sourcebook Unearthed Arcana which allows a character to simultaneously take two classes at once, gaining the abilities and strengths of both.
- Fans of the Transformers (and to some degree Hasbro) use the term gestalt to refer to teams of robots which can combine together to form one large robot which is "stronger than the sum of its parts".
- Author Theodore Sturgeon (February 26, 1918 - May 8, 1985) referred to the term gestalt in his book More Than Human (Farrar & Straus, 1953. International Fantasy Award) to describe a series of characters that together created "a greater being", also implying that this was the next stage in human evolution. Nonetheless the different people that formed the gestalt could be changed for another person with similar characteristics (for example, a person that performed as a "head" could be exchanged for another person as long as he was able to be a "head" and was accepted in the gestalt). Category:German loanwords

Holism in science

Holism in science, or Holistic science, is a scientific paradigm that emphasizes the study of complex systems. Not a scientific discipline itself, it defines a philosophical lens by which emergence is taken into account when applying the scientific method, often within a wider interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary mode of inquiry. This practice is in contrast to a purely analytic tradition which proports to explain everything by understanding systems by dividing them into their smallest possible or discernible elements and understanding their elemental properties alone.

Features considered central to the holistic approach

The term holistic science has been used as a category encompassing a number of scientific research fields (see some examples below). The term may not have a precise definition. Fields of scientific research considered potentially holistic do however have certain things in common. First, they are multidisciplinary. Second, they are concerned with the behavior of complex systems. Third, they recognize feedback within systems as a crucial element for understanding their behavior. The Santa Fe Institute, a center of holistic scientific research in the United States, expresses it like this: :The two dominant characteristics of the SFI research style are commitment to a multidisciplinary approach and an emphasis on the study of problems that involve complex interactions among their constituent parts.[http://www.santafe.edu/research/indexResearchAreas.php]

Opposition to reductionism

Some advocates of holism refer to orthodox science as reductionist science or the reductionist paradigm or greedy reductionism. This is a compact way to allude to a tendency of classical science towards the modular: that is, to break systems down into manageable parts for study. The holistic premise is that there is a possible qualitative difference between an entire system and its parts: that modularisation may fail. As applied to science, holists may generally assert that this difference can warrant the kind of rigorous scrutiny typical of scientific inquiry. The distinction of approach then lies not so much in the subjects chosen for study, but in the methods and assumptions used to study them. That said, holistic methods are not generally at odds with the classical scientific method. Where holistic scientists come from a standard science background, holistic work in science tends to be, to varying degrees, a marriage of the two approaches. For example gestalt psychology grew out of early experimental psychology.

Examples of holistic fields of study in science

Many scientific disciplines are affected by the holistic paradigm. Some of these are widely accepted parts of mainstream science, while others are variously considered to be protoscientific or even pseudoscientific.

Systems biology

A fledgling field in which scientists endeavor to harness large quantities of biological data to gain insights into the functioning of entire biological systems (i.e. plants, animals, organisms). See the Systems biology article for more information.

System dynamics modelling

In system dynamics modeling, a field that originated at MIT, a holistic controlling paradigm organizes scientific method, but uses the results of reductionist science to define static relationships between variables in a modeling procedure that permits simulation of the dynamics of the system under study.

Complexity theory

Another area of intense holistic scientific research is complexity theory. Research in this area began in 1980s at the Santa Fe Institute, and this institute remains a driving force in the field.

Cognitive science

The field of cognitive science, or the study of mind and intelligence has some examples for holistic approaches. These include Unified Theory of Cognition (Allen Newell, e.g. SOAR, ACT-R as models) and many others, many of which rely on the concept of emergence, i.e. the interplay of many entities make up a functioning whole. Non-holistic functionalist approaches within cognitive science include e.g. the modularity of mind paradigm. Cognitive science need not concern only human cognition. Biologist Marc Bekoff has done holistic, interdisciplinary scientific research in animal cognition and has published a book about it (see below).

Neural networks and artificial intelligence

Another category of holistic research consists of attempts to simulate the human brain or build systems that function along the same lines as the human brain. The field as a whole is called artificial intelligence and the subfield neural networks in particular can be considered holistic, as it is based on the assumption that connections and feedback between simple nodes arranged in a system, or network, can give rise to behavior similar to intelligent or cognition-based behavior.

Other examples

- Ecology, or ecological science, i.e. studying the ecology at levels ranging from populations, communities, and ecosystems up to the biosphere as a whole (for more information, see ecology).
- The study of climate change can be considered holistic science, as the climate (and the Earth itself) constitutes a complex system to which the scientific method cannot be applied using current technology.
- Princeton University hosts a holistic science project entitled "Global Consciousness Project" that uses a network of physical random number generators to register events of global signficance, testing the hypothesis that there is a collective human consciousness at work in the world. [http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ External Link]
- In 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a book, Das Farbenlehre (The Theory of Colors), that not only parted radically with the dominant Newtonian light and optical theories of his time, but also with the entire Enlightenment methodology of reductive science. Although the theory was not received well by scientists, Goethe—considered one of the most important intellectual figures in modern Europe—thought of his color theory as his greatest accomplishment. Holistic theorists and scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake still refer to Goethe's Theory of Colors as an inspiring example of holistic science. The introduction to the book lays out Goethe's unique philosophy of science.
- Another example of how holistic and reductionist science can be mutually supportive and cooperative is free choice profiling.

Writers on holistic science

A text often referred to by writers on holistic science (and by all who recognize the existence of scientific paradigms) is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. While this book does not address holistic science directly, it is relevant because, in it, Kuhn originally coined the term "scientific paradigm" and introduced the whole concept of opposing, or even warring, paradigms in science. The following have written influential books, treating non-reductionist or holistic science:
- Teilhard de Chardin, French paleontologist, biologist, philosopher (1881-1955, see also [http://www.gaiamind.com/Teilhard.html external biography])
- Francisco Varela, Chilean biologist (1946-2001)
- Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and prolific author (see [http://www.sheldrake.org/ his personal website])
- Mae-Wan Ho, biologist
- Stephen Wolfram, author of A New Kind of Science
- [http://philosophy.rice.edu/faculty.cfm?doc_id=843 Eric Margolis] of Rice University, co-author of Concepts: core readings (with Stephen Lawrence of the University of Sheffield)
- Ken Wilber, American philosopher, psychologist and author of The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (see [http://www.kenwilber.com/ his official website])
- Fred Alan Wolf, American physicist, author of Taking the Quantum Leap
- Marc Bekoff, American biologist and cognitive ethologist, author of Species of Mind (with philosopher Colin Allen)

Holistic science in academe

Perhaps due to the inherent multidisciplinary nature of holistic science, academic institutions have been slow to come forward with degree programs for it. Those that have done so include [http://www.schumachercollege.org Schumacher College] in the UK, which offers an MSc degree program in Holistic Science. Several universities have set up centers dedicated to one or more scientific fields where holistic approaches are common. These include the University of Michigan (Center for the Study of Complex Systems), Princeton University (the Global Consciousness Project), Rice University (Cognitive Sciences Program), and the London Metropolitan University (Centre for Postsecular Studies). There are also several non-university academic institutions and societies that are dedicated to holistic science or open to holistic ideas. For example, Santa Fe Institute (a major center of holistic scientific research in the U.S.) and the Scientific and Medical Network in Europe.

Opposing views

Holistic science is controversial. One opposing view is that holistic science is "pseudoscience" because it does not rigorously follow the scientific method despite the use of a scientifically-sounding language. Science journalist John Horgan has expressed this view in the book, The End of Science 1996. He wrote that a certain pervasive model within holistic science, self-organized criticality, for example, "is not really a theory at all. Like punctuated equilibrium, self-organized criticality is merely a description, one of many, of the random fluctuations, the noise, permeating nature." By the theorists' own admissions, he said, such a model "can generate neither specific predictions about nature nor meaningful insights. What good is it, then?"

Bibliography

- Paul Davies and John Gribbin. The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries That Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality. [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671728415/ref=ase_khaldea/002-4996976-1353618 Amazon link].
- [http://www.geocities.com/northsheep/holiscience.html Article "What is the Proper Relationship of Holistic and Reductionist Science?" by Karl North]
- [http://www.foodandhealing.com/article-wholismscience.htm Article "The Fine Line: (W)holism and Science" by Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.]
- [http://www.khaldea.com/articles/ni2.shtml Article "A New Image of Cosmos & Anthropos: From Ancient Wisdom to a Philosophy of Wholeness" by Michael R. Meyer]
- Excerpts from [http://www.eclipse.co.uk/moordent/holistic.htm Holistic Science - towards a second Renaissance] by R.J.C. Wilding (unpublished book in process)
- Article "[http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mr.king/writings/essays/essaysukc/csasukc0.html Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Science]" by Mike King (available on-line)
- Article "[http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/goodwin216.htm Patterns of Wholeness: Introducing Holistic Science]" by Brian Goodwin, from the journal [http://www.resurgence.org/index.htm Resurgence]
- Article "[http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/goodwin201.htm From Control to Participation]" by Brian Goodwin, from the journal [http://www.resurgence.org/index.htm Resurgence]
- [http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/book%20chapters/goethe_intro.htm Introduction] to Goethe's Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, edited by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc. State University of New York Press, 1998

External links

- [http://www.santafe.edu Santa Fe Institute]
- [http://www.isss.org International Society for the System Sciences]
- [http://www.schumachercollege.org Schumacher College]
- [http://www.cscs.umich.edu/ Center for the Study of Complex Systems] at the University of Michigan
- [http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~cognsci/ Rice Cognitive Sciences Program]
- [http://www.scimednet.org The Scientific and Medical Network]
- [http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ Princeton University Global Consciousness Project]
- [http://www.jnani.org/postsecular/index.htm Centre for Postsecular Studies] at the London Metropolitan University Science Category:Interdisciplinary fields Category:Systems theory Category:Cognitive science Category:Pseudoscience

Synergetics

Synergetics can refer to either of the following:
- A branch of physics dealing with the self-organizing properties of matter in thermodynamic gradients, invented by Hermann Haken.
- A book by Buckminster Fuller
- A "self-discipline" pioneered by Buckminster Fuller: see [http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/synintro.html].

Homeopathy

Homeopathy (also spelled homœopathy or homoeopathy) from the Greek words όμοιος, hómoios (similar) and πάθος, páthos (suffering), is a system of alternative medicine, notable for its controversial practice of diluting remedies until there is less than one molecule of the original ingredient left per dose. The model of homeopathy was developed by the Saxon physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) and first published in 1796. Neither its empirical nor its hypothetical foundation has been verified by the scientific method. Homeopathy calls for treating "like with like", a doctrine referred to as the "Law of Similars". The practitioner considers the totality of symptoms of a given case, then chooses a remedy that has been reported in a homeopathic proving to produce a similar set of symptoms in healthy subjects. This remedy is usually given in extremely low concentrations prepared according to a procedure known as potentisation, because it is held that this process gives higher dilutions more therapeutic power.

Basic principles

Theory of disease

The conventional theory of disease in Hahnemann's time was based on the four humours. Mainstream medicine focused on restoring the balance in the humours, either by attempting to remove an excess of a humour (by such methods as bloodletting and purging, the use of laxatives, enemas and nauseous substances that made patients vomit) or by suppressing symptoms associated with the humours causing trouble, such as giving feverish (and so hot and wet) patients substances associated with cold and dry. The late 18th century was a time of intense exploration, with many new diseases being identified, and the model of internal humours was proving inadequate. For example, many new diseases were clearly associated with certain geographic regions, which was difficult to explain through entirely internal mechanisms. Scientists were considering a model of external causes, and Hahnemann was led to speculate on such causes of disease. Beginning with his early work, Hahnemann rejected the prevailing physical model, in favour of a view of disease as more dynamic or spirit-like. He came to consider the spiritual factors as the root cause of all disease, in what he termed the "highest disease." Most later homeopaths, in particular James Tyler Kent, have tended to put even more emphasis on spiritual factors. Vitalism had been a part of mainstream science through the 18th century. Whereas modern medicine sees bacteria and viruses as the causes of many diseases, some modern homeopaths regard them as effects, not causes, of disease. Others have to some extent adapted to the views of modern medicine by referring to disturbances in, and stimulation of, the immune system, rather than the vital force. Scientific medicine has discarded vitalism and its associated beliefs in favour of the germ theory of disease, as part of a physiological model based on the work of scientists like Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, and Joseph Lister. Moreover, following Avogadro's discovery it has firmly rejected the possibility of most homeopathic preparations having any medicinal action.

The "Law of Similars"

Homeopathy rests on a principle known as the "Law of Similars". Hahnemann first expressed it as the exhortation similia similibus curentur or "let likes cure likes." The idea did not originate with Hahnemann, but he was the first to use it as the basis of a system of medicine. The "Law of Similars" is generally considered by homeopaths as a law of nature. Following this principle, the appropriate homeopathic substance for treating a disease is one which induces similar symptoms in a healthy person. The relation of similarity is primarily determined through provings, in which relatively healthy volunteers who are given a substance in homeopathic form record changes in their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual symptoms. This information is subsequently compiled and presented remedy-by-remedy in a Materia Medica. Subsequent versions of the Materia Medica additionally incorporate symptoms observed to have been cured by the remedy. A homeopathic repertory is an index of the Materia Medica, namely a listing of symptoms, followed by remedies reputed to cure them. With the growth of information on remedies such an index has become an indispensable tool for narrowing down the range of possibilities of appropriate remedy for a given case, although it is still properly treated as an adjunct to the Materia Medica. At first, Hahnemann proved substances known to him as poisons or as remedies. Hahnemann's findings from provings were first recorded in his Materia Medica Pura. Kent's Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica (1905) lists 217 remedies, and modern drugs and chemicals are being added continually to contemporary versions. As a result, homeopathy uses a wide variety of animal, plant, mineral, and chemical substances of natural or synthetic origin. Examples include Natrum muriaticum (sodium chloride or table salt),lachesis muta (the venom of the bushmaster snake), Opium, and Thyroidinum (thyroid hormone). Other homeopaths during and after Hahnemann's time, notably Hering and Lux, developed remedies called nosodes, which are homeopathic dilutions of the agent or the product of the disease in question. Rabies nosode, for example, is made by potentizing the saliva of a rabid dog. Some homeopaths also use a number of more esoteric substances, known as imponderables because the prepartions do not originate from a material substance but from electromagnetic or electrical energy presumed to have been captured by direct exposure (X-ray, Sol (sunlight), [http://www.hominf.org/posi/posiintr.htm Positronium], and [http://homeoint.org/clarke/e/elect.htm Electricitas] (electricity)) or through the use of a telescope (Polaris). Recent ventures by individual homeopaths into the realm of esoteric substances include [http://uk.geocities.com/veryscarymary/stormremedy1.html Tempesta] (thunderstorm), and [http://www.biolumanetics.net/tantalus/Cases/BerlinWall.htm Berlin wall]. Today, about 3000 remedies are used in homeopathy, of which approximately 300 are used based on comprehensive Materia Medica information, a further 1500-or-so on relatively fragmentary knowledge, and the rest are used experimentally in difficult clinical situations based on the law of similars, either without empirical knowledge of their homeopathic properties or through purely empirical knowledge independent of the law of similars. Examples include: the use of an isopathic (disease causing) agent as a first prescription in a 'stuck' case, when the beginning of disease can be traced to a specific event such as vaccination; the use of a biologically or chemically related substance when a remedy fails to act yet seems well-indicated; and more recently, the use of substances based on their place in the natural classification of their respective kingdoms (the periodic table or relevant biological taxonomy). This last approach is considered very promising by progressives in the homeopathic community, because it allows for grouping remedies and classifying the ever-burgeoning Materia Medica, but is rejected by many purists because it involves speculation about remedy action in the absence of proper provings. The "Law of Similars" is the guiding principle in homeopathy, but calling it a "law" is misleading. It is, rather, an axiom or postulate which forms the foundation of the homeopathic system and through the application of which homeopaths arrive at their diagnosis. As it cannot be disproved scientifically (since a failure to cure homeopathically can always be attributed to incorrect selection of a remedy), the "Law of Similars" derives its justification from its contribution to the clinical results that homeopaths claim. The application of this principle, however, is not straightforward: there exist multiple methodologies for determining the most-similar remedy (the simillimum), and homeopaths will often disagree on the diagnosis. This is due in part to the complexity of the idea of 'totality of symptoms' to which the law refers, as homeopaths will not use all the symptoms of a patient, but will decide which are the most characteristic; this evaluation of the gathered clinical data is the aspect of diagnosis requiring the most knowledge and experience. Finally, the remedy picture as found in entries of the Materia Medica is always more comprehensive than the symptomatology that a single individual can ever exhibit. These confounding factors mean that a homeopathic diagnosis remains presumptive until it is verified through testing the effect of the remedy on the patient. See also: List of common homeopathic remedies

The "Theory of Infinitesimals"

The most characteristic—and controversial—principle of homeopathy is that the potency of a remedy can be enhanced (and side effects diminished) by dilution in a particular procedure known as dynamization or potentization. Liquids are successively diluted (with water or occasionally alcohol) and shaken by 10 hard strikes against an elastic body, a process called succussion. Insoluble solids are diluted by grinding them with lactose, a process known as trituration. Homeopathic practitioners claim to observe that the vigorous agitation following each dilution transfers some of the "essential property" of the substance to the water, which fits in with the concept of disease as a disturbance in the "vital force" of the patient. The dilution factor at each stage is traditionally 1:10 (D or X potencies) or 1:100 (C potencies). Hahnemann advocated the use of 30C dilutions for most purposes, i.e. dilution by a factor of 100³⁰ = 10⁶⁰. Critics point out that since Avogadro's number is only 6.022 × 10²³ particles/mole the chance that even one molecule of the original would be present in a 15C solution is small and the chance of one molecule of the original being present in a 30C solution is infinitesimal. Some later homeopaths, in particular Kent, advocated the use of much higher potencies, whose manufacture could no longer be practically achieved by the traditional methods, but required succussion without dilution (Jenichen), higher dilution factors (LM potencies are diluted by a factor of 50,000), or machines which in some way integrate dilution and succussion into a continuous process (Korsakoff). Higher dilutions are generally considered stronger and 'deep-acting'. This is in contrast to pharmacology and biochemistry, which hold that the effects of a substance are always due to its physical or biochemical activity in the patient's body, and therefore that generally the more of an active ingredient is present in a drug, the more effect (whether positive, negative, or both) it will have. The choice of potency will depend on a number of factors. These include how deep-seated the disease appears to be; whether the disease is primarily physical or more mental/emotional; the patient's sensitivity based on the practitioner's intuitive assessment or previous reactions to remedies; and the desired dosing regimen based on patient-compliance considerations (e.g., low potency repeated often vs. high potency repeated seldom). There are many theories and traditions of potency use. For example, as a general rule French and German homeopaths use lower potencies than their American counterparts. What most homeopaths agree on is that the choice of potency is secondary to the choice of remedy: a well chosen remedy will act in a variety of potencies, but an approximately matched remedy might act only in certain potencies.

Chronic disease

Although homeopathy is often used for the treatment of acute illness, there are several distinctive theoretical principles that apply mainly to the homeopathic treatment of chronic disease:

Suppression

A prominent role in the homeopathic theory of disease belongs to the notion of suppression. Its initial meaning consisted of the belief that there are diseases whose external manifestations prevent development of inner symptoms of the same disease. In his Chronic Diseases Hahnemann argued that mistreatment of diseases of the skin leads to disease 'deeper' in the organism, listing numerous cases in support. Present-day homeopaths invoke this notion in their claim that symptoms are not in themselves the disease, but rather represent an underlying disturbance of the organism's vitality. As they seek to address this underlying disease, homeopaths do not automatically regard the disappearance of a symptom (whether spontaneous or in response to some treatment) as a favorable event: under some cases this could instead indicate a weakening of the organism's ability to express the symptom, and because the underlying disturbance is still present, sooner or later it is expressed as a symptom elsewhere in the organism. They further claim that the tendency of past skin manifestations to reappear transiently following successful homeopathic prescribing is considered evidence in support of the this notion. It is maintained that although suppression is sometimes necessary for the patient's welfare or may even be life saving, it is regarded unfavorably in the context of long-term prognosis. In the modern context the issue arises mainly with respect to the use of corticosteroid treatment for skin disease, allergies, and asthma, and the use of chemotherapy, as homeopathic treatment is claimed to be significantly less effective under immune-system suppression. Critics assert that the notion of suppression is deeply flawed, being based on erroneous intepretation of some clinical facts Hahnemann adduced in support of the theory. This is illustrated by Hahnemann's reasoning about the development of symptoms of syphilis: Physicians of his time regularly tried but failed to stop the progression of the disease by destroying the chancre that manifests early on. Hahnemann saw a non-existent causal relation between these events, arguing that the removal of the chancre was the cause of the disease's progression, writing that syphilis :"...can only proceed from the uncured indwelling veneral disease, whose external substitute and suppresser (the chancre, which, as long as it exists undisturbed, prevents the outbreak of the syphilis) has been destroyed locally by the physician, and can consequently no longer hinder its outbreak." But since the clinical course of untreated syphilis involves the spontaneous disappearance of the primary chancre only to be followed by more extensive skin and systemic manifestations some time later, Hahnemann was wrong both in his observations (that the chancre remained indefinitely when untreated) and theory (that localized treatment of the chancre was the cause of later symptoms).

Direction of cure

Hahnemann's protégé Constantine Hering systematized Hahnemann's observations concerning the relation between symptoms by noting that homeopathic treatment often brought back previously suppressed symptoms of the patient (known as "return of old symptoms"), with cure tending to proceed:
- from more vital to less vital organs;
- from the interior to the surface; and (when applicable)
- from the head and torso to the extremities. Thus, as an example, a patient originally treated with medicinal ointments for a body-wide rash, later became asthmatic, and was now being treated homeopathically for suicidal depression, would tend first to recover emotionally while experiencing transient asthma symptoms and the reappearance of his skin rash, which would leave the core of his body first and his extremities last. Although this set of observations later became known as "Hering's Law of Direction of Cure", it is not a strict law but a clinical pattern whose presence indicates a high likelihood that deep cure has taken place and that recurrence is unlikely.

Homeopathic aggravation

The phenomenon of existing symptoms worsening in response to homeopathic treatment is termed homeopathic aggravation. The idea of aggravation can be considered a consequence of the law of similars, whereby a remedy acts by accentuating the disease symptoms, thus prompting the organism's healing response. Some homeopaths regard a quick aggravation as an indication of strong vitality and tend to be encouraged by its presence, while others strive to avoid aggravations in favor of the patient's comfort throughout treatment.

Constitutional treatment

Although Hahnemann himself did not have an explicit theory of physical constitution or psychological disposition, he did observe that general symptoms pertaining to the whole organism (e.g., reactions to weather, perspiration and sleep patterns) plus the patient's disposition were of special importance both diagnostically and for case management. Later homeopaths, notably James Tyler Kent, increasingly used overall disposition as a basis for determining the remedy and assessing the patient's vitality in response to treatment. Such treatment, which was applied in cases of chronic illness, became known as constitutional prescribing. Recent developments in the understanding of remedies and the homeopathic process, such as George Vithoulkas' essence prescribing and Rajan Sankaran's concept of central delusion, are continuations of this trend. Because in the present social context classical homeopaths are usually seen for chronic complaints, these principles feature prominently in current homeopathic education and practice. In accordance with this view of disease, classical homeopathic treatment of chronic disease requires a long interview, often longer than an hour, to determine the totality of the patient's symptoms: a thorough history is taken, including childhood and physically or psychologically traumatic or memorable events; important or recurrent dreams are elicited; and a unified understanding of the person's unique perception of the world is sought.

Miasms

Although nowadays homeopathy is especially known for its treatment of chronic diseases, Hahnemann recognized already early on that homeopathy, like conventional medicine, had more difficulty with these than with acute illness. In response, in his later years he developed the concept of miasms, an idea that is still as complex as it ever was, and which remains contentious. After some years of homeopathic experience Hahnemann began noticing that many of his chronic patients tended to relapse even after prolonged homeopathic treatment: though they responded to remedies, over time their symptoms would tend to shift around without a fundamental improvement in their state. This led to his hypothesizing that health was not only determined by the person's present vitality, but also related to historical factors in the person's own life, as well as that of immediate ancestors; what he called miasm (from the Greek for taint). These factors had to be addressed before the patient could experience satisfactory improvement of the symptoms, while in cases where the miasmatic load was heavy only partial improvement was to be expected. Hahnemann described three types of miasm in his Chronic Diseases (vol. 1):
- Psora (possibly from Greek for itch): This was associated with cutaneous manifestations such as scabies, as well as diseases that tended to present as constantly irritating or distracting yet completely reversible (e.g. eczema, mild asthma, recurring infections). Hahnemann considered this the primordial miasm, arguing that improper treatment of such manifestations throughout history was what led to chronic disease and the other miasms.
- Sycosis (from the Greek for fig-wart): This was associated with genital infections such as fig-wart (today recognized as HPV) and gonorrhea. These infections and diseases such as cutaneous warts, benign tumors, and psychological neuroses had the shared quality of being relatively fixed yet non life-threatening. Psychologically such states were associated with the need to accept the problem as an irremediable defect.
- Syphilis (from the disease name) was associated with syphilis and other manifestations such as bone ulcers, organic heart disease, and dementia that had the shared tendency of producing irreversible tissue destruction. Later in the nineteenth century the following miasms, which are considered intermediate in severity between sycosis and syphilis, were further delineated:
- Tuberculosis: Associated with the infection as well as with life-threatening yet reversible asthma or pneumonia and (psychologically) with constant dissatisfaction and desire for change;
- Cancer: Associated with malignant states as well as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and psychological traits of perfectionism, and excessive responsibility or ambition. More recently, the highly influential Rajan Sankaran has further developed the understanding of the psychological qualities of miasms, and has made miasms an integral aspect of his diagnostic approach. He further expanded the list of miasms by largely supplanting Psora in favor of several, more specific miasms previously subsumed under it:
- Acute: Diseases (whether acute of chronic) that present with a pattern of recover (with no ill effects) or succumb;
- Typhus (after the clinical pattern of the infection): Enormous, short-term struggle followed by recovery;
- Ringworm (after the clinical pattern of the infection): Cyclical recovery followed by likely recurrence;
- Malaria (after the clinical pattern of the infection): Low-grade, fixed illness (similar to a sycotic manifestation) punctuated by acute exacerbations. He further added a miasm between cancer and syphilis:
- Leprosy (after the clinical pattern of the infection): Destructive, irreversible, yet not necessarily life-threatening manifestations such as leprosy and other disfigurements and AIDS that lead to both physical and social disability. Miasms are determined through careful inquiry into the patient's personal and family medical history in search for previous infections (especially ones that from which recovery was incomplete) such as tuberculosis or diseases such as cancer. The presence of such manifestations can influence the choice of remedy beyond the presenting symptoms, and also provides a prognostic measure in a similar way as familial inheritance influences prognosis in conventional medicine. The acceptance of miasms varies within the homeopathic community. Some homeopaths find the concept unhelpful or otherwise unacceptable; others will make occasional use of it; while other yet strive in every case to determine the miasmatic nature of the illness in order to facilitate prescribing (since remedy selection can be assisted by knowledge of the miasm). Of the latter two groups some regard miasms as objective features of the disease, while others view them merely as clinically useful categorizations.

History

According to homeopathic lore, Hahnemann began developing the homeopathic method after coming upon the idea that "like cures like" while translating a work on malaria. Upon reaching a passage stating that quinine was an effective treatment because it was bitter and astringent, Hahnemann felt this implausible because there were many other substances that were equally bitter yet lacked any therapeutic value. To better understand the effects of quinine, he decided to take it himself and observed that his reactions were similar to the symptoms of the disease it was used to treat. For Hahnemann and his students the whole of the body and spirit was the focus of therapy, not just the localised disease. Hahnemann himself spent extended periods of time with his patients, asking them questions that dealt not only with their particular symptoms or illness, but also with the details of their daily lives. It is also suggested that the gentle approach of homeopathy was a reaction to the violent forms of heroic medicine common at the time, which included techniques such as bleeding as a matter of course. Homeopathy was brought to America in 1825 and rapidly gained in popularity, partly due to the fact that the excesses of conventional medicine were especially extreme there, and partly due to the efforts of Constantine Hering. Homeopathy reached its peak of popularity in America in the decades 1865–1885 and thereafter declined due to a combination of the recognition by the establishment of the dangers of large doses of drugs and bleeding and dissent between different schools of homeopathy. Nearly as important as Hahnemann himself to the development and popularization of homeopathy was the American physician James Tyler Kent (1849 – 1921). His most important contribution may be his repertory, which is still widely used today. Kent's approach to homeopathy was decidedly authoritarian, emphasizing the metaphysical and clinical aspects of Hahnemann's teachings, in particular
- insistence on the doctrines of miasm and vitalism;
- more emphasis on psychological symptoms (as opposed to physical pathology) in prescribing; and
- regular use of very high potencies. Kent's influence in America was somewhat limited, but his ideas were re-imported into the United Kingdom, where they became the homeopathic orthodoxy by the end of the First World War. In the 1930s the popularity of homeopathy began to wane, especially in Europe and the United States, partly due to advances in biology and conventional medicine, to the Flexner Report (1910) which led (in North America) to the closure of virtually all medical schools teaching alternative medicine, and due to a decline in coherence in the homeopathic community. Homeopathy experienced a renaissance in the 1970s, largely thanks to the efforts of George Vithoulkas in Europe and North America, that continues to this day. In India homeopathy had remained relatively strong throughout the 20th century due to its isolation from the above factors, and at present Indian homeopaths are among the most influential world-wide. Finally, the rise in popularity of homeopathy must also be seen as part of the general rise in interest in alternative medicine over the past few decades. The ease with which large databases can be manipulated has brought about profound changes in the way homeopathy is practised. Today many homeopaths use personal computers to sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of provings and case studies. Because the information about lesser-known remedies is more accessible, it is now more common for homeopaths to prescribe them, which in turn has lead to an increase in the number of new provings. Database technology has also encouraged researchers to reorganize and restructure existing information. See also: List of important homeopaths

Homeopathy around the world

There are estimated to be over 100,000 physicians practising homeopathy world wide, with an estimated 500 million people receiving treatment. Over twelve thousand medical doctors and licensed health care practitioners administer homeopathic treatment in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Since 2001 homeopathy is regulated in the European Union by Directive 2001/83/EC. The latest amendments to this directive make it compulsory for all member states to implement a special registration procedure for homeopathic remedies. In the United Kingdom, as in most countries, homeopathic remedies may be sold over the counter. The UK has five homeopathic hospitals where treatment, funded by the National Health Service, is available and there are numerous regional clinics. Homeopathy is not practised by the majority of the medical profession but there is a core of public support, especially in Scotland and also from the English royal family. Homeopathy has been used in India since the middle of the 19th century and is today a widely practised and officially recognized system of medicine there. India has the largest homeopathic infrastructure in the world in terms of manpower, institutions and drug manufacturing industry. There are 300,000 qualified homeopaths, 180 colleges, 7500 government clinics, and 307 hospitals In the United States, homeopathic remedies are, like all healthcare products, subject to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. However, the FDA accords homeopathic remedies a treatment significantly different from that accorded to other drugs. Homeopathic products are not required to be approved by the FDA prior to sale, not required to be proven either safe or effective prior to being sold, not required to be labeled with an expiration date, and not required to undergo finished product testing to verify contents and strength. Homeopathic remedies have their own imprints that, unlike conventional drugs, do not have to identify their active ingredients on the grounds that they have few or no active ingredients. In the United States only homeopathic medicines that claim to treat self-limiting conditions may be sold over the counter, while homeopathic medicines that claim to treat a serious disease can be sold only by prescription. Neither the American Medical Association nor the American Academy of Pediatrics has an official policy for or against homeopathy, but unofficially, the AMA has denounced homeopathy as unscientific quackery, and will censure any physician who advocates homeopathy as a viable alternative to drug treatment or sugery. As an historical note, the AMA was originally founded in response to the American Foundation for Homeopathy, although it was not considered an official policy, nor stated anywhere in their charter. Reading the homeopathic journals of the time, however will highlight the intense political debate going on which prompted the formation of the AMA. Homeopathy's popularity in the United States is growing. The 1995 retail sales of homeopathic medicines in the United States were estimated at US$201 million and growing at a rate of 20 percent a year, according to the American Homeopathic Pharmaceutical Association. The number of homeopathic practitioners in the United States has increased from fewer than 200 in the 1970s to approximately 3,000 in 1996. In Germany, about 6,000 physicians specialize in homeopathy. In 1978 homeopathy, along with anthroposophically extended medicine and herbalism, were recognized as "special forms of therapy", meaning that their medications are freed from the usual requirement of proving efficacy. Since January 1, 2004 homeopathic medications, albeit with some exceptions, are no longer covered by the country's public health insurance. Most private health insurers continue to cover homeopathy. In Austria homeopathy has been a recognized part of the medical system since 1983. In Switzerland homeopathy is one of the five classes of complementary medicine. At one time, homeopathic medications were covered by the basic health insurance system, as long as they were prescribed by a physician. This practice ended in June 2005. The Swiss Government, after a 5-year trial, has withdrawn insurance coverage for homoeopathy and four other complementary treatments because they did not meet efficacy and cost-effectiveness criteria. In Mexico the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) has had a school of Homeopathy since 1936. This school has both bachelor and master degrees.

Diversity

There is, and always has been, considerable diversity in the theory and practice of homeopathy, some of which are mentioned below:

Pragmatism versus mysticism

One notable distinction is between what can be called the 'pragmatic' and the 'mystical' approach - but it should be remembered that there are not two distinct groups, but a spectrum of attitudes and practices. An early advocate of pragmatism was Richard Hughes, while the most influential mystic was James Tyler Kent. The pragmatists tend to be open to "whatever works," whereas the mystics tend to rely on authority and tradition. There is still considerable diversity in both camps because the pragmatists usually define "working" based on personal experience and the mystics use various sources as authorities. The pragmatists tend to see homeopathy as complementary medicine and are more willing to co-exist with conventional doctors. The mystics, some of whom are also conventional doctors, see homeopathy as alternative medicine and have more confidence that homeopathy can be used effectively against all diseases. Pragmatists are more likely to be interested in proving homeopathy within the framework of mainstream science, and will talk about such concepts as the "memory of water" and stimulation of the immune system. The mystics see less need to justify their methods with conventional criteria; for them homeopathy acts on a vital force that is, so far, not accessible to science. The pragmatists are more likely to prescribe relatively low dilutions because the action of those seems more plausible, whereas mystics will often use high dilutions in single dose. Finally, pragmatists are more likely to use homeopathy in non-classical ways (see below).

Classical versus non-classical homeopathy

Hahnemann's formulation of homeopathy and subsequent advances are often referred to as classical homeopathy in contrast with variants of homeopathy that do not observe all of its original tenets: in particular, classical homeopaths use one remedy at a time and base their prescription also on incidental or constitutional symptoms. But in reality homeopathic remedies are frequently used both by professionals and by the lay public based on formulations marketed for specific medical conditions. Occasionally single remedies are so used, but more typically mixtures of several remedies known to be useful for certain conditions are used in a practice collectively known as complex homeopathy. Some formulations are simply based on a 'shot-gun' approach of prescribing the most commonly indicated single remedies in mixture form, while other formulations, such as those by Heel and Reckeweg, are proprietary mixtures marketed for specific diagnostic critera based on various diagostic systems described in accompanying manuals. Much of the public and some practitioners are not familiar with classical homeopathy and equate these practices with homeopathy; others are familiar with the classical approach but regard these as legitimate variants; while others yet consider it a misuse of the term as such practice merely represents the use of homeopathic preparations without regard to (classical) homeopathic principles. Numerically the use of non-classical approaches probably exceeds that of classical homeopathy, at least in places like France and Germany where over-the-counter preparations are popular and where many doctors use natural medicines in a conventional clinical setting.

The popularity of homeopathy

Over the past two decades the use of homeopathic remedies and visits to homeopathic practitioners have increased. Possible reasons for this trend are:
- Reported clinical efficacy: Some homeopathic patients may have personally found previous treatment to be effective, or heard from friends, colleagues, and the press of many cases in which a sickness was healed after homeopathic treatment. Some reinforce their favorable judgement with selective reference to positive scientific reports. Though they are aware that science has found no adequate explanation for the mechanism of homeopathy, they may subscribe to an empirical view of the matter: whatever works in their experience is good enough for them. This attitude arguably characterizes most health consumers nowadays, whose main concern is for perceived efficacy rather than scientific sanction of their treatment choice. This attraction is possibly further amplified from the inability by conventional healthcare to treat long term diseases.
- Disaffection with the establishment: Some reject the medical establishment, which is perceived to place too much emphasis on machines and chemicals and to treat the disease, not the person. Homeopathic practitioners often spend more time dealing with their patients than do conventional practitioners. Furthermore, homeopathic preparations have few if any side effects and are generally much cheaper than conventional medications.
- Attraction to the homeopathic world-view: Some are attracted to homeopathy through its holistic world-view, their desire for their story to be heard out in detail, their belief that their individually diagnosed complaints belong together in one pattern (classical homeopaths will usually prescribe one remedy to cover assorted ailments), and so on.
- Exhaustion of other options: Some come to homeopathic treatment following years of other conventional or alternative treatment. They therefore try homeopathy, figuring that they have nothing to lose, even though in some cases they actively disbelieve it.

The scientific validity of homeopathy

The following are the main scientific issues that arise in the ongoing debate between skeptics and proponents of homeopathy:

Homeopathic claims contradict established scientific facts

Skeptics consider homeopathy to be lacking any plausible mechanism. They often view homeopathy as a pseudoscientific remnant from the age of alchemy, when important concepts such as molecules and germs were understood poorly or not at all. In the view of modern scientists, the basic interactions of molecules are sufficient to explain all known chemical and biological phenomena, even if many processes are too complex to be understood at this time. This consensus developed during and after the formulation of homeopathy, as a result of discoveries like the size of atoms by Loschmidt in 1865, the synthesis of urea by Friedrich Wöhler in 1828, and advances in understanding many more diseases. The primary criticism of homeopathy by established science is the lack of a chemical mechanism to explain how ultra-dilute solutions can retain an imprint of a molecule that no longer exists in solution. Regardless of whether the dilution medium is water or alcohol, molecular physics does not allow for imprinting of anything in a liquid medium once those molecules have been diluted to near nonexistence. Critics also reject homeopathic theory as being logically inconsistent. Why should only the properties of the one intended remedy be imprinted during dynamization, and not the properties of all of the impurities in the water, particularly since all of the substances in complex mother tinctures are presumably imprinted? Why should artificial shaking and swirling imprint the water, but not similar processes in nature? Why should the same information be imprinted by dynamization with alcohol or by trituration with sugar, although the properties of these substances are very different from those of water?

Theoretical and laboratory investigation of homeopathic preparations

The main difficulty in providing scientific support for the effect of homeopathic remedies lies in the lack of mechanistic explanation for the purported effects of remedies. This is both a problem in itself and a hindrance to the acceptance of favourable clinical evidence (see below), as clinical evidence is routinely judged in relation to its prior mechanistic plausibility. Nevertheless there is a small-scale research effort, primarily by physicists and chemists, to try detect phenomena relating to, and provide potential mechanisms for, the purported effects of submolecular or "ultra-dilute" homeopathic preparations. In addition there are occasional results that become identified by the homeopathic community or researchers - whether or not justifiably - as relevant to homeopathy. The following are recent observations of anomalous properties of homeopathic preparations reported in peer-reviewed publications: Anomalous physical properties of homeopathic water have been observed:
- L. Rey "[http://www.vhan.nl/documents/Rey.thermoluminescence.pdf Thermoluminescence of ultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride]" (Physica A, 2003; 323:67-74) observed physical properties that related to the original composition of the solution prior to dilution.
- Vittorio Elia and Marcella Niccoli in "[http://www.annalsnyas.org/cgi/content/full/879/1/241 Thermodynamics of Extremely Diluted Aqueous Solutions]," (Annals NY Acad Sci, 1999; 827:241-248) observed differences in thermal properties between double-distilled water undergoing homeopathic serial dilution-and-succussion with no starting solvent and ones with solvent initially present;
- See also their "New Physico-Chemical Properties of Extremely Diluted Aqueous Solutions" J Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry, 2004; 75:815-836. Immunological effects of ultradilute preparations on living cells have been observed:
- Davenas et al. "[http://www.homeopathicdoctor.ca/reference/Benveniste.doc Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE]" Nature 1998; 333(6176):816-818 (a notorious paper made famous by Natures retraction of it soon after publication - what became know as the Benveniste affair.
- P. Belon, J. Cumps, M. Ennis, et al., "[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10350142&dopt=Abstract Inhibition of Human Basophil Degranulation by Successive Histamine Dilutions: Results of a European Multi-Centre Trial]," Inflam Res 48 Suppl. 1, 1999:17-18. The phenomenon of hormesis has been suggested to be a plausible mechanism for how low potency homeopathic preparations still containing molecules of the solute can work. It does not, however, address the question of the efficacy of the submolecular preparations. Recent theoretical hypotheses concerning mechanism of action invoke clathrates, which are non-random aggregations of solutes in solution that seem to occur also in water-alcohol mixtures such as are frequently used in homeopathy:
- S. Dixit et al. [http://www.templeton.org/wateroflife/doc/pub/Poon%20et%20al-Mol_Seg_Co.pdf Molecular segregation observed in a concentrated alcohol-water solution] Nature 416: 829-832 (Apr 2002).
- T. Yokono et al. "[http://jjap.ipap.jp/link?JJAP/43/L1436 Clathrate-like ordering in liquid water induced by infrared irradiation]," Jap J Appl Phys 43 (2004), L1436-38. This theory suggests physical and not chemical differences between pure water and homeopathic preparations. One predicted physical test which would tell difference is NMR. A recent study using NMR failed to distinguish between homeopathic solutions:
- J. Anick "[http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/4/15/abstract High sensitivity 1H-NMR spectroscopy of homeopathic remedies made in water] BMC Complement Alt Med 4:15 (2004). It is important to note that there is still no proposed mechanism for how such clathrates can invoke healing once inside the body.
Clinical trials
A meta-analysis is a tool for aggregating and evaluating research data from a series of individual clinical trials that address a single topic, within which can be found references to individual trials. To date, specific meta-analyses of peer-reviewed publications which suggest no significant difference between placebo and homeopathy include:
- Walach (1997) found that the effects of homeopathy were not significantly different from those of a placebo.
- Ernst (1999) was more ambiguous and did not find evidence of effects greater than placebo. However, he suggests that studies were not of good enough quality to point in either direction.
- Rodrigues & Moritz (2003) concluded that "ample evidence exists to show that the homeopathic therapy is not scientifically justifiable", because of serious shortcomings in terms of publication bias and lack of methodologically sound trials validating homeopathy. However, the review was published in an obscure Brazilian journal and is not considered as being very high up the evidence pyramid.
- Shang et al. (2005) state in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, that no convincing evidence has been found that homeopathy performs any better than placebo, whereas under the same evaluative criteria conventional medicine performs better than placebo, and concluded that doctors should be able to inform patients of the "lack of benefit." The trial results were derived from a comparative review of 8 trials of homeopathy verus 6 of trials of conventional medicine selected from two groups of 110 matching trials, based on predetermined criteria of internal validity that sought to extract the best-quality trials in both groups. Reviews suggesting an effect above placebo include:
- Linde et al (1997), who concluded "the results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo". However in his latter 1999 study this conclusion was largely withdrawn and questions have been raised about the original study.
- Linde & Melchart (1998) found that there was evidence to support homeopathy but this evidence was not very strong.
- Cucherat et al (2000) found some evidence in support of homeopathy, but (like Linde & Melchart) found that higher quality studies were more likely to disprove homeopathy.
- Kleijnen et al (1991) concluded that "At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias."
Persistent lack of concrete evidence of efficacy
Despite the available research, homeopathy has not been proven conclusively to work either in the clinic or in the lab, and the available research remains inconsistent and of variable quality. Another complicating factor is the claim by both sides of the debate for the existence of a publication bias: critics of homeopathy propose the likely existence of many negative trials of homeopathy that are not submitted for publication, whereas homeopaths claim that it is difficult to publish in the maintream scientific press because they present scientifically implausible conclusions. Skeptic James Randi has offered an award of one million US dollars to anyone who can prove the existence of anything supernatural or paranormal; Randi stipulates that homeopathy qualifies as such. The million dollars are also available to anyone who can, by any means of their choosing, tell the difference between plain water and any homeopathic remedy of their choosing. A recent attempt to win the prize was aired on the BBC science program Horizon. The Randi challenge is not specific to homeopathy, and is not a specific scientific research protocol. Having concluded that the controlled studies of homeopathy are too weak to be convincing, the skeptics must still address the widespread claims of successful treatments. These skeptics begin by pointing out that anecdotal evidence of controversial phenomena does not constitute evidence that a cure has taken place. Without control cases, it is impossible to distinguish between efficacy of a treatment and spontaneous remission. Without double blinding it is impossible to rule out observer bias and the placebo effect. Without reproduction in a separate study, it is difficult to rule out chance, fraud, or poorly understood systematic effects.
The possibility of testing homeopathy scientifically
It is often said that homeopathy does not lend itself to being tested through statistical means because of the individualized nature of homeopathic treatment and the role of the doctor-patient relationship. But while it may be difficult to objectively study some aspects of homeopathic treatment, the efficacy of homeopathic preparations in high dilution is easily studied using standard methods of placebo control: if the placebo and treatment groups cannot be distinguished at a statistically significant level on the basis of the clinical evaluation, patient report, or objective measures, then the hypothesis of efficacy can be rejected. Indeed, homeopathic remedies are popularly used over-the-counter in an analogous manner to conventional medicines (rather than following classical-homeopathic principles), so likewise should be amenable to testing. Because homeopathy lacks the research infrastructure of modern medicine, but is largely clinically based, few homeopaths are properly trained in the methods of scientific research. Following a recent period of much interest in clinical support for homeopathy (possibly due to the rise of the evidence-based medicine movement, beginning in the early 1990s), many in the homeopathic community have concluded that, until a plausible mechanism-of-action is found, further clinical evidence will carry little weight, and the limited resources of the community should therefore be invested elsewhere, such as in improving educational standards. Moreover, proponents of alternative medicine often criticize the medical establishment and government agencies for failing to invest the necessary resources for testing their hypotheses thoroughly—demanding robust proof of efficacy according to the latest standards, while devoting only scant resources to the enterprise—although those that see little promise in alternative approaches often argue that such expenditure is unwarranted. Ultimately the issue becomes political, because health-care systems are subject to public scrutiny and preference. This concerns many in the scientific establishment, who regard this as a threat to the autonomy of science from political forces. Some researchers of homeopathy downplay the importance of the placebo effect by pointing to reports of successful treatment of infants and animals. Even in such cases, in the absence of double-blinding, practitioner bias or patient expectation may still continue to play a role. Yet another perspective favors the use of observational studies in place of placebo-controlled studies to compare the clinical efficacy of homeopathy to that of other methods of known efficacy. Although observational studies do not use placebo control, they have advantages such as lower cost and better modelling of clinical practice, which makes them an often-used alternative to controlled studies. Finally, scientific studies do not in themselves represent objective data, but have to be scrutinized and interpreted by competent scientists. While skeptics tend to reject borderline results from scientific studies, because they have a prior belief that there can be no effect (due to the lack of a plausible mechanism), proponents of homeopathy tend to accept these results due to their predisposition toward homeopathy.
The status quo
Upwards of 130 clinical trials have been carried out investigating homeopathy or related uses of ultradilutions, mainly isopathy, and approximately 70% of these trials are in favour of some kind of efficacy above placebo. However, several meta-analyses have yielded inconclusive or unfavourable results, with two in particular observing that the higher quality trials were more likely to reject claims of efficacy over the placebo effect. Linde et al (2001) summarize as such:

In conclusion, the available systematic reviews on homeopathy provide little guidance for patients and doctors. They rather reflect the ongoing fundamental controversy on this therapy and strengthen the perception that, on one side, positive evidence from clinical trials will not convince skeptics, and that on the other side negative results from trials not representing actual practice will not have any impact on homeopaths.

Misconceptions about homeopathy

Composition of homeopathic remedies
A common misconception is that homeopathic remedies use only natural, and thus presumed by some to be safe, herbal components (akin to herbology). While herbs are used in homeopathy, there is also use of non-biological substances (such as salts) and components of animal origin, such as duck liver in the popular remedy oscillococcinum. Homeopathy also uses substances of human origin, called nosodes. Some people have the opposite misconception, that homeopathic remedies are only based on toxic substances like snake venom or mercury. Another difference is that although both use herbs, in herbology measurable amounts of the herbs are in the remedy, while in homeopathy the active ingredient is diluted to the point where it is no longer measurable. Since the term homeopathy is well known and has good marketing value, the public can be further confused by people who have adopted the term for other forms of therapy. For example, some companies have combined homeopathic with non-homeopathic substances such as herbs or vitamins, and some preparations marketed as homeopathic contain no homeopathic preparations at all. Classical homeopaths claim only remedies prepared and prescribed in accordance with the principles established by Hahnemann can be called homeopathic. Many producers of homeopathic remedies also produce other types of alternative remedies, under the same brand name, which can create some confusion for the general public.
Homeopathy and vaccination
To some, homeopathy, particularly the use of nosodes, resembles the mainstream practice of vaccination, in that vaccines contain a small, closely-related dose of the disease against which they are to protect. Hahnemann himself interpreted the introduction of vaccination by Edward Jenner in 1798 as a confirmation of the law of similars. To those familiar with the modern practices of homeopathy and immunology, the two practices are fundamentally different. A vaccine is usually a bacterium or virus whose capability to produce symptoms has deliberately been weakened, while still providing enough information to the immune system to afford protection. By preparing the immune system of a healthy organism to meet a future attack by the pathogen, vaccination hopes to prevent disease, in contrast to homeopathy's hope, which is to cure it.
Safety of homeopathic treatment
As homeopathic dilutions are considered by skeptics not to have any direct effect at all, naturally they do not claim that the remedies themselves have any harmful effects. The main potential harm from homeopathic treatment, therefore, arises not from the remedies themselves, but from the withholding of arguably more efficacious treatment, or from misdiagnosis of dangerous conditions by the non-medically qualified homeopathist.
References

- [http://www.accampbell.uklinux.net/homeopathy/homeopathy-html/chapter08.html Kentian Homeopathy], Chapter 8 of Homeopathy in Perspective by A. Campbell
- [http://www.thespiritofhomoeopathy.com/evolution.html The Evolution of Homoeopathy]
- [http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1575855,00.html Homeopathy Seeks More Acknowledgement] from Deutsche Welle
- [http://www.delhihomeo.com/paperberlin.html Cost Effectiveness and Efficacy of Homeopathy in Primary Health Care Units of Government of Delhi- A study] by Dr. Raj Kumar Manchanda and Dr. Mukul Kulashreshtha
- [http://www.dhu.de/wc_800/archiv/GMG.shtml Gesundheitssystem: Was bringt das neue Gesetz?] (in German)
- 6 [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_6_25/ai_79794372 Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine] from the Skeptical Enquirer
- [http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml Homeopathy: The Test - programme summary] from BBC
- Jonas WB, Kaptchuk TJ, Linde K. "A critical overview of homeopathy" Annals of Internal Medicine, (2003); 138: 393-399
- Linde K, Hondras M, et al. "[http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6882-1-4.pdf Systematic reviews of complementary therapies – an annotated bibliography. Part 3: Homeopathy]", BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2001; 1, 4.
- Klaus Linde and Dieter Melchart "Randomized Controlled Trials of Individualized Homeopathy: A State-of-the-Art Review", Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 4 (1998): 371-88 ([http://nhscrd.york.ac.uk/online/dare/990167.htm structured abstract])
- M. Cucherat et al. "Evidence of Clinical Efficacy of Homeopathy: A Meta-Analysis of Clinical Trials", European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 56 (2000): 27-33 ([http://nhscrd.york.ac.uk/online/dare/20001151.htm structured abstract])
- Walach H "Unspezifische Therapie-Effekte. Das Beispiel Homöopathie" [PhD Thesis]. Freiburg, Germany: Psychologische Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, (1997)
- Ernst E. "Classical homeopathy versus conventional treaments: a systematic review" Perfusion, (1999); 12: 13-15
- Moritz RV, Rodrigues A. [http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0041-87812003000600007&tlng=es&lng=en&nrm=iso "A critical review of the possible benefits associated with homeopathic medicine"], Rev. Hosp. Clin. 58(6)
- Linde K, Clausius N, Ramirez G, Melchart D, Eitel F, Hedges LV, Jonas WB. "Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials" Lancet (1997); 350: 834-943
- 16 Kleijenen J, Knipschild P, ter Riet G. "Clincal trials of homeopathy." BMJ (1991); 302: 316-323
- Bandolier Homeopathy - dilute information and little knowledge[http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/aboutus.html]
- Linde K, Scholz M, Ramirez G, Clausius N, Melchart D, Jonas WB. "Impact of study quality on outcome in placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy" J Clin Epidemiol. 1999 Jul;52(7):631-6.[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T84-3WRJNTW-P&_coverDate=07%2F31%2F1999&_alid=294496608&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=5076&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=48adc60952f9810801ab909

Category:Holism

Category:Philosophy of science

Aliovit

Aliovit fou un districte de la província o regió armènia de Tauruberan, a la part nord de la punta nord-est del llac Van. Límita al est amb els districtes de Garni i Arberani; al nord amb el Bagrevand; al oest amb l'Apahuniq, i al sud amb el Bznuniq i el llac Van. La capital fou Zarishat. Possessió dels Gnuni va passar al emir qaisita Djahap al-Qaisi (el 772 emir de Manazkert) vers el 771. Categoria:Regions d'Armènia

hotels in Krakow zak�ady bukmacherskie gry sportowe tapety na pulpit slots

:: RELATED NEWS ::

Mediaset
Mediaset ist die Sendergruppe von Italiens Regierungschef Silvio Berlusconi. Die Mediengruppe "Mediaset" (eingebettet in die "Fininvest"-Holding, an der die Familie Berlusconi knapp 51 Prozent hält) besitzt drei überregionale Privat-Fernsehsender: Italia 1, Rete 4 und Canale 5. Mediaset war die erste Sendergruppe, die in ganz Italien ein einheitliches Programm ausstrahlte. Es galt

Arnold Schölzel
Arnold Schölzel (
- 21. Oktober 1947 in Bremen) ist Chefredakteur der Berliner Tageszeitung Junge Welt.

Biografie

Nach seiner Kindheit, die er in Bremen verbrachte, machte Schölzel 1966 dort sein Abitur. Anschließend zwang ihn 1967 die Wehrpflicht in die

Max Graham
Max Graham ist ein britischer Houseproduzent und Remixer. Graham wuchs in Spanien und den USA auf, bevor er 1989 nach Kanada kam. In den 1990er Jahren arbeitete er als DJ in dem bekannten Nachtclub Atomic in

Wilhelm Emelé
Wilhelm Emelé (
- 1830 in Buchen (Odenwald), † 11. Oktober 1905 in Freiburg im Breisgau) war ein deutscher Schlachten- und Historienmaler. Wilhelm Emelé studierte und malte in München,

Cat&Mouse
Cat&Mouse ist eine finnische Band, bestehend aus Kärtsy Hatakka, Leadsänger von Waltari und seinem um einige Jahre älterer Bruder Tote Hatakka. 1975, als Kärtsy gerade mal 8 Jahre alt war, erschien ihr erstes Album "She Does Slip". 1995 gab es eine Neu-Veröffentlichung des Albums mit Bonustracks aus dem selben Jahr. Die Plattenfirma, bei welcher "She Does Slip" aufgenommen wurde, hatte Kärtsy gefragt, ob er mit einer Neuveröffentlichung zum 20-jährigen Jubiläum des Albums einverstand

Florida Inc.

Singles ;Fuck It :DE: 30 - 17.05.2004 - 10 Wo. ;Let Me Love You :DE: 79 - 11.07.2005 - ...

Florida Inc. ist das gemeinsame Musikprojekt des niederländischen DJs Andre Hol und des US-Amerikaners Mike Hunt. Einen ersten Erfolg landete das Projekt

William Gannaway Brownlow
William Gannaway Brownlow (auch Parson Brownlow. genannt), (
- 29. August 1805 in Virginia; † 28. April 1877) war ein US-amerikanischer Politiker und Unionsverfechter im Sezessionskrieg und einer der schärfsten Publizisten gegen die

William G. Brownlow
William Gannaway Brownlow (auch Parson Brownlow. genannt), (
- 29. August 1805 in Virginia; † 28. April 1877) war ein US-amerikanischer Politiker und Unionsverfechter im Sezessionskrieg und einer der schärfsten Publizisten gegen die

Whole

Responses to holism

Holistic healing

See also

External links

Greek language

History

Classification

Geographic distribution

Official status

Phonology

Vowel sounds

1920s

Events and trends

Technology

Science

War, peace and politics

Economics

Culture, religion

People

World leaders

Entertainers

Sports figures

External links

Oxford English Dictionary

Origins

The first editors

The Oxford editors

The fascicles

The First Edition and the first Supplement

The second Supplement and the Second Edition

The Compact Editions

The electronic versions

The Third Edition

Spelling

Miscellanea

See also

Further reading

External links

Reductionism

Scientific reductionism

Reductionist Ideas

Alternatives to Reductionism

References and further reading

Greedy reductionism

See also

Santa Fe Institute

Scientists associated with the Santa Fe Institute

External links

Philosophy of language

Overview

History

Major problems and sub-fields

Composition and parts

Principle of compositionality

Problem of universals and composition

The nature of meaning

Types of meaning

Vagueness

Ideas and meaning

Empiricism and words

Critique of idea theories

A cognitive idea theory

Truth and meaning

Logic and language

Davidson, Tarski, and truth theories

Critiques of truth-theories of meaning

Usage and meaning

Wittgenstein's turn

Peter Strawson, Keith Donnellan, and usage

Paul Grice

Jurgen Habermas

Conceptual and inferential role semantics

Critiques of use theories of meaning

Consequences and meaning

Language and the world

Mind and language

Innateness and learning

Language and thought

Social interaction and language