Featured | Democratic Firms
Making Enterprises and Markets Responsible
This is a paper written to further Richard Cornuelle’s abiding vision of a more responsible economy and posted here to invite comment. The basic idea is revisit the whole idea of a market economy dominated by absentee-owned and publicly traded corporations (“Wall Street Capitalism”) that disconnect companies (“the Mother of all disconnects”) from the natural desires of the people working in the companies to improve their communities.
Kantian Personhood Principle
This paper formulates the labor theory of property and democratic theory in the context of the Kantian personhood principle to treat other persons always as ends in themselves and never simply as means.
Featured | Development
Making Enterprises and Markets Responsible
This is a paper written to further Richard Cornuelle’s abiding vision of a more responsible economy and posted here to invite comment. The basic idea is revisit the whole idea of a market economy dominated by absentee-owned and publicly traded corporations (“Wall Street Capitalism”) that disconnect companies (“the Mother of all disconnects”) from the natural desires of the people working in the companies to improve their communities.
Helping People Help Themselves
The full title to this book is: Helping People Help Themselves: From
the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. The book is an intellectual analysis, giving a full history of the relevant ideas, of the various modes of “helping” in general and development assistance in particular.
Featured | Property Theory
Kantian Personhood Principle
This paper formulates the labor theory of property and democratic theory in the context of the Kantian personhood principle to treat other persons always as ends in themselves and never simply as means.
Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy
This book presents a modern version of the old Labor (or Natural Rights) Theory of Property and of an Inalienable Rights Theory that descends from the Reformation and Enlightenment. Together these theories re-solve the basic problem of distribution in the sense of giving a basis for the just appropriation of property and a basis for answering the question of who is to be the firm, e.g., the suppliers of share capital as in conventional capital, the government as in socialism, or the people who work in the firm as in the system of economic democracy (or labor-managed market economies).
Featured | Quantum Mechanics
The Objective Indefiniteness Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
The common-sense view of reality is expressed logically in Boolean subset logic (each element is either definitely in or not in a subset, i.e., either definitely has or does not have a property). But quantum mechanics does not agree with this “properties all the way down” picture of micro-reality. Are there other coherent alternative views of reality? A logic of partitions, dual to the Boolean logic of subsets (partitions are dual to subsets), was recently developed along with a logical version of information theory. In view of the subset-partition duality, partition logic is the alternative to Boolean subset logic and thus it abstractly describes the alternative dual view of micro-reality. Perhaps QM is compatible with this dual view? Indeed, when the mathematics of partitions using sets is “lifted” from sets to vector spaces, then it yields the mathematics and relations of quantum mechanics. Thus the vision of micro-reality abstractly characterized by partition logic matches that described by quantum mechanics. The key concept explicated by partition logic is the old idea of “objective indefiniteness” (emphasized by Shimony). Thus partition logic, logical information theory, and the lifting program provide the back story so that the old idea then yields the objective indefiniteness interpretation of quantum mechanics.
A Common Fallacy in Quantum Mechanics: Why Delayed Choice Experiments do NOT imply Retrocausality
This paper analyzes the separation fallacy that leads to flawed inferences about retrocausality in the context of “delayed choice” versions of separation experiments.
Featured | Mathematics
Determination through universals
Semiadjunctions (essentially a formulation of a universal mapping property using hets) turn out to be the appropriate concept for applications of category theory in the life sciences.
Information as distinctions
This paper is sub-titled “New Foundations for Information Theory” since it is based on the logical notion of entropy from the logic of partitions. The basic logical idea is that of “distinctions.” Logical entropy is normalized counting measure of the set of distinctions of a partition, and Shannon entropy is the number of binary partitions needed, on average, to make the same distinctions of the partition.
