Deborah Mayo is a philosopher of science who has attempted to capture the implications of the new experimentalism in a philosophically rigorous way. Mayo focuses on the detailed way in which claims are validated by experiment, and is concerned with identifying just what claims are borne out and how. A key idea underlying her treatment is that a claim can only be said to be supported by experiment if the various ways in which the claim could be as fault have been investigated and eliminated. A claim can only be said to be borne out by experiment, and a severe test of a claim, as usefully construed by Mayo, must be such that the claim would be unlikely to pass it if it were false.

Her idea can be explained by some simple examples. Suppose Snell's law of refraction of light is tested by some very rough experiments in which very large margins of error are attributed to the measurements of angles of incidence and refraction, and suppose that the results are shown to be compatible with the law within those margins of error. Has the law been supported by experiments that have severely tested it? From Mayo's perspective the answer is “no” because, owing to the roughness of the measurements, the law of refraction would be quite likely to pass this test even if it were false and some other law differing not too much from Snell's law true. An exercise I carried out in my school-teaching days serves to drive this point home. My students had conducted some not very careful experiments to test Snell's law. I then presented them with some alternative laws of refraction that had been suggested in antiquity and mediaeval times, prior to the discovery of Snell's law, and invited the students to test them with the measurements they had used to test Snell's law; because of the wide margins of error they had attributed to their measurements, all of these alternative laws pass the test. This clearly brings out the point that the experiments in question did not constitute a severe test of Snell's law. The law would have passed the test even if it were false and one of the historical alternatives true.

Enunciated by Jung as an integral part of his psychology in 1916 immediately after his unsettling confrontation with the unconscious, the transcendent function was seen by Jung as uniting the opposites, transforming psyche, and central to the individuation process. It also undoubtedly reflects his personal experience in coming to terms with the unconscious. Jung portrayed the transcendent function as operating through symbol and fantasy and mediating between the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious to prompt the emergence of a new, third posture that transcends the two. In exploring the details of the transcendent function and its connection to other Jungian constructs, this work has unearthed significant changes, ambiguities, and inconsistencies in Jung's writings. Further, it has identified two separate images of the transcendent function: (1) the narrow transcendent function, the function or process within Jung's pantheon of psychic structures, generally seen as the uniting of the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious from which a new attitude emerges; and (2) the expansive transcendent function, the root metaphor for psyche or being psychological that subsumes Jung's pantheon and that apprehends the most fundamental psychic activity of interacting with the unknown or other. This book has also posited that the expansive transcendent function, as the root metaphor for exchanges between conscious and the unconscious, is the wellspring from whence flows other key Jungian structures such as the archetypes and the Self, and is the core of the individuation process. The expansive transcendent function has been explored further by surveying other schools of psychology, with both depth and non-depth orientations, and evaluating the transcendent function alongside structures or processes in those other schools which play similar mediatory and/or transitional roles.

India is renowned for its diversity. Dissimilitude abounds in every sphere - from the physical elements of its land and people to the intangible workings of its beliefs and practices. Indeed, given this variety, India itself appears to be not a single entity but an amalgamation, a “constructs” arising from the conjoining of innumerable, discrete parts. Modem scholarship has, quite properly, tended to explore these elements in isolation. (In part, this trend represents the conscious reversal of the stance taken by an earlier generation of scholars whose work reified India into a monolithic entity - a critical element in the much maligned “Orientalist” enterprise.) Nonetheless, the representation of India as a singular “Whole” is not an entirely capricious enterprise; for India is an identifiable entity, united by - if not born out of - certain deep and pervasive structures. Thus, for example, the Hindu tradition has long maintained a body of mythology that weaves the disparate temples, gods, even geographic landscapes that exist throughout the subcontinent into a unified, albeit syncretic, whole.

In the realm of thought, there is no more pervasive, unifying structure than karma. It is the “doctrine” or “law” that ties actions to results and creates a determinant link between an individual's status in this life and his or her fate in future lives. Following what is considered to be its appearances in the Upanishads, the doctrine reaches into nearly every corner of Hindu thought. Indeed, its dominance is such in the Hindu world view that karma encompasses, at the same time, life-affirming and life-negating functions; for just as it defines the world in terms of the “positive” function of delineating a doctrine of rewards and punishments, so too it defines the world through its “negative” representation of action as an all but inescapable trap, an unremitting cycle of death and rebirth.

Despite - or perhaps because of - karma’s ubiquity, the doctrine is not easily defined. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty reports of a scholarly conference devoted to the study of karma that although the participants admitted to a general sense of the doctrine's parameters, considerable time was in a “lively but ultimately vain attempt to define…karma and rebirth”. The base meaning of the term “karma” (or, more precisely, in its Sanskrit stem form, karman a neuter substantive) is “action”. As a doctrine, karma encompasses a number of quasi-independent concepts: rebirth (punarjanam), consequence (phala, literally “fruit,” a term that suggests the “ripening” of actions into consequences), and the valuation or “ethic-ization” of acts, qualifying them as either “good” (punya or sukarman) or “bad” (papam or duskarman).

In a general way, however, for at least the past two thousand years, the following (from the well known text, the Bhagavata Parana) has held true as representing the principal elements of the karma doctrine: “The same person enjoys the fruit of the same sinful or a meritorious act in the next world in the same manner and to the same extent according to the manner and extent, to which that (sinful or meritorious) act has been done by him in this world.” Nevertheless, depending on the doctrine's context, which itself ranges from its appearance in a vast number of literary sources to its usage on the popular level, not all these elements may be present (though in a general way they may be implicit).

Demography of organisations, also called population ecology is an interesting field. It proposes that organisational mortality processes depend upon the age and size of the organisation, as well as on characteristics of populations and environments. Moreover, there is evidence of an imprinting process – meaning that environmental conditions at certain early phases in an organisation’s development have longterm consequences. In particular, organisations subject to intense competition have elevated mortality hazards at all ages. A central theme is structural inertia, the tendency for organisations to respond slowly relative to the speed of environmental change. A central argument holds that the inertia derives from the very characteristics that make organizations favoured actors in modern society in terms of reliability and (formal) accountability. It follows that changes in an organisation’s core features are disruptive and increase mortality hazards, at least in the short-run. Research on this subject tends to support this view. The concept of niche provides a framework for relating environmental variations and competition to populations in terms of dimensions of social, political, and economic environments. Most research in this field builds on theories of resource partition and of density dependence. Resource-partitioning theory concerns the relationship between increasing market concentration and increasing proliferation of specialists in mature industries. The key implication of this theory concerns the effects of concentration on the viability of specialist organisations (those that seek to exploit a narrow range of resources). The theory of densitydependent organisational evolution synthesizes ecological and institutional processes. It holds that growth in the number of organisations in a population (density) drive processes of social legitimatization and competition that, in turn, shape the vital rates.

The greens’ success has clear policy implications, especially on issues of nuclear power, ecological tax reform, and citizenship rights. But success also has implications for green parties themselves. Greens have always faced a unique ‘strategic conundrum’ arising from their unique beliefs and movement roots. Put simply, how can they reconcile their radical alternative politics with participation in mainstream or ‘grey’ parliamentary and government structures? Throughout the 1990s most green parties shed their radical cloth in an attempt to capture votes, even at the expense of green party unity and purity. Most were rewarded with electoral success well beyond what had been imaginable in the 1980s. The price to pay has been tortured internal debates about strategy, and new questions about green party identity and purpose. Today the key questions facing green parties revolve around not whether to embrace power, but what to do with it. More specifically, green parties face three new challenges in the new millennium: first, how to carve out a policy niche as established parties and governments become wiser to green demands, and as green concerns themselves appear more mainstream. Second, how to take green ideas beyond the confines ofrich industrialised states into Eastern Europe and the developing world where green parties remain marginal and environmental problems acute. Third, how to ensure that the broader role of green parties—as consciousness raisers, agitators, conscience of parliament and politics—is not sacrificed on the altar of electoral success. Green parties have come a long way since their emergence and development in the 1970s and 1980s. They have become established players able to shape party competition, government formation, and government policy. But this very ‘establishment’ carries risks for a party whose core values
and identities depend mightily on their ability to challenge the conventional order, to agitate and to annoy. For most green parties, the greatest fear is not electoral decline so much as the prospect of becoming a party with parliamentary platform, ministerial voice, but nothing new to say.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. The linguistic relativity hypothesis focuses on structural differences among natural languages such as Hopi, Chinese, and English, and asks whether the classifications of reality implicit in such structures affect our thinking about reality. Analytically, linguistic relativity as an issue stands between two others: a semiotic-level concern with how speaking any natural language whatsoever might influence the general potential for human thinking (i.e., the general role of natural language in the evolution or development of human intellectual functioning), and a functional- or discourse-level concern with how using any given language code in a particular way might influence thinking (i.e., the impact of special discursive practices such as schooling and literacy on formal thought). Although analytically distinct, the three issues are intimately related in both theory and practice. For example, claims about linguistic relativity depend on understanding the general psychological mechanisms linking language to thinking, and on understanding the diverse uses of speech in discourse to accomplish acts of descriptive reference. Hence, the relation of particular linguistic structures to patterns of thinking forms only one part of the broader array of questions about the significance of language for thought. Proposals of linguistic relativity necessarily develop two linked claims among the key terms of the hypothesis (i.e., language, thought, and reality). First, languages differ significantly in their interpretations of experienced reality—both what they select for representation and how they arrange it. Second, language interpretations have influences on thought about reality more generally—whether at the individual or cultural level. Claims for linguistic relativity thus require both articulating the contrasting interpretations of reality latent in the structures of different languages, and assessing their broader influences on, or relationships to, the cognitive interpretation of reality.