We prove that any subset of $\overline {\mathbb {Q}}^m$ (closed under complex conjugation and which contains the origin) is the exceptional set of uncountably many transcendental entire functions over $\mathbb {C}^m$ with rational coefficients. This result solves a several variables version of a question posed by Mahler for transcendental entire functions [Lectures on Transcendental Numbers, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 546 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1976)].

This study examines the interest in different pension payout schemes when full annuitization is the default. We focus on three possible pension payout schemes: a flat-rate annuity, a high/low annuity-based profile, and a partial lump sum at retirement with a lower flat-rate annuity after that. We make use of a vignette study and find substantial interest in each of the three payout schemes. Interest in the lump sum scheme increases when a higher percentage can be taken out as a lump sum or when interest rates or replacement rates are lower. Interest in a high/low annuity-based profile increases when the high annuity is valid for a shorter period.

This paper recapitulates earlier work in which I argued for the disunity of science, the plurality of partly incommensurable ways in which the world can be conceptualised for scientific purposes. It then aims to show how this plurality is intelligible, even to be expected, from the perspective of a process philosophy that sees the world as largely disorganised, but as allowing the emergence of pockets of stability, most notably the stability provided by biological organisms. It incidentally aims to demonstrate the importance to one another of science and metaphysics.

Why is support the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This article argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical-right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center–periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues”—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.

The founder of conservation biology, Michael Soulé, set out a vision for conservation biology that was explicitly value-laden, analogous to cancer-biology. In so doing, he drew on the writings of Aldo Leopold, known among philosophers primarily for his land ethic. Employing and extending the work of Anderson (2004) and Clough (2020), I argue that the Leopoldian views that Soulé was drawing on were the product of the coevolution of descriptive and evaluative beliefs over the course of Leopold’s life, grounded in his experiences, resulting in tested and reliable—albeit defeasible—values underlying conservation biology.

Until the 19th century, the UK state stayed out of education. Only in 1833 would Parliament first pass an act that subsidized education for the poor. By 1914, 160 education acts had been passed, consolidating into the state schooling system we recognize today. This paper seeks to explain this remarkable progression. I argue that the emergence of social-knowledge institutions across the West was a powerful force of cultural construction. What I term social scientization, this process was multidimensional and translocal, entailing the elaboration, reification, and diffusion of functionalist theories of the nation-state that centered national education as means to greater cultural rationalization. Longitudinal analyses on comprehensive population data comprising over 10,100 UK parliamentary acts support the core historical insight of this piece: increasingly routine and aggressive forms of state intervention in education were the progressive instantiation of the 19th-century nation-state model, which was fundamentally epistemic in character and inextricably linked to the expansive cultural content of the ascendant social sciences.

Benchmark tests are employed when testing for racial discrimination by police. Neil and Winship (2019) emphasize that such tests are threatened by Simpson’s paradox, but they avoid analyzing the paradox causally. They consequently cannot elucidate the link between statistical quantities and discrimination hypotheses. Simpson’s paradox reveals that the statistics given by benchmark tests are not invariant to conditioning on additional variables. On this basis, I argue that benchmark statistics should not by themselves be taken to provide any evidence regarding discrimination, absent additional assumptions. Causal models can represent these assumptions.

This paper articulates a conceptual framework for examining philosophical issues such as the role of values in science at an organizational level. It distinguishes between three dimensions of organizations – organizational aims, organizational structure, and organizational culture – and it examines how these dimensions relate to values in research and development, with a focus on machine learning systems for predictive policing. This framework can be fruitful in identifying interesting and understudied philosophical problems – including those involving inter-organizational divisions of labor – that might otherwise be difficult to conceptualize.