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This book examines the evolution of one of the most pervasive and enduring American icons from the 18th-century to the present day. Spanning film, literature, and the entire expanse of American popular culture, from comics to country music to television and the Internet, the book argues that the longevity of the hillbilly stems from its ambiguity as a marker of both social derision and regional pride. Typically associated with Appalachia or the Ozarks, the “hillbilly” was viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the social order, and as a keeper of traditional values of family, home, and physical production. The character was therefore both a foil to an increasingly urbanizing and industrializing America and a symbol of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life. The book also argues that “hillbillies” have played a critical role in the construction of whiteness and modernity. Middle-class Americans imagined hillbillies, with their supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon or Scottish origins, as an exotic race, akin to blacks and Indians, but still native and white, as opposed to the growing influx of immigrants in the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, the image's whiteness allowed crude caricatures of Southern mountaineers to persist long after similar ethnic and racial stereotypes had become socially unacceptable.

Ideally, individual risk‐taking decisions and government risk policies should be based on a rational balancing of risk and cost. Unfortunately, private decisions are subject to a number of biases including overestimation of small probabilities and alarmist responses to ambiguous risks. Hazard warnings can potentially be effective, but are not always ideal, as the people now overestimate the risks of smoking. Labour market estimates of the value of life can provide a rational reference point for benefit‐cost tests of risk regulations. The pressures exerted by irrational public responses to risk often lead to regulations that impose inordinately high costs per life saved. Excessive regulation potentially makes society worse off from a health and safety standpoint as shown by the risk–risk analysis methodology developed in this book. Similarly, liability rules and social insurance systems also should be structured to reflect an efficient balancing of risk and cost.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired, which are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

This book examines the American law of contract interpretation in detail. Intended primarily for lawyers, judges, legal scholars, and law students, the book focuses attention on the elements of contract interpretation — the evidentiary facts that are legally relevant when interpreting a contract. The book describes and analyzes how courts do and should perform three practical tasks in contract interpretation. First, courts identify the terms to be interpreted (under the parol evidence rule); second, courts decide whether a contract is relevantly ambiguous; third, fact-finders (judges or juries) resolve any ambiguities that appear. The book examines these issues through the lens of three theories that are supposed to tell us how to perform the three tasks to further the goals of contract interpretation. These theories are literalism, objectivism, and subjectivism. In the last chapter, the author makes a novel proposal, which he calls “objective contextual interpretation”.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, as well as evidence from neurobiology, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The music-theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats or beat subdivisions. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired that are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

Can it be justifiable to commit oneself ‘by faith’ to a religious claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total available evidence? After critiquing both Wittgensteinian and Reformed epistemologies of religious belief, this book defends a modest fideism that understands theistic commitment as involving ‘doxastic venture’ in the face of evidential ambiguity: practical commitment to propositions held to be true through ‘passional’ causes (causes other than the recognition of evidence of or for their truth). It is argued that the justifiability of religious faith-ventures is ultimately a moral issue — although such ventures can be morally justifiable only if they accord with the proper exercise of our rational epistemic capacities. The book canvasses issues concerning the ethics of belief and doxastic voluntarism. William James's ‘justification of faith’ in The Will to Believe is extended by requiring that justifiable faith-ventures should be morally acceptable both in motivation and content. The book conducts an extended debate between fideists and ‘hard line’ evidentialists, who maintain that religious faith-ventures are never justifiable. It concludes that, although neither fideists nor evidentialists can succeed in establishing their opponents' irrationality, fideism may nevertheless be morally preferable, as a less dogmatic, more self-accepting, even a more loving, position than its evidentialist rival.

Scientific facts can be so complicated that only specialists in a field fully appreciate the details, but the nature of everyday practice that gives rise to these facts should be understandable by everyone interested in science. This book describes how scientists bring their own interests and passions to their work, illustrates the dynamics between researchers and the research community, and emphasizes a contextual understanding of science in place of the linear model found in textbooks with its singular focus on “scientific method”. This book also introduces readers to issues about science and society. Practice requires value judgments: What should be done? Who should do it? Who should pay for it? How much? Balancing scientific opportunities with societal needs depends on appreciating both the promises and the ambiguities of science. Understanding practice informs discussions about how to manage research integrity, conflict of interest, and the challenge of modern genetics to human research ethics. Society cannot have the benefits of research without the risks. The last chapter contrasts the practices of science and religion as reflective of two different types of faith and describes a holistic framework within which they dynamically interact.

This book deals with a specific form of language change: deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers. These manipulations are based and depending on cultural and social contexts, they are often—if not always—considered to be secret, and are at the same time expressions of difference and power. The central thesis on which the explorations of manipulated language in this book are based is that language here—deliberately diverging from the norm—is central to the construction of social norms, and that exactly by manipulation and alteration identity may be explored and defined. Manipulated language and deliberate linguistic change are thus seen as the creation of a medium through which speakers attempt to preserve certain structures. The complexity and diversity of linguistic manipulation and how it is linked to the structure of society are dealt with in this book by referring to secrecy, mimesis, sacrilege, and ambiguity as leading concepts of power. This study concentrates on case studies from the Jukun-speaking areas of Nigeria, as well as Nilotic and Bantu-speaking parts of Uganda (and to a lesser extent Sudan), but also presents data on manipulated languages from many other parts and speaker communities of the continent, as well as examples from the African diaspora.