For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.

I'm quite pessimistic about climate change. This is an urgent problem, and much of the world is only now waking up to the easiest part of solving - the realization that anthropogenic global warming is real.

If there are to be appropriate judgments about what questions are significant, you need both the informed views of scientists who know what has been achieved and what future developments are promising and the reflective judgments of representatives of different groups who can identify what kinds of information are most urgently needed.

If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are.

I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.

Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities.

It's not at all a bad idea for scientific questions to be chosen because a democratic deliberation would identify them as important for people's lives.