We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) “neuron” and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but (...) most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a correct account of actual causation; rather, we argue that standard methods will not lead to such an account. A different approach is required. Once upon a time a hungry wanderer came into a village. He filled an iron cauldron with water, built a fire under it, and dropped a stone into the water. “I do like a tasty stone soup” he announced. Soon a villager added a cabbage to the pot, another added some salt and others added potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was a meal for all. (shrink)

Most causal discovery algorithms in the literature exploit an assumption usually referred to as the Causal Faithfulness or Stability Condition. In this paper, we highlight two components of the condition used in constraint-based algorithms, which we call “Adjacency-Faithfulness” and “Orientation- Faithfulness.” We point out that assuming Adjacency-Faithfulness is true, it is possible to test the validity of Orientation- Faithfulness. Motivated by this observation, we explore the consequence of making only the Adjacency-Faithfulness assumption. We show that the familiar PC algorithm has (...) to be modified to be correct under the weaker, Adjacency-Faithfulness assumption. The modified algorithm, called Conservative PC (CPC), checks whether Orientation- Faithfulness holds in the orientation phase, and if not, avoids drawing certain causal conclusions the PC algorithm would draw. Howtion: ever, if the stronger, standard causal Faith-. (shrink)

Reflectance spectroscopy is a standard tool for studying the mineral composition of rock and soil samples and for remote sensing of terrestrial and extraterrestrial surfaces. We describe research on automated methods of mineral identification from reflectance spectra and give evidence that a simple algorithm, adapted from a well-known search procedure for Bayes nets, identifies the most frequently occurring classes of carbonates with reliability equal to or greater than that of human experts. We compare the reliability of the procedure to the (...) reliability of several other automated methods adapted to the same purpose. Evidence is given that the procedure can be applied to some other mineral classes as well. Since the procedure is fast with low memory requirements, it is suitable for on- board scientific analysis by orbiters or surface rovers. (shrink)

A central theme in western philosophy was to find formal methods that can reliably discover empirical relationships and their explanations from data assembled from experience. As a philosophical project, that ambition was abandoned in the 20th century and generally dismissed as impossible. It was replaced in philosophy by neo-Kantian efforts at reconstruction and justification, and in professional statistics by the more limited ambition to estimate a small number of parameters in pre-specified hypotheses. The influx of “big data” from climate science, (...) neuropsychology, biology, astronomy and elsewhere implicitly called for a revival of the grander philosophical ambition. Search algorithms are meeting that call, but they pose a problem: how are their accuracies to be assessed in domains where experimentation is limited or impossible? Increasingly, the answer is through simulation of data from models of the kind of process in the domain. In some cases, these innovations require rethinking how the accuracy and informativeness of inference methods can be assessed. Focusing on causal inference, we give an example from neuroscience, but to show that the model/simulation strategy is not confined to causal inference, we also consider two classification problems from astrophysics: identifying exoplanets and identifying dark matter concentrations. (shrink)

Joseph G. Ramsey argues that Richard Wright’s 1940 novella “Bright and Morning Star” has been consistently misunderstood. What has been almost universally read as a narrative of communist heroism stages instead a heroic mistake. “Bright and Morning Star” is not a story primarily about heroic individual sacrifice, but about the ways collective struggle can fail.

By bootstrapping the output of the PC algorithm (Spirtes et al., 2000; Meek 1995), using larger conditioning sets informed by the current graph state, it is possible to define a novel algorithm, JPC, that improves accuracy of search for i.i.d. data drawn from linear, Gaussian, sparse to moderately dense models. The motivation for constructing sepsets using information in the current graph state is to highlight the differences between d-­‐separation information in the graph and conditional independence information extracted from the sample. (...) The same idea can be pursued for any algorithm for which conditioning sets informed by the current graph state can be constructed and for which an orientation procedure capable of orienting undirected graphs can be extracted. Another plausible candidate for such retrofitting is the CPC algorithm (Ramsey et al, 2006), yielding an algorithm, JCPC, which, when the true graph is sparse is somewhat more accurate than JPC. The method is not feasible for discovery for models of categorical variables, i.e., traditional Bayes nets; with alternative tests for conditional independence it may extend to non-­‐linear or non-­‐Gaussian models, or both. (shrink)

After reviewing theoretical reasons for doubting that machine learning methods can accurately infer gene regulatory networks from microarray data, we test 10 algorithms on simulated data from the sea urchin network, and on microarray data for yeast compared with recent experimental determinations of the regulatory network in the same yeast species. Our results agree with the theoretical arguments: most algorithms are at chance for determining the existence of a regulatory connection between gene pairs, and the algorithms that perform better than (...) chance are nonetheless so errorprone as to be of little practical use in these applications. (shrink)

We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) "neuron" and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but (...) most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a correct account of actual causation; rather, we argue that standard methods will not lead to such an account. A different approach is required. (shrink)

Model theoretic considerations purportedly show that a certain version of structural realism, one which articulates the nvtion of structure via Ramsey sentences, is in fact trivially true. In this paper we argue that the structural realist is by no means forced to Ramseyfy in the manner assumed in the formal proof. However, the structural realist's reprise is short-lived. For, as we show, there are related versions of the model theoretic argument which cannot be so easily blocked by the structural (...) realist. We examine various ways in which the structural realist may respond, and conclude that the best way of blocking the model theoretic argument involves formulating his Ramseyfied theories using intensional operators. Introduction The model theoretic arguments On Ramseyfying away predicates The model theoretic argument bites back Restricting the second order quantifiers 5.1 Naturalness 5.2 Intrinsic 5.3 Qualitative 5.4 Contingent and causal Intensional operators and relations between properties Conclusion. (shrink)

We examine the Dual Ramsey Theorem and two related combinatorial principles VW(k,l) and OVW(k,l) from the perspectives of reverse mathematics and effective mathematics. We give a statement of the Dual Ramsey Theorem for open colorings in second order arithmetic and formalize work of Carlson and Simpson [1] to show that this statement implies ACA 0 over RCA 0 . We show that neither VW(2,2) nor OVW(2,2) is provable in WKL 0 . These results give partial answers to questions (...) posed by Friedman and Simpson [3]. (shrink)

The theory of subjective probability and utility recently proposed by professor richard jeffrey has several unique features and appears to be in some ways distinctly more satisfactory than earlier theories. There is, However, One very important class of decision problems which is not discussed by professor jeffrey--Problems concerned with decisions about strategies for using information. The principal task of this paper is to point out some questions which arise in attempting to deal with these decision problems within jeffrey's theory. To (...) do this it will be necessary to examine in some detail jeffrey's discussion of the relation between his theory and those of ramsey and savage. (shrink)

The connections between mathematical logic and combinatorics have a rich history. This paper focuses on one aspect of this relationship: understanding the strength, measured using the tools of computability theory and reverse mathematics, of various partition theorems. To set the stage, recall two of the most fundamental combinatorial principles, König's Lemma and Ramsey's Theorem. We denote the set of natural numbers by ω and the set of finite sequences of natural numbers by ω<ω. We also identify each n ∈ (...) ω with its set of predecessors, so n = {0, 1, 2, …, n − 1}. (shrink)

The Rainbow Ramsey Theorem is essentially an "anti-Ramsey" theorem which states that certain types of colorings must be injective on a large subset (rather than constant on a large subset). Surprisingly, this version follows easily from Ramsey's Theorem, even in the weak system RCA₀ of reverse mathematics. We answer the question of the converse implication for pairs, showing that the Rainbow Ramsey Theorem for pairs is in fact strictly weaker than Ramsey's Theorem for pairs over (...) RCA₀. The separation involves techniques from the theory of randomness by showing that every 2-random bounds an ω-model of the Rainbow Ramsey Theorem for pairs. These results also provide as a corollary a new proof of Martin's theorem that the hyperimmune degrees have measure one. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ is among the most ambitious and influential philosophical works of the early twentieth century, and in recent years it has again occupied a central position in discussions of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Written in an austere and meticulous style, the _Tractatus_ addresses questions in the philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics, and, according to its author, provides a solution to all the problems of philosophy. This Broadview Edition contains the original English translation by C.K. Ogden and Frank P. (...) Ramsey, annotated and revised by the editor for improved accuracy and clarity. Appendices include important material by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, as well as excerpts from Wittgenstein’s other writings. (shrink)

This essay challenges a "meta-theory" in just war analysis that purports to bridge the divide between just war and pacifism. According to the meta-theory, just war and pacifism share a common presumption against killing that can be overridden only under conditions stipulated by the just war criteria. Proponents of this meta-theory purport that their interpretation leads to ecumenical consensus between "just warriors" and pacifists, and makes the just war theory more effective in reducing recourse to war. Engagement with the new (...) meta-theory reveals, however, that these purported advantages are illusory, made possible only by ignoring fundamental questions about the nature and function of political authority that are crucial to all moral reflection on the problem of war. (shrink)

We show, relative to the base theory RCA₀: A nontrivial tree satisfies Ramsey's Theorem only if it is biembeddable with the complete binary tree. There is a class of partial orderings for which Ramsey's Theorem for pairs is equivalent to ACA₀. Ramsey's Theorem for singletons for the complete binary tree is stronger than $B\sum_{2}^{0}$ , hence stronger than Ramsey's Theorem for singletons for ω. These results lead to extensions of results, or answers to questions, of Chubb, (...) Hirst, and McNicholl [3]. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn ‘Universals’, Ramsey declares that we do not, and cannot, know the forms of atomic propositions. A year later, in a symposium with Braithwaite and Joseph, he announces a change of mind: atomic propositions may, after all, be discoverable by analysis. It is clear from the 1926 paper that Ramsey intends this to be a revision of the 1925 claim. Puzzlingly, however, Ramsey does not mention analysis in 1925. My task in this article is to provide (...) a justification for that change of mind. My argument consists of two parts. I first show what relation holds between the negative 1925 assertion and the more positive 1926 assertion which allows us to read the latter claim as a retraction of the former, as Ramsey appears to have intended it. Then I shall argue that the retraction of the 1925 claim is forced upon Ramsey by reflection on the fact that three theses, all of which he held in or around the relevant period, are, rather surprisingly, revealed to be inconsistent. (shrink)

Excerpt from Nine Modern Moralists The greatness of the men whose insight and re ections are the subject of the following chapters is obviously a sufficient justification for this volume. The reader who simply wants to learn what was felt and thought and believed by some of the outstanding minds of the immediate past and of the present can, it is hoped, do so by reading the chapters of this book as expository essays. Here he will find their thought anatomized; (...) and, in relatively brief compass, it may be possible for him to become seriously engaged in thinking their thoughts after them. Certainly, no one can come to an understanding of the latest and best of contemporary ideas and ideals by going around these men; only by going through them can one gain a deeper understanding of himself and of our epoch. That is the first purpose of this book: to provide an introduction to nine selected modern moralists. The second purpose is constructive and critical. Exposition and ex planation by themselves are not the aim of these chapters. The highest tribute one can pay any thinker, or any body of writing, is to wrestle with it; and this may well be the best way to bring out the innermost and most vital meaning of what any man has said. I trust that in this wrestling I have nowhere simply commanded an issue to be gone, or have ignored the real meaning or the strength of an idea or point of view in rejecting or reformulating it. The procedure employed in criti cism is always an internal one. This is to say that it always seems best to go as far as one can with another man's thought, developing it up to the point where some criticism or objection or revision unfolds itself, as it were, from within the system or structure of thought under examina tion. In this way the most constructive results may be expected from criticism; and, in this way also, constructive and critical essays may fairly aim to be explanatory ones. As expository essays the chapters that follow may be taken one at a time and in any order, or one or more without the others. Their con structive and critical purpose, however, connects them all together. The author has been somewhat surprised at the extent to which this is true, when preparing for publication these papers which were written in some cases years apart. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

This essay reconsiders Paul Ramsey’s “medical indications” policy and argues that his reconstruction of the case of Joseph Saikewicz demonstrates that there is more room for caretakers to decline treatments for “voiceless dependents” than his interlocutors have sometimes thought. It furthermore draws on Ramsey’s earlier work to propose ways that Ramsey might have improved his policy, and argues that the shortcomings of Ramsey’s view arise from his bracketing of age in making determinations about what form (...) of medical care is owed. The reading of Ramsey set forth here suggests Cathleen Kaveny’s depiction of the ‘medical indications’ policy in Ethics at the Edges of Law is too rigid and inflexible, even while it affirms other aspects of her critique. (shrink)

This note is a postscript to Ramsey's 'Truth and Probability'. It replaces that article's psychological reading of subjective probability with a reading of it as a consistency condition on the theory that we act to maximise expected utility.

The article argues that universals of law, i.e. the laws of nature, are the general axioms of a deductive system of all knowledge, and their deductive consequences. Universals of fact are generalisations deducible from these together with particular facts.

During the battle of Iwo Jima in June 1944, Private First Class Jackylin Harold Lucas and three other U.S. Marines came under attack while making their way along a ravine. Upon seeing two grenades thrown near the soldiers, Lucas dove onto one grenade and pulled the other under his body, saving his companions from serious injury or death. Lucas survived, but his injuries were so grave that his companions left him for dead. Lucas’s act was one of spectacular and nearly (...) suicidal altruism. What does such an act show us about our nature and the human capacity for good and evil? Perhaps it offers a window onto our true nature—a nature ultimately good, though susceptible to corrupting influences. Or perhaps it seems extraordinary precisely because we are greedy and violent by nature but can, in rare instances, rise above those instincts. Questions about what human nature is and how we can learn about it are difficult to answer. They are difficult not just because humans are complex creatures whose behavior is deeply embedded in the cultural environment that they are a part of, but also because it is not obvious what a concept of human nature is supposed to do or what it is for. The concept of human nature is often used as a normative concept, one that can serve as a guide to action, showing us how we ought to behave. Less commonplace is an approach that seeks a descriptive account of human nature, one that characterizes what humans do and are disposed to do. I argue in this essay that the normative and descriptive approaches are at odds and that we should not expect a single concept of human nature to play both roles. Furthermore, there are deep problems with normative accounts. They often ignore or contradict the contemporary scientific worldview, and they often merely reflect biases about how we ought to be and what we ought to do. Human nature in this sense becomes politicized and serves in arguments about the moral status of issues like homosexuality, abortion, or biomedical enhancement. Because of the problems inherent in normative notions of human nature, I offer a descriptive alternative. My alternative attempts to align the scientific study of the human with human nature. (shrink)

Early in his career Richard Rorty became well known for advocating what became known as eliminative materialism. This position depended on the radical idea that the main elements of commonsense psychology, including ordinary sensations, do not really exist. This chapter argues that on a closer reading of Rorty's relevant articles, it is clear that Rorty was not an eliminative materialist in any normal sense, but rather a more conventional materialist who made some misguided claims about what mind–brain identity involves.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

I. Metaphysical phenomena -- II. Physical phenomena.

The developmental properties of organisms play important roles in the generation of variation necessary for evolutionary change. But how can individual development steer the course of evolution? To answer this question, we introduce developmental channeling as a disposition of individual organisms that shapes their possible developmental trajectories and evolutionary dappling as an evolutionary outcome in which the space of possible organismic forms is dappled—it is only partially filled. We then trace out the implications of the channeling-dappling framework for contemporary debates (...) in the philosophy of evolution, including evolvability, reciprocal causation, and the extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Human nature is frequently evoked to characterize our species and describe how it differs from others. But how should we understand this concept? What is the nature of a species? Some take our nature to be an essence and argue that because humans lack an essence, they also lack a nature. Others argue for non-essentialist ways of understanding human nature, which usually aim to provide criteria for sorting human traits into one of two bins, the one belonging to our nature (...) and the other outside our nature. This Element argues that both the essentialist and trait bin approaches are misguided. Instead, the author develops a trait cluster account of human nature, which holds that human nature is based on the distribution of our traits over our (actual and possible) life histories. One benefit of this account is that it aligns human nature with the human sciences, rendering the central concern of the human sciences to be the study of human nature. (shrink)

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions benefit from casting a wider net: Is most scientific change gradual or revolutionary? What are the key sources of scientific novelty? Over the past several decades, a massive effort to digitize (...) the academic literature and equip computers with algorithms that can distantly read and analyze a digital database has taken us one step closer to answering these questions. The Dynamics of Science brings together a diverse array of contributors to examine the largely unexplored computational frontiers of history and philosophy of science. Together, they reveal how tools and data from automated textual analysis, or machine "reading," combined with methods and models from game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, can begin to answer fundamental questions about the nature and history of science. (shrink)

"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

This chapter contains sections titled: Practical Ethics Practical Ethics and Hold Manufacturing Reason 1: Rock Modification is Acceptable Only for Safety Reasons Reason 2: Hold Manufacturing Violates Important Environmental Commitments Reason 3: Hold Manufacturing Harms Future Generations of Good Climbers Reason 4: This is a Slippery Slope; Any Acceptance of Manufacturing Will Lead to Abuses Conclusion.

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.

Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of (...) the right.Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era. (shrink)

Joseph J. Fins calls for a reconsideration of severe brain injury treatment, including discussion of public policy and physician advocacy.

José Benardete developed a famous paradox involving a beginningless set of items each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. The Grim Reaper version of this paradox has recently been employed in favor of various finitist metaphysical theses, ranging from temporal finitism to causal finitism to the discrete nature of time. Here, I examine a new challenge to these finitist arguments—namely, the challenge of implying that the future cannot be endless. In particular, I (...) develop future-oriented Benardete paradoxes and examine their epistemic symmetry with past-oriented paradoxes. (shrink)

Rigid designators for concrete objects and for properties -- On the coherence of the distinction -- On whether the distinction assigns to rigidity the right role -- A uniform treatment of property designators as singular terms -- Rigid appliers -- Rigidity - associated arguments in support of theoretical identity statements: on their significance and the cost of its philosophical resources -- The skeptical argument impugning psychophysical identity statements: on its significance and the cost of its philosophical resources -- The skeptical (...) argument further examined: on resources, allegedly overlooked, for confirming psychological identities. (shrink)

Benardete paradoxes involve a beginningless set each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. Such paradoxes have been wielded on behalf of arguments for the impossibility of an infinite past. These arguments often deploy patchwork principles in support of their key linking premise. Here I argue that patchwork principles fail to justify this key premise.