Popper, who was 92 when he died on 17 September 1994, was widely acclaimed as the greatest philosopher of science and by many as the greatest philosopher of any kind of the twentieth century. His most outstanding achievement was probably his solving of the age-old problem of induction . He showed that there is no such thing. Induction does not exist. Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, had succeeeded in proving that experience and reason have no necessary connection (...) with one another . There is no such thing as rational belief. Kenneth Clark described this in his Civilisation as `an intellectual time bomb which, after sizzling away for almost two hundred years, has only just gone off.'. (shrink)

This article provides a critical comparative analysis of the substantive and procedural values and ethical concepts articulated in guidelines for allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified 21 local and national guidelines written in English, Spanish, German and French; applicable to specific and identifiable jurisdictions; and providing guidance to clinicians for decision making when allocating critical care resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. US guidelines were not included, as these had recently been reviewed elsewhere. Information was extracted from each (...) guideline on: 1) the development process; 2) the presence and nature of ethical, medical and social criteria for allocating critical care resources; and 3) the membership of and decision-making procedure of any triage committees. Results of our analysis show the majority appealed primarily to consequentialist reasoning in making allocation decisions, tempered by a largely pluralistic approach to other substantive and procedural values and ethical concepts. Medical and social criteria included medical need, co-morbidities, prognosis, age, disability and other factors, with a focus on seemingly objective medical criteria. There was little or no guidance on how to reconcile competing criteria, and little attention to internal contradictions within individual guidelines. Our analysis reveals the challenges in developing sound ethical guidance for allocating scarce medical resources, highlighting problems in operationalising ethical concepts and principles, divergence between guidelines, unresolved contradictions within the same guideline, and use of naïve objectivism in employing widely used medical criteria for allocating ICU resources. (shrink)

This paper introduces a special issue of Cognitive Science initiated on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP), a two-volume work that introduced the use of neural network models as vehicles for understanding cognition. The collection surveys the core commitments of the PDP framework, the key issues the framework has addressed, and the debates the framework has spawned, and presents viewpoints on the current status of these issues. The articles focus on both historical roots and contemporary (...) developments in learning, optimality theory, perception, memory, language, conceptual knowledge, cognitive control, and consciousness. Here we consider the approach more generally, reviewing the original motivations, the resulting framework, and the central tenets of the underlying theory. We then evaluate the impact of PDP both on the field at large and within specific subdomains of cognitive science and consider the current role of PDP models within the broader landscape of contemporary theoretical frameworks in cognitive science. Looking to the future, we consider the implications for cognitive science of the recent success of machine learning systems called “deep networks”—systems that build on key ideas presented in the PDP volumes. (shrink)

In this prcis we focus on phenomena central to the reaction against similarity-based theories that arose in the 1980s and that subsequently motivated the approach to semantic knowledge. Specifically, we consider (1) how concepts differentiate in early development, (2) why some groupings of items seem to form or coherent categories while others do not, (3) why different properties seem central or important to different concepts, (4) why children and adults sometimes attest to beliefs that seem to contradict their direct experience, (...) (5) how concepts reorganize between the ages of 4 and 10, and (6) the relationship between causal knowledge and semantic knowledge. The explanations our theory offers for these phenomena are illustrated with reference to a simple feed-forward connectionist model. The relationships between this simple model, the broader theory, and more general issues in cognitive science are discussed. (shrink)

We explore the formal foundations of recent studies comparing aural pattern recognition capabilities of populations of human and non-human animals. To date, these experiments have focused on the boundary between the Regular and Context-Free stringsets. We argue that experiments directed at distinguishing capabilities with respect to the Subregular Hierarchy, which subdivides the class of Regular stringsets, are likely to provide better evidence about the distinctions between the cognitive mechanisms of humans and those of other species. Moreover, the classes of the (...) Subregular Hierarchy have the advantage of fully abstract descriptive (model-theoretic) characterizations in addition to characterizations in more familiar grammar- and automata-theoretic terms. Because the descriptive characterizations make no assumptions about implementation, they provide a sound basis for drawing conclusions about potential cognitive mechanisms from the experimental results. We review the Subregular Hierarchy and provide a concrete set of principles for the design and interpretation of these experiments. (shrink)

The American Constitution held out the hope that ordinary people were capable of deciding their own fates, and in doing so it immeasurably elevated the dignity of common people. The organization and interplay of the parts that comprise the whole American government exist to provide people the opportunity to govern themselves and, at the same time, reveal the limits of democratic self-rule. The forgetting of these limits is not only destructive to the constitution but the nation as a whole.

本书讲述了一群试图解释中国哲学及其艺术词语问题的比较哲学家之长达20年之久的事情。包括“孟子人性理论的背景”、“孟子的人性论”等。.

This is an English translation of Plato’s dialogue of Socrates seeking the true definition of rhetoric, with an attempt to show the flaws of the sophistic orators. Includes speeches from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars that reflect Plato’s themes. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate (...) audience. (shrink)

Arieti and Barrus' new edition of Plato's Protagoras provides a rigorously clear and accurate translation that communicates Plato's puns, metaphors, figures of speech, and other verbal techniques naturally, allowing scholars to feel the full scope of Plato's rhetoric. This new edition confronts and discusses the critical linguistic choices made in rendering difficult or obscure terms into an easily readable and understandable rendition. The commentary, introduction, glossary, and appendices elucidate the dialogue's many issues, especially those concerning rhetoric, education, and literary interpretation.

The commentaries reflect three core themes that pertain not just to our theory, but to the enterprise of connectionist modeling more generally. The first concerns the relationship between a cognitive theory and an implemented computer model. Specifically, how does one determine, when a model departs from the theory it exemplifies, whether the departure is a useful simplification or a critical flaw? We argue that the answer to this question depends partially upon the model's intended function, and we suggest that connectionist (...) models have important functions beyond the commonly accepted goals of fitting data and making predictions. The second theme concerns perceived in-principle limitations of the connectionist approach to cognition, and the specific concerns these perceived limitations raise for our theory. We argue that the approach is not in fact limited in the ways our critics suggest. One common misconception, that connectionist models cannot address abstract or relational structure, is corrected through new simulations showing directly that such structure can be captured. The third theme concerns the relationship between parallel distributed processing (PDP) models and structured probabilistic approaches. In this case we argue that there the difference between the approaches is not merely one of levels. Our PDP approach differs from structured statistical approaches at all of Marr's levels, including the characterization of the goals of cognitive computations, and of the representations and algorithms used. (shrink)

We sketch an axiomatic reformalization of Generalized Phrase StructureGrammar (GPSG) – a definition purely within the language ofmathematical logic of the theory GPSG embodies. While this treatment raisesa number of theoretical issues for GPSG, our focus is not thereformalization itself but rather the method we employ. The model-theoreticapproach it exemplifies can be seen as a natural step in the evolution ofconstraint-based theories from their grammar-based antecedents. One goal ofthis paper is to introduce this approach to a broader audience and todemonstrate (...) its application to an existing theory. As such, it joins agrowing literature of similar studies. Prior studies, however, have had anumber of weaknesses – they generally offer little in the way ofconcrete examples of the advantages the approach has to offer, theytypically ignore significant portions of the theories they address, and, byfully abstracting away from the notion of grammar mechanism, they largelyabandon the possibility of establishing meaningful complexity results. Thesecond goal of the paper is to address these issues. Our thrust is to sketchthe reformalization sufficiently to illustrate the way in which it capturesFeature Specification Defaults (FSDs) and the Exhaustive Constant PartialOrdering (ECPO) property. Our definition of FSDs is considerably simplifiedrelative to the original formalization and is free of the procedural flavorthat has led some to assume that FSDs are inherently dynamic. Our treatmentof ECPO uncovers a gap in its definition in the context of partialcategories that has heretofore gone unnoticed. We offer these as ademonstration of the kind of insight that a model-theoretic reinterpretationcan bring to an existing theory. Further, since these are the types ofproperties that prior studies in this genre have failed to address, FSDs andECPO provide a means for us to explore the limitations of these approachesand to offer ways of overcoming them. Finally, the logical framework weemploy has a well defined generative capacity – definability in thisframework characterizes strong context-freeness in a particular sense. Thus,despite being more abstract than its constraint-based predecessors, themodel-theoretic approach, as exemplified here, can offer stronger complexityresults than are typically available in the constraint-based framework. (shrink)

The development of ethical and practice guidelines related to mental health service on the Internet has lagged behind the movement of practitioners into this area. Even for clinicians who are not offering services on the Web, the Internet has led to confusion and concern about proper roles and responsibilities. This article discusses an actual experience we had with a self-described rationally suicidal man with multiple sclerosis. After presenting some background on MS, we report initial interactions with the man verbatim and (...) summarize subsequent correspondence in an analysis of the man's claim that his decision to die was well reasoned and that he should be allowed a physician's assistance. (shrink)