It is considered in some quarters that hypothesis‐driven methods are the only valuable, reliable or significant means of scientific advance. Data‐driven or ‘inductive’ advances in scientific knowledge are then seen as marginal, irrelevant, insecure or wrong‐headed, while the development of technology—which is not of itself ‘hypothesis‐led’ (beyond the recognition that such tools might be of value)—must be seen as equally irrelevant to the hypothetico‐deductive scientific agenda. We argue here that data‐ and technology‐driven programmes are not alternatives to hypothesis‐led studies in (...) scientific knowledge discovery but are complementary and iterative partners with them. Many fields are data‐rich but hypothesis‐poor. Here, computational methods of data analysis, which may be automated, provide the means of generating novel hypotheses, especially in the post‐genomic era. BioEssays 26:99–105, 2004. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

A considerable number of areas of bioscience, including gene and drug discovery, metabolic engineering for the biotechnological improvement of organisms, and the processes of natural and directed evolution, are best viewed in terms of a ‘landscape’ representing a large search space of possible solutions or experiments populated by a considerably smaller number of actual solutions that then emerge. This is what makes these problems ‘hard’, but as such these are to be seen as combinatorial optimisation problems that are best attacked (...) by heuristic methods known from that field. Such landscapes, which may also represent or include multiple objectives, are effectively modelled in silico, with modern active learning algorithms such as those based on Darwinian evolution providing guidance, using existing knowledge, as to what is the ‘best’ experiment to do next. An awareness, and the application, of these methods can thereby enhance the scientific discovery process considerably. This analysis fits comfortably with an emerging epistemology that sees scientific reasoning, the search for solutions, and scientific discovery as Bayesian processes. (shrink)

Recently, it has been argued that the phenomenon of direct transfer of intermediate metabolites between adjacent enzymes, also known as metabolic channelling, would not decrease the concentration of those intermediates in the bulk solution. However, this conclusion has been drawn by extrapolation from the results of simulations with a rather restricted set of parameters. We show that, for a number of kinetic cases, the existence of metabolic channelling can decrease the size of the soluble pool of intermediates. When the enzyme(s) (...) downstream of the channel have a catalytic capacity that is large relative to the enzymes upstream of the channel, the decrease of concentration can be substantial (3 orders of magnitude). (shrink)

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...) which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

The idea of basic action is a fixed point in the contemporary investigation of the nature of action. And while there are arguments aimed at putting the idea in place, it is meant to be closer to a gift of common sense than to a hard-won achievement of philosophical reflection. It first appears at the stage of innocuous description and before the announcement of philosophical positions. And yet, as any decent magician knows, the real work so often gets done in (...) the set-up. I argue that the seemingly innocent idea of basic action is, in fact, bound up with a wide-spread conception of the nature of bodily or physical action (section 3). Its legitimacy is vital to the intelligibility of the causal theory of action, according to which physical action consists of a mere event and a condition of mind joined (in the right way) by the bond of causality. Left unchecked, means-end reason threatens to permeate physical action, and thus threatens the sovereignty of the sphere of material events at the center of the causal theory: such events, including the movements of one’s body when one intentionally moves it, are thought to be constitutively independent of the subject’s rational capacities. Basic action is a necessary countermeasure, a sort of metaphysical containment wall needed to preserve the separate jurisdictions of the mind of the acting subject and what merely happens. I argue that so long as action theory proceeds under the assumption that there must be basic action, it must regard our relation to the progress of our own deeds as not different in principle from Marx’s understanding of the relation of the non-worker (Nichtarbeiter) to the material processes that realize his own ideas, namely the work done on the factory floor. Each is alienated from the progress, or getting done, of his deeds. In each the process of doing something intentionally turns out to be a case of delegating tasks to another power. How the process comes to completion is not willed, and at best watched: the causal work is not the agent’s work, his knowledge not self-knowledge (section 5). We should find this unacceptable. And if this is right, it should be a pressing question whether there must be basic action. I argue that we have no good reason to think so: basic action is not forced on us by argument (sections 2 and 4). It is open to us to consider an alternative, one on which action is not, in the fundamental case, barren of means- end structure, but instead permeated by it: we register as a force in nature not at the limit of the means-end order but precisely in its constitution. [from article introduction]. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can (...) be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields. (shrink)

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on the notion of logic and demonstrative knowledge, particularly Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, offering an overview of traditional Aristotelianism in relation to logic and describing Bacon's approach to demonstration and logic. It also analyzes the contribution of the Cambridge Platonists and evaluates the influence of Cartesianism. The chapter concludes that theorizing about logic and demonstrative knowledge followed an arc familiar from other branches of philosophy such as metaphysics or (...) the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Alexander X. Douglas situates Spinoza's philosophy in its immediate historical context, and argues that much of his work was conceived with the aim of rebutting the claims of his contemporaries. In contrast to them, Spinoza argued that philosophy reveals the true nature of God, and reinterpreted the concept of God in profound and radical ways.

A brief exploration of the nature of, and motivations for, contemporary forms of metaethical quietism. Also outlines some of the prominent objections to such positions and discusses some of the limitations of these objections from the quietist's perspective.

In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch—jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the twentieth century. Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, What is Frisch’s relationship to (...) the discipline of ethology? To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and his 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive (...) exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection. (shrink)

In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a productive role for attributions of semantic (...) content in the process of animal behavior research. (shrink)

Recent accounts of multiscale modeling investigate ontic and epistemic constraints imposed by relations between component models at varying relative scales (macro, meso, micro). These accounts often focus especially on the role of the meso, or intermediate, relative scale in a multiscale model. We aid this effort by highlighting a novel role for mesoscale models: they can function as a focal point, and rationale, for disagreement between researchers who otherwise share theoretical commitments. We illustrate with a case study in multiscale modeling (...) of insect behavior, arguing that the cognitive map debate in neuroethology research is best understood as a mesoscale disagreement. (shrink)

Agents often face a choice of what to do. And it seems that, in most of these choice situations, the relevant reasons do not require performing some particular act, but instead permit performing any of numerous act alternatives. This is known as the basic belief. Below, I argue that the best explanation for the basic belief is not that the relevant reasons are incommensurable (Raz) or that their justifying strength exceeds the requiring strength of opposing reasons (Gert), but that they (...) are imperfect reasons—reasons that do not support performing any particular act, but instead support choosing any of the numerous alternatives that would each achieve the same worthy end. In the process, I develop and defend a novel theory of objective rationality, arguing that it is superior to its two most notable rivals. (shrink)

This book provides an argumentation model for means-end reasoning, a distinctive type of reasoning used for problem-solving gand decision-making. Means-end reasoning is modeled as goal-directed argumentation from an agent's goals and known circumstances, and from an action selected as a means, to a decision to carry out the action. Goal-based reasoning for argumentation provides an argumentation model for this kind of reasoning, showing how it is employed in settings of intelligent deliberation where agents try to collectively arrive at a conclusion (...) on what they should do to move forward in a set of circumstances. The book explains how this argumentation model can help build more realistic computational systems of deliberation and decision-making and shows how such systems can be applied to solve problems posed by goal-based reasoning in numerous fields, from social psychology and sociology, to law, political science, anthropology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and robotics." -- Back cover. (shrink)

Does criminal liability require an act? -- Motive and criminal liability -- The costs to criminal theory of supposing that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility -- Transferred intent -- The nature and justifiability of nonconsummate offenses -- Strict liability, justice, and proportionality -- The sequential principle of relative culpability -- Willful ignorance, knowledge, and the equal culpability thesis : a study of the significance of the principle of legality -- Rapes without rapists : consent and reasonable mistake -- Mistake of (...) law and culpability -- On the supposed priority of justification to excuse -- Partial defenses -- The "but everybody does that!" defense -- The de minimis "defense" to criminal liability -- Why punish the deserving -- Malum prohibitum and retributivism -- Already punished enough. (shrink)

Can philosophy be a source of hope? Today it is common to believe that the answer is no - that providing hope, if it is possible at all, belongs either to the predictive sciences or to religion. In this exciting and simulating book, however, Alexander Douglas argues that the philosophy of Spinoza can offer something akin to religious hope. Douglas shows how Spinoza is able, without appealing to belief in any traditional afterlife or supernatural grace, to develop a (...) profound and original theory of how humans can escape from the conditions of death and sin. Douglas argues that this theory of escape, which Spinoza calls beatitude, is the centrepiece of his entire philosophy, though scholars have often downplayed or ignored it. One reason for this scholarly neglect might be the difficulty of understanding Spinoza's theory, which departs from the standard doctrines and methods of Western philosophy. Douglas's interpretation therefore seeks inspiration beyond the Western tradition, drawing especially on the classical Daoist text Zhuangzi and its commentaries. Here, Douglas argues, surprising resonances with Spinoza's core ideas can be found, leading to a new way of understanding his strange yet compelling theory of beatitude. (shrink)

This study looks to the work of Tarski's mentors Stanislaw Lesniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and reconsiders all of the major issues in Tarski scholarship in light of the conception of Intuitionistic Formalism developed: semantics, truth, paradox, logical consequence.

This reader-friendly book examines philosophies and philosophers using an engaging, non-condescending approach that speaks to you at your level.

The opponents of enhancement do not all set out to defend a common and clearly specified thesis. However, several would either assent or be attracted to the following claim (henceforth, the bioconservative thesis): Even if it were technically possible and legally permissible for people to engage in biomedical enhancement, it would not be morally permissible for them to do so. The scope of this thesis needs to be clarified. This chapter argues that the bioconservative thesis, thus qualified, is false. There (...) is clearly scope for most people to morally enhance themselves. According to every plausible moral theory, people often have bad or suboptimally good motives. The author tentatively argues that it would sometimes be morally permissible for people to biomedically mitigate their counter‐moral emotions. The chapter concludes with a scenario consisting of five assumptions that will be morally permissible for people to morally enhance themselves. (shrink)

A civic science curriculum is advocated. We discuss practical mechanisms for (and highlight the possible benefits of) addressing the relationship between scientific knowledge and civic responsibility coextensively with rigorous scientific content. As a strategy, we suggest an in-course treatment of well known (and relevant) historical and contemporary controversies among scientists over science policy or the use of sciences. The scientific content of the course is used to understand the controversy and to inform the debate while allowing students to see the (...) role of scientists in shaping public perceptions of science and the value of scientific inquiry, discoveries and technology in society. The examples of the activism of Linus Pauling, Alfred Nobel and Joseph Rotblat as scientists and engaged citizens are cited. We discuss the role of science professors in informing the social conscience of students and consider ways in which a treatment of the function of science in society may find, coherently, a meaningful space in a science curriculum at the college level. Strategies for helping students to recognize early the crucial contributions that science can make in informing public policy and global governance are discussed. (shrink)

Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.

I recently heard a presentation by E. V. Semenov, the director of the Russian State Science Foundation. He said that culturology has not been included in the Foundation's rubrication. There are grants, but there is no rubric, because so far culturology is an extremely fluid area, and very diverse topics are relegated to it. Aleksei Iur'evich [Shemanov] is quite right when he says that "the process of shaping culturology into a special discipline" is still under way. In such conditions, it (...) would be premature to offer any definitions of culturology that claim to be complete. So perhaps it is better to approach the problem of defining culturology by developing its notions and concepts. Therefore, I support the version of the dictionary proposed by its authors, although implementing it will be fairly difficult. As an initial idea, however, it is quite suitable. (shrink)

Alethic pluralism is the view that truth requires different treatment in different domains of discourse. The basic idea is that different properties play important roles in the analysis of truth in different domains of discourse, such as discourse about the material world, moral discourse, and mathematical discourse, to take three examples. Alethic disjunctivism is a kind of alethic pluralism, and is the view that truth is to be identified with the disjunctive property that is formed using each of the domain-specific (...) properties as disjuncts (i.e., in the view's simplest form, truth is the property of either having domain-specific property 1, or domain-specific property 2, and so on). This paper evaluates the prospects for alethic disjunctivism. In particular, it outlines the proper formulation of the view, and assesses some concerns that the disjunctive property lacks the pedigree necessary to be considered a truth property. I begin by briefly outlining the motivations for alethic pluralism, before noting four general constraints on formulations of the view. I then consider a ‘simple’ formulation of alethic disjunctivism, and recommend an amendment. I then demonstrate that the candidate truth property specified by this new formulation is able to meet the central constraints required for it to be considered a viable formulation of alethic pluralism. The final part of this demonstration involves making some distinctions between different kinds of disjunctive properties, and arguing that disjunctive properties are not necessarily highly abundant properties: some are more sparse than others. (shrink)

_Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers._ Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of (...) energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of _pistis_, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and _zhi_, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. (shrink)

I explain what teleological reasons are, distinguish between direct and indirect teleological reasons, and discuss both whether all practical reasons are teleological and whether all teleological reasons are direct.

This monograph poses a series of key problems of evidential reasoning and argumentation. It then offers solutions achieved by applying recently developed computational models of argumentation made available in artificial intelligence. Each problem is posed in such a way that the solution is easily understood. The book progresses from confronting these problems and offering solutions to them, building a useful general method for evaluating arguments along the way. It provides a hands-on survey explaining to the reader how to use current (...) argumentation methods and concepts that are increasingly being implemented in more precise ways for the application of software tools in computational argumentation systems. It shows how the use of these tools and methods requires a new approach to the concepts of knowledge and explanation suitable for diverse settings, such as issues of public safety and health, debate, legal argumentation, forensic evidence, science education, and the use of expert opinion evidence in personal and public deliberations. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction as it pertains to utilitarianism.

This is a general introduction to supererogation in relation to utilitarianism.

Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature is a philosophical overview of Tibetan Buddhist thought. Charting the different ways Buddhist traditions in Tibet configure the relationship between Madhyamaka and Mind-Only, Duckworth shows how these configurations inform the shape of distinct contemplative practices.