Astrobiology aims to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word “biosignature” suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating living systems. Our limited access to other worlds suggests this observation is more likely to reflect out‐of‐equilibrium gasses than a writhing octopus. Yet, anything short of a writhing octopus will raise skepticism about what has been detected. Resolving that skepticism requires a theory to delineate processes due to life and (...) those due to abiotic mechanisms. This poses an existential question for life detection: How do astrobiologists plan to detect life on exoplanets via features shared between non‐living and living systems? We argue that you cannot without an underlying theory of life. We illustrate this by analyzing the hypothetical detection of an “Earth 2.0” exoplanet. Without a theory of life, we argue the community should focus on identifying unambiguous features of life via four areas: examining life on Earth, building life in the lab, probing the solar system, and searching for technosignatures. Ultimately, we ask, what exactly do astrobiologists hope to learn by searching for life? (shrink)

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either (...) an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives, secondly less frequent ones, and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete. Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives. (shrink)

How does the human brain link relational concepts to perceptual experience? For example, a speaker may say “the cup to the left of the computer” to direct the listener's attention to one of two cups on a desk. We provide a neural dynamic account for both perceptual grounding, in which relational concepts enable the attentional selection of objects in the visual array, and for the generation of descriptions of the visual array using relational concepts. In the model, activation in neural (...) populations evolves dynamically under the influence of both inputs and strong interaction as formalized in dynamic field theory. Relational concepts are modeled as patterns of connectivity to perceptual representations. These generalize across the visual array through active coordinate transforms that center the representation of target objects in potential reference objects. How the model perceptually grounds or generates relational descriptions is probed in 104 simulations that systematically vary the spatial and movement relations employed, the number of feature dimensions used, and the number of matching and nonmatching objects. We explain how sequences of decisions emerge from the time‐ and state‐continuous neural dynamics, how relational hypotheses are generated and either accepted or rejected, followed by the selection of new objects or the generation of new relational hypotheses. Its neural realism distinguishes the model from information processing accounts, its capacity to autonomously generate sequences of processing steps distinguishes it from deep neural network accounts. The model points toward a neural dynamic theory of higher cognition. (shrink)

This essay discusses how, for Hegel, freedom can be realized in nature in a rudimentary fashion in solar systems. This solves a problem in Kant’s account of freedom, namely, the problem that Kant only gives a negative argument for why freedom is not impossible but does not give a positive account of how freedom is real. I give a novel account of Kant’s negative argument. Then, I show how, according to Hegel, solar systems can be considered as exhibiting freedom in (...) a rudimentary fashion. Finally, I lay out how Hegel systematically develops this point about the freedom of solar systems in the ‘Mechanism’-chapter of the Science of Logic. In doing so, he uses Kant’s negative argument in a ‘purified’ form to arrive at an account of an ‘intimate token-type relation’ between the planets in a solar system and the law that governs their motion. The essay as a whole provides a concrete example of how Hegel is an inheritor and radicalizer of Kant, both with respect to freedom’s reality and with respect to philosophical method. (shrink)

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural (...) aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life. (shrink)

Describing actions entails that relations between objects are discovered. A pervasively neural account of this process requires that fundamental problems are solved: the neural pointer problem, the binding problem, and the problem of generating discrete processing steps from time-continuous neural processes. We present a prototypical solution to these problems in a neural dynamic model that comprises dynamic neural fields holding representations close to sensorimotor surfaces as well as dynamic neural nodes holding discrete, language-like representations. Making the connection between these two (...) types of representations enables the model to describe actions as well as to perceptually ground movement phrases—all based on real visual input. We demonstrate how the dynamic neural processes autonomously generate the processing steps required to describe or ground object-oriented actions. By solving the fundamental problems of neural pointing, binding, and emergent discrete processing, the model may be a first but critical step toward a systematic neural processing account of higher cognition. (shrink)

Background In an increasingly globalized world, legal protocols related to health care that are both effective and culturally sensitive are paramount in providing excellent quality of care as well as protection for physicians tasked with decision making. Here, we analyze the current medicolegal status of brain death diagnosis with regard to end-of-life care in Japan, China, and South Korea from the perspectives of front-line health care workers. Main body Japan has legally wrestled with the concept of brain death for decades. (...) An inability to declare brain death without consent from family coupled with cultural expectations of family involvement in medical care is mirrored in other Confucian-based cultures and may complicate care for patients from these countries when traveling or working overseas. Within Japan, China, and South Korea, medicolegal shortcomings in the diagnosis of brain death act as a great source of stress for physicians and expose them to potential public and legal scorn. Here, we detail the medicolegal status of brain death diagnosis within Japan and compare it to China and South Korea to find common ground and elucidate the impact of legal ambiguity on health care workers. Conclusion The Confucian cultural foundation of multiple Asian countries raises common issues of family involvement with diagnosis and cultural considerations that must be met. Leveraging public education systems may increase awareness of brain death issues and lead to evolving laws that clarify such end-of-life issues while protecting physicians from sociocultural backlash. (shrink)

Taking a phrase from President Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1992, this book could have just as easily been called It’s About Trust, Stupid. In his book, David A Shore, PhD, associate dean and founding director of the Trust Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health, presents a convincing argument for the importance of trust in healthcare delivery.Shore is equally convincing in arguing that people have a lack of trust in the healthcare system in the United States. To make (...) this point, he cites studies showing that while many continue to trust doctors and nurses, the trust in healthcare delivery itself …. (shrink)

I argue that God’s holiness as conceived in Hebrew Scripture grounds human obligations to obey divine commands. To disobey the commands of a holy God would disrespect a basic good, which we have decisive reason to avoid doing. God’s holiness may be a somewhat obscure property––though I propose transcendence and perfect morality as necessary conditions––but His omniscience and perfect morality guarantee that He would not command human beings to do things that His holiness would not ground His authority to command. (...) I conclude by replying to objections. (shrink)

A mass problem is a set of Turing oracles. If P and Q are mass problems, we say that P is weakly reducible to Q if for all Y ∈ Q there exists X ∈ P such that X is Turing reducible to Y. A weak degree is an equivalence class of mass problems under mutual weak reducibility. Let [Formula: see text] be the lattice of weak degrees of mass problems associated with nonempty [Formula: see text] subsets of the Cantor (...) space. The lattice [Formula: see text] has been studied in previous publications. The purpose of this paper is to show that [Formula: see text] partakes of hyperarithmeticity. We exhibit a family of specific, natural degrees in [Formula: see text] which are indexed by the ordinal numbers less than [Formula: see text] and which correspond to the hyperarithmetical hierarchy. Namely, for each [Formula: see text], let hα be the weak degree of 0, the αth Turing jump of 0. If p is the weak degree of any mass problem P, let p* be the weak degree of the mass problem P* = {Y | ∃X ⊆ BLR )} where BLR is the set of functions which are boundedly limit recursive in X. Let 1 be the top degree in [Formula: see text]. We prove that all of the weak degrees [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], are distinct and belong to [Formula: see text]. In addition, we prove that certain index sets associated with [Formula: see text] are [Formula: see text] complete. (shrink)

I discuss a puzzle that shows there is a need to develop a new metaphysical interpretation of mathematical theories, because all well-known interpretations conflict with important aspects of mathematical activities. The new interpretation, I argue, must authenticate the ontological commitments of mathematical theories without curtailing mathematicians' freedom and authority to creatively introduce mathematical ontology during mathematical problem-solving. Further, I argue that these two constraints are best met by a metaphysical interpretation of mathematics that takes mathematical entities to be constitutively constructed (...) by human activity in a manner similar to the constitutive construction of the US Supreme Court by certain legal and political activities. Finally, I outline some of the philosophical merits of metaphysical interpretations of mathematical theories of this type. (shrink)

The issue of statelessness poses problems for the statist approach to the philosophy of immigration. Despite the fact that the statist approach claims to constrain the state’s right to exclude with human rights considerations, the arguments statists offer for the right of states to determine their own immigration policies would also justify citizenship rules that would render some children stateless. Insofar as rendering a child stateless is best characterized as a violation of human rights and insofar as some states have (...) direct responsibility for causing such harm, the problem of non-refugee stateless children points to greater constraints than most statists accept on states’ right to determine their own rules for membership. While statists can ultimately account for the right not to be rendered stateless, recognizing these additional human rights constraints ultimately weakens the core of the statist position. (shrink)

Uncertainty is the name of the game in philosopher Kenneth W Goodman’s attempt to apply ethics to evidence based medicine . Indeed, the book is as much about epistemology, or the study of how we learn and know about the world, as it is about ethics. Goodman’s desire is to understand what constitutes proof, or evidence, that a particular treatment is better than others. One of the ethical connections is that a failure to use such treatments is blameworthy.EBM is a (...) concept that is getting a great deal of attention these days. At least two factors drive this …. (shrink)

The UK government has recently taken steps to exclude certain groups of migrants from free treatment under the National Health Service, most controversially from treatment for HIV. Whether this discrimination can have any coherent ethical basis is questioned in this paper. The exclusion of migrants of any status from any welfare system cannot be ethically justified because the distinction between citizens and migrants cannot be an ethical one.

Many people share the intuition that by turning to works of literature something can be learned about the world. One way to explain the epistemic access to the world that fictional literature provides is by comparing it to thought experiments. Both? thought experiments and works of fiction? might be seen as imaginative exercises which help to find out what would or could happen if certain conditions were met. This comparison of fictional literature with thought experiments provides the point of departure (...) for the contributions in our volume. It contributes to the discussion of an approach that has quite recently entered the field of the philosophy of literature. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas, one of the "founding fathers" of just war theory, offers an account of virtuous warfare in practice. The author argues that Aquinas's approach to warfare, with its emphasis on justice and charity, is helpful in providing a coherent moral account of war to which Christians can subscribe. Particular attention is given to the role of charity, since this virtue is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian soldier. Charity compels him to soldier justly, and by fighting justly, he is (...) elevated by God to friendship with God. Notable features of this approach are its emphasis on the criteria for judging whether a war is just and its relativizing of the criteria for proper combat behavior. (shrink)

Stephen Cole Kleene was one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century and this book is the influential textbook he wrote to teach the subject to the next generation. It was first published in 1952, some twenty years after the publication of Godel's paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic, which marked, if not the beginning of modern logic. The 1930s was a time of creativity and ferment in the subject, when the notion of computable moved from the realm (...) of philosophical speculation to the realm of science. This was accomplished by the work of Kurt Gode1, Alan Turing, and Alonzo Church, who gave three apparently different precise definitions of computable. When they all turned out to be equivalent, there was a collective realization that this was indeed the right notion. Kleene played a key role in this process. One could say that he was there at the beginning of modern logic. He showed the equivalence of lambda calculus with Turing machines and with Godel's recursion equations, and developed the modern machinery of partial recursive functions. This textbook played an invaluable part in educating the logicians of the present. It played an important role in their own logical education.". (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the concept of nature and how Kant and Hegel each conceive of it. Both agree that ‘nature’ cannot be an empirical concept but is rather presupposed in all experience and object-related thinking. Yet, Kant holds that we can only conceive of nature as a unified whole when we conceive of it as a mechanical system. Whereas, according to Hegel, the unity of all the different kinds of natural phenomena can only be accounted for by (...) means of his dialectical method. A crucial and novel point in my reading of Kant is that the concept of nature as a mechanical system is merely a regulative ideal, i.e., an imaginary end-point of science that we only approach asymptotically. It is this point that allows me to resolve long-standing puzzles in the scholarship regarding organisms and free will. For, this point allows for a coherent reading of Kant, a reading that involves that 1) we do in fact have experience of organisms and that 2) Kant’s distinctive kind of determinism is compatible with an open future. My reading of Kant furthermore provides a uniquely suited entry-point into Hegel’s dialectical account of nature, according to which not only human beings and organisms, but even solar systems do not fit the mould of a flat-footed mechanical determinism. This allows me to show that Hegel is—in several respects—both an inheritor and radicalizer of Kant. (shrink)

Mental representations have continuous as well as discrete, combinatorial properties. For example, while predominantly discrete, phonological representations also vary continuously; this is reflected by gradient effects in instrumental studies of speech production. Can an integrated theoretical framework address both aspects of structure? The framework we introduce here, Gradient Symbol Processing, characterizes the emergence of grammatical macrostructure from the Parallel Distributed Processing microstructure (McClelland, Rumelhart, & The PDP Research Group, 1986) of language processing. The mental representations that emerge, Distributed Symbol Systems, (...) have both combinatorial and gradient structure. They are processed through Subsymbolic Optimization–Quantization, in which an optimization process favoring representations that satisfy well-formedness constraints operates in parallel with a distributed quantization process favoring discrete symbolic structures. We apply a particular instantiation of this framework, λ-Diffusion Theory, to phonological production. Simulations of the resulting model suggest that Gradient Symbol Processing offers a way to unify accounts of grammatical competence with both discrete and continuous patterns in language performance. (shrink)

Normative questions concerning political authority and political obligation are widely seen as central questions of political philosophy. Current global transformations require an innovative response from normative political thinking about these two topics. In light of a concrete example of the supranational forms of authority and obligation that have been and are emerging beyond the national state and beyond the traditional domains of international law, I lay out what has become the standard approach to authority and obligation and indicate why this (...) approach is inadequate in contemporary circumstances. I sketch an alternative approach and suggest how the most promising exemplar of this kind, Habermas’ discourse theory of law and politics, can better deal with the example. Having thus made plausible the advantages of the discourse theory of the alternative approach, I end with an ‘internal’ critique of Habermas’ own recent writings on the global political order. (shrink)

Rorty was one of the great dissolvers of dualisms, but strangely this iconoclasm ended when it came to liberal democracy. Here he held fast to the most stubborn of dualisms in political thought, a simple dichotomy of the public and the private, and used it, unsuccessfully, to resolve questions concerning the place of religion in modern democratic politics. Yet the philosophical basis of Rorty's pragmatism both undercuts two common ways of spelling out the relationship between religion and the polity in (...) liberalism and makes his use of the public/private dichotomy impossible. By means of an internal critique, I argue for a Habermasian corrective. (shrink)

This chapter talks about the war between the Formics, a seemingly malevolent species of aliens, and humans in the Ender's Game. The great tragedy of the violence that erupted from the Human/Formic war was the result of two deep misunderstandings. The Formics not only failed to grasp the capabilities of humanity, but humanity also deeply misunderstood the creatures that they would come to nickname “buggers.” These misunderstandings may have resulted from what is sometimes called “cultural incommensurability.” The chapter relates that (...) what is most important about Ender is not merely his ability to understand his “enemy,” but his ability to love them. He is able to harness the sympathies of the humans and change their minds about the buggers. Along with the Formic hive‐ queen, Ender now occupies the space in between the two conceptual schemes—a space he can never retreat from—and has begun translating their meanings. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This chapter explores the different dimensions of domination, including whether it has a structural approach, its relation to race and imperialism, and how non-domination can be institutionalized and achieved at a global level.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the legal concept and the meaning of human dignity for each European state and the European Union. For each of these 43 countries and the EU, it scrutinizes three main aspects: the constitution, legislation, and application of law. The book addresses and presents answers to important questions relating to the concept of human dignity. These questions include the following: What is the meaning of human dignity? What is the legal status of the respective (...) human dignity norms? Are human dignity norms of a programmatic nature, or do they establish an individual right which can be invoked before court? Is human dignity inviolable? The volume answers these questions from the perspectives of all European countries. As a reaction to the barbaric events during World War II, human dignity found its way into international law. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The starting point for developing the concept on a national level was the codification of human dignity in article 1, paragraph 1 of the German Grundgesetz. Consequently, the concept of human dignity spread throughout Europe and, in the context of human rights, became a fundamental legal concept. (shrink)

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in electri[k] ‐ electri[s]‐ity. But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the experimental setup presented may contribute to this debate based on a kind of evidence that was not brought to bear to date. Our experiment was thus designed to distinguish between alternations where (...) phonological computation plays no role, and those where it has contributed to language production. The design manipulates two factors that to date have not been considered in experimental studies of language production: linguistic complexity and alternation specificity. The former is understood as extra processing demands issued by two types of linguistic activity, morphosyntactic and phonological. Our results show that reaction time latencies are longer when participants are burdened with both morphosyntactic and phonological tasks than when they carry out just a morphosyntactic task, and they are still shorter in absence of both types of demands. These results allowed us to address alternation specificity, that is, the fact that different alternations (within a language or across languages) may be driven by different production routines (an idea that is consensual among linguists but underdeveloped in the psycholinguistic literature). Our study shows that four different alternations in French produce alternation‐specific signatures in reaction time latencies. These findings may thus redound to the advantage of psycholinguistic studies by identifying two new factors, as well as produce results that speak to the linguistic quarrels. (shrink)

Vols. for 1972- include papers from the Summer Linguistics Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Previous research on linguistic relativity and economic decisions hypothesized that speakers of languages with obligatory tense marking of future time reference (FTR) should value future rewards less than speakers of languages which permit present tense FTR. This was hypothesized on the basis of obligatory linguistic marking (e.g., will) causing speakers to construe future events as more temporally distal and thereby to exhibit increased “temporal discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the delay until they will occur increases. However, several aspects (...) of this hypothesis are incomplete. First, it overlooks the role of “modal” FTR structures which encode notions about the likelihood of future outcomes (e.g., might). This may influence “probability discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the probability of their occurrence decreases. Second, the extent to which linguistic structures are subjectively related to temporal or probability discounting differences is currently unknown. To address these, we elicited FTR language and subjective ratings of temporal distance and probability from speakers of English, which exhibits strongly grammaticized FTR, and Dutch, which does not. Several findings went against the predictions of the previous hypothesis: Framing an FTR statement in the present (“Ellie arrives later on”) versus the future tense (“…will arrive…”) did not affect ratings of temporal distance; English speakers rated future statements as relatively more temporally proximal than Dutch speakers; and English and Dutch speakers rated future tenses as encoding high certainty, which suggests that obligatory future tense marking might result in less discounting. Additionally, compared with Dutch speakers, English speakers used more low-certainty terms in general (e.g., may) and as a function of various experimental factors. We conclude that the prior cross-linguistic observations of the link between FTR and psychological discounting may be caused by the connection between low-certainty modal structures and probability discounting, rather than future tense and temporality. (shrink)

In December 2007 it was revealed that the British government is considering the exclusion of certain groups of migrants—those considered to be present “illegally”—from primary health care provided by the National Health Service. At present, practitioners have discretion to accept any individual for NHS treatment regardless of their status. A joint Home Office and Department of Health review is examining this access for foreign nationals, and the likely outcome is the restriction of access to irregular migrants, which would, according to (...) the Institute of Public Policy Research, affect around 390,000 people. In 2004 such groups were excluded from NHS secondary care, most controversially from treatment for HIV, and so the present proposal would bar them from all but emergency health treatment. (shrink)