Multiverse Views in set theory advocate the claim that there are many universes of sets, no-one of which is canonical, and have risen to prominence over the last few years. One motivating factor is that such positions are often argued to account very elegantly for technical practice. While there is much discussion of the technical aspects of these views, in this paper I analyse a radical form of Multiversism on largely philosophical grounds. Of particular importance will be an account of (...) reference on the Multiversist conception, and the relativism that it implies. I argue that analysis of this central issue in the Philosophy of Mathematics indicates that Radical Multiversism must be algebraic, and cannot be viewed as an attempt to provide an account of reference without a softening of the position. (shrink)

Set-theoretic and category-theoretic foundations represent different perspectives on mathematical subject matter. In particular, category-theoretic language focusses on properties that can be determined up to isomorphism within a category, whereas set theory admits of properties determined by the internal structure of the membership relation. Various objections have been raised against this aspect of set theory in the category-theoretic literature. In this article, we advocate a methodological pluralism concerning the two foundational languages, and provide a theory that fruitfully interrelates a `structural' perspective (...) to a set-theoretic one. We present a set-theoretic system that is able to talk about structures more naturally, and argue that it provides an important perspective on plausibly structural properties such as cardinality. We conclude the language of set theory can provide useful information about the notion of mathematical structure. (shrink)

I argue that Plato's purpose in the discussion of false belief in the "Theaetetus" is to entertain and then to reject the idea that thinking is a kind of mental grasping. The interpretation allows us to make good sense of Plato's discussion of 'other-judging' (189c-190e), of his remarks about mathematical error (195d-196c), and most importantly, of the initial statement of the puzzle about falsity (188a-c). That puzzle shows that if we insist on conceiving of the relation between thought and its (...) objects on the model of holding or grasping something in our hands, we will be unable to account for the possibility of false identity judgments: For no one who is literally grasping two things in his hands would seriously entertain the idea that one of the things is numerically identical with the other. (shrink)

Discusses a variety of ways mankind is cruel to animals.

This book documents Szilard's energetic attempts to influence public policy on arms control and disarmament issues, both through open political processes and statements and through behindthe-scenes contacts with Washington power sources and a remarkable exercise in personal diplomacy with Nikita Khrushchev. Leo Szilard conceived of the possibility of nuclear fission sustained by a chain reaction years before it was achieved in the laboratory. He was also one of the initiators of the atomic bomb project in the United States. Yet he (...) dedicated his final years to the causes of understanding and sustaining life. The eminent physicist became a biologist and a vital force calling, for the control of nuclear and other weapons. This book documents Szilard's energetic attempts to influence public policy on arms control and disarmament issues, both through open political processes and statements and through behindthe-scenes contacts with Washington power sources and a remarkable exercise in personal diplomacy with Nikita Khrushchev. Many of the issues Szilard deals with in this valuable record of the years 1947-1963 are still crucial today. His opposition to antiballistic missile systems, his proposal for a Washington-Moscow "hot line," his work on the Pugwash conferences that brought together scientists from the East and the West, his pivotal role in the creation of the Council for a Livable World, his advocacy of a nuclear policy of no-first-use and restricted retaliation, and his support of "minimum deterrence" in place of an overwhelming counterforce capability - all these matters are as important in the 1980s as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. (shrink)

Although widespread throughout the biomedical sciences, the practice of honorary authorship—the listing of authors who fail to merit inclusion as authors by authorship criteria—has received relatively little sustained attention. Is there something wrong with honorary authorship, or is it only a problem when used in conjunction with other unethical authorship practices like ghostwriting? Numerous sets of authorship guidelines discourage the practice, but its ubiquity throughout biomedicine suggests that there is a need to say more about honorary authorship. Despite its general (...) acceptance among many scientists, honorary authorship is unethical. Even if burdensome, responsible researchers are obligated to forgo honorary authorship. (shrink)

Today’s fast-moving, media lifeworld embodies many of the metaphors of its analog predecessors – including those of warfare and conflict. The metaphor of warfare is used to describe everything from corporate marketing strategies to political campaigns, often with harmful consequences. In one way of exploring the front lines of the resulting war on truth, we describe some lessons learned from the experience of military veterans who have actually endured the liminality of combat, and who emerge with what is increasingly termed (...) moral injuries. We use their experience as an analogy for competing narratives in cyberspace, where objective standards of truth and facticity are apparent casualties, and where fake news is emerging as victorious. We then apply models of social construction, specifically the practical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning, and the metaphor of jazz improvisation in the context of Schutz’s lifeworld phenomenology as possibly useful, helpful, and hopeful ways of acting into the complexity of truth together. (shrink)

Near the end of the Amherst Cofloquium on “Nietzsche Today: The Reception of his Work after 1968,” Geoff Waite challenged the underlying historical assumption: “Is 1968 chosen because it marks the approximate date of the publication of the first volume of the splendid critical edition of Nietzsche's work by Colli and Montinari, or rather the approximate date of the until recently wholly apolitical appropriation of Nietzsche by post-structuralism? Do we wish to allude to die year of the Zagreb meeting on (...) Nietzsche of “creative Marxists” trying, as they said, to locate “the theme of human freedom in Nietzsche,” or rather to the year that Jiirgen Habermas delivered himself of the opinion that “Nietzsche is no longer contagious?” For some of us, however, 1968 has to mean also and mainly May '68.”. (shrink)

Cimino's The Deer Hunter is a mass culture product that sells. It is a conventional, manipulative Hollywood movie that moves large U.S. audiences. In trying to identify the ideological function of this film, Leibowitz has compared The Deer Hunter to Nazi ideology or German Romantic nationalist aesthetics. This comparison, however, says little about the film itself. To invoke this German tradition is to do little more than to invoke the roots of the modern culture industry in general. The Nazis are (...) only unique in that they succeeded early in blending propaganda, violence, pornography, religion and a consumer mentality in a mechanism of cultural manipulation. (shrink)

Although popular, I argue that the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) account of authorship is flawed. It inadvertently allows for practices that it was designed to prevent. In addition, it creates a new category of authorless papers—orphan papers. The original World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) criterion is preferable.

A central area of current philosophical debate in the foundations of mathematics concerns whether or not there is a single, maximal, universe of set theory. Universists maintain that there is such a universe, while Multiversists argue that there are many universes, no one of which is ontologically privileged. Often model-theoretic constructions that add sets to models are cited as evidence in favour of the latter. This paper informs this debate by developing a way for a Universist to interpret talk that (...) seems to necessitate the addition of sets to V. We argue that, despite the prima facie incoherence of such talk for the Universist, she nonetheless has reason to try and provide interpretation of this discourse. We present a method of interpreting extension-talk (V-logic), and show how it captures satisfaction in `ideal' outer models and relates to impredicative class theories. We provide some reasons to regard the technique as philosophically virtuous, and argue that it opens new doors to philosophical and mathematical discussions for the Universist. (shrink)

Research across a variety of domains has found that people fail to evaluate statistical information in an atheoretical manner. Rather, people tend to evaluate statistical information in light of their pre-existing beliefs and experiences. The locus of these biases continues to be hotly debated. In two experiments we evaluate the degree to which reasoning when relevant beliefs are readily accessible (i.e., when reasoning with Belief-Laden content) versus when relevant beliefs are not available (i.e., when reasoning with Non-Belief-Laden content) differentially demands (...) attentional resources. In Experiment 1 we found that reasoning with scenarios that contained Belief-Laden content required fewer attentional resources than reasoning with scenarios that contained Non-Belief-Laden content, as evidenced by smaller costs on a secondary memory load task for the former than the latter. This trend was reversed in Experiment 2 when participants were instructed to ignore their beliefs when reasoning with Belief-Laden and Non-Belief-Laden scenarios. These findings provide evidence that beliefs automatically influence reasoning, and attempting to ignore them comes with an attentional cost. (shrink)

I argue that Plato's purpose in the discussion of false belief in the "Theaetetus" is to entertain and then to reject the idea that thinking is a kind of mental grasping. The interpretation allows us to make good sense of Plato's discussion of 'other-judging' (189c-190e), of his remarks about mathematical error (195d-196c), and most importantly, of the initial statement of the puzzle about falsity (188a-c). That puzzle shows that if we insist on conceiving of the relation between thought and its (...) objects on the model of holding or grasping something in our hands, we will be unable to account for the possibility of false identity judgments: For no one who is literally grasping two things in his hands would seriously entertain the idea that one of the things is numerically identical with the other. (shrink)

The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn out to be useful for philosophy of physics. In this article, we show first that this heuristic defense of metaphysics can be extended to the scientific field of applied ontology, which uses constructs from analytic metaphysics. Second, we elaborate on a parallel by French (...) & McKenzie between mathematics and metaphysics to show that the whole field of analytic metaphysics, being useful not only for philosophy but also for science, should continue to exist as a largely autonomous field. (shrink)

Much of the debate surrounding the concept of information in biology centers on the question of whether or not biological systems ‘really’ carry information. The criterion for determining if a system “really” carries information is whether or not there is a principled, theoretical account of information that captures the relevant biological usages. If biological systems do not carry information in this sense, information talk is termed merely heuristic and dismissed as philosophically uninteresting. To date, all three proposed theoretical accounts of (...) information—mathematical, causal and teleosemantic—fail to capture the meaning of biologists. Details of other biological practices that utilize informational concepts are often lost because the debate is too focused on one instance of information talk—genetic information and because biological representations are thought to need a certain kind of theoretical foundation. The problem with this methodology is that it takes the failure of philosophical accounts of information to capture current biological practices as conclusive evidence that informational representations in biology are incoherent. This approach is backwards. A better strategy is to get a clear understanding of biological practice and then to use it to shape our understanding of the philosophical significance of biological information. In this paper, I shift attention from abstract reasoning about information in the philosophical literature to concrete reasoning about informational models in biology. The current debate pays too little attention to the biologically prominent concept of signal. I develop a contextualized understanding of signaling models in biological practice. I argue that biologists use the concept of signal to model distinct functional roles in biological systems and not in any of the theoretical senses of information found in the current philosophical literature. For cell biologists, a signal causally indicates the state of a system at a given point and is used in the context of a style of functional explanation generally known as ‘causal role function,’ in which a mechanism or entity has a function if its behavior explains a contribution to a capacity of interest. I support this analysis with an example drawn from cell biology and reframe the debate over the significance of informational terms in biology. The focus on signal recasts the debate by highlighting examples of information talk which are central to active research programs in biology. The advantage of looking at these models is that their centrality to biological practice forces us to reconsider the adequacy of a methodology that dismisses biological models because we lack a particular kind of philosophical understanding of them. Standard philosophical accounts of information rely on assumptions appropriate for the needs of philosophers but are ill-suited for capturing biological practice. A contextualized understanding of the role of signal in biological practice allows us to work out from the details of practice to tackle broader philosophical issues. On this view, the significance of information talk in biology hinges more on our understanding of how biologists represent function than on our understanding of philosophical accounts of information. (shrink)