We study human performance in two classical NP‐hard optimization problems: Set Cover and Maximum Coverage. We suggest that Set Cover and Max Coverage are related to means selection problems that arise in human problem‐solving and in pursuing multiple goals: The relationship between goals and means is expressed as a bipartite graph where edges between means and goals indicate which means can be used to achieve which goals. While these problems are believed to be computationally intractable in general, they become more (...) tractable when the structure of the network resembles a tree. Thus, our main prediction is that people should perform better with goal systems that are more tree‐like. We report three behavioral experiments which confirm this prediction. Our results suggest that combinatorial parameters that are instrumental to algorithm design can also be useful for understanding when and why people struggle to choose between multiple means to achieve multiple goals. (shrink)

Few topics in international intellectual property law have been as controversial in recent years as the one we are about to examine. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a Diplomatic Conference attempted to revise the oldest international convention providing some protection for patented inventions outside of the domestic laws. Those efforts broke down, largely because developed and developing countries could not agree on the powers that governments should retain to issue compulsory licenses or on the grounds for which these powers (...) could be exercised. The failure of this Conference, held under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), persuaded the technology-exporting countries to link future negotiations concerning international intellectual property protection to the Multilateral Trade Negotiations, known as the Uruguay Round, which got underway in 1986. The end result was Annex IC of the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization of 1994, which incorporated a new, comprehensive and relatively elevated set of international minimum standards of patent protection into the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). (shrink)

The secrets from the inner meaning of Torah form the soul of the Chasidic movement's thought. They inspire, revive, and inflame Jewish souls with a passion to constantly increase observance and devotion. For more than two centuries it has inoculated millions against the ravages of secularism and preserved the spiritual life of the Jewish nation. Chasidus emerged as a protection from the storm winds of modernity. Today's Jewish community might benefit from a new look at the Chasidic movement's beginnings and (...) reflections. Even those Jews who fulfill their religious obligations frequently perform rituals in a lifeless and superficial way. Were we to discover the depth and soulful vitality that fill Chasidic literature, a renewed passion might flame our faltering Jewish experience with the warmth of Torah. Unfortunately, for many of my contemporary American Jews, access to the gem-stones of the Chasidim has been denied. Chasidic works are overwhelmingly in Hebrew, and few good translations exist. This book provides an introduction to the basic terms and ideas of Chasidic texts. It is written for the interested lay reader who may be new to Torah study, as well as the yeshiva student who is knowledgeable about Biblical narratives and Talmudic law but may be new to the world of Chasidus. (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

The _Physics_ is a foundational work of western philosophy, and the crucial one for understanding Aristotle's views on matter, form, essence, causation, movement, space, and time. This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation makes it available to a contemporary English reader as no other does—in part because it fits together seamlessly with other closely associated works in the New Hackett Aristotle series, such as the _Metaphysics_, _De Anima_, and forthcoming _De Caelo_ and _On Coming to Be and Passing Away_. (...) Eventually the series will include all of Aristotle's works. Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, while a detailed Index of Terms indicates places where focused discussion of key notions occurs. An illuminating general Introduction describes the book that lies ahead, explaining what sort of work it is and what sorts of evidence it relies on. (shrink)

This essay considers the reliability and proper role of authorial intention in the interpretation of figurative language and argues that, even in cases of metaphor and irony, the meaning of a text must remain logically independent of the intent of its historical author. Irony and metaphor have been broadly considered to be the most problematic cases for the anti-intentionalist approach to interpretation. The arguments in this essay address standard intentionalist arguments and, in the end, defend a sort of hypothetical intentionalism (...) that is, in all significant respects, anti-intentionalist. (shrink)

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

Here I look to some work in the historical sciences in order to draw out some of the epistemic benefits of “speculative narratives,” which bears on some more general epistemic benefits of speculative reasoning. Due to the contingent nature of much historical evidence, some degree of speculative reasoning is necessary to get the epistemological ball rolling in the historical sciences, and I argue that speculative narratives provide the necessary sort of frameworking apparatus for doing precisely this. I use contemporary work (...) on the first peopling of the Americas (the “Clovis First Debate”) for illustration. (shrink)

Sometimes, learning about the origins of a belief can make it irrational to continue to hold that belief—a phenomenon we call ‘genealogical defeat’. According to explanationist accounts, genealogical defeat occurs when one learns that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between one’s belief and the truth. Flatfooted versions of explanationism have been widely and rightly rejected on the grounds that they would disallow beliefs about the future and other inductively-formed beliefs. After motivating the need for some explanationist account, we raise (...) some problems for recent versions of explanationism. Learning from their failures, we then produce and defend a more resilient explanationism. (shrink)

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of (...) cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. -/- Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic. (shrink)

Examines the lived experience of social encounters drawing on phenomenological insights.

Par ces temps de grands malaises identitaires, subjectifs et collectifs, où les frontières vacillent, où l'identité fait problème - tantôt elle chavire et tantôt elle se crispe -, on découvre avec surprise que le concept de différence est lui aussi insuffisant pour rendre compte de toutes ces effervescences: il est trop simple, trop figé... Nous décrivons ici ces lieux par lesquels on passe pour devenir différent, et tenter de faire quelque chose de "sa" différence; ces moments où nous sommes "entre (...) deux"; dans les contextes les plus variés: l'écrivain qui se débat entre deux langues, la femme qui, pour accéder à sa propre féminité, doit se dégager de la Femme originelle, l'adolescent ou le jeune qui cherche à faire le pas sans passer à l'acte ou, simplement, se ranger, et même le chômeur cherchant "une place" - tous passent par un entre-deux. Celui-ci se révèle être un passage ou une impasse, selon que l'origine qui se rejoue dans cette épreuve se révèle accessible ou pas à une sorte de partage - qu'il s'agit justement d'éclairer. L'entre-deux est donc plus qu'un nouveau concept, c'est une épreuve où l'on s'affronte à l'Origine - perdue ou redonnée, morcelée ou en bloc. On s'y affronte à la fois pour la retrouver et pour s'en dégager. Et l'origine est une dynamique à laquelle on a affaire chaque fois qu'il s'agit de se déplacer. Ces déplacements requièrent une certaine énergie; c'est elle, précisément, que ce texte voudrait libérer, en dégageant, à partir des vertiges originels, les entre-deux du possible. (shrink)

Infallibilism is the view that a belief cannot be at once warranted and false. In this essay we assess three nonpartisan arguments for infallibilism, arguments that do not depend on a prior commitment to some substantive theory of warrant. Three premises, one from each argument, are most significant: if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then the Gettier Problem cannot be solved; if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can be transferred (...) to an accidentally true belief; if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then it can be warranted and accidentally true. We argue that each of these is either false or no more plausible than its denial. Along the way, we offer a solution to the Gettier Problem that is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.

" Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...) moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. (shrink)

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some cases, (...) the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the find ings and the policy is easy to see. In other cases, perhaps most, its influence is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally the findings of social scientific studies are explicitly drawn upon by policymakers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, the categories and theoretical models of social science provide a general background orientation within which policymakers concep tualize problems and frame policy options. At times, the in fluence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policymakers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to le gitimate preestablished goals and strategies. Nonetheless, amid this diversity and variety, troubling general questions persistently arise. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts are those that lie “beyond the call of duty.” There are two standard ways to define this idea more precisely. Although the definitions are often seen as equivalent, I argue that they can diverge when options are infinite, or when there are cycles of better options; moreover, each definition is acceptable in only one case. I consider two ways out of this dilemma.

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Conversation, talk, the communicative process, can be compared to the symphonic play of a piece of music. There is an orchestra, the musicians, whose tones and notes must flow, complement and harmonize with one another. There is a main theme. As the music builds variations on the theme are played, and new themes and subthemes are introduced. The basinett responds to the strings, the bass emphasizes the mood of the violin, while the french horn adds a new melody. The subtlety (...) and evenness of flow, the seeming simplicity of the piece, the rich interleaving of subdevelopments, variations, tangents, and recapitulations, are what make a piece of music great.Coherent communication is much the same. It looks easy. It flows. It seems effortless. In reality, of course, it is rich and complex, in both form and content. As in music, conversants may begin a conversation slowly, tentatively, with some simple (or complex) topic in mind. Slowly the momentum builds, the connections surface, and the themes become defined. As in music, these themes are then elaborated upon in various ways. Topic elaborations often spawn their own variations. New themes and subthemes are introduced. All the while, as in music, original themes reappear and are interwoven with the new ones. The twists and turns of the conversation seem to occur effortlessly.In music, there is usually one composer in control of which instrument plays next; one composer who is in charge of what the instrument will say. There is a single coordinator of theme introductions, developments, variations, and interweavings. The composition is done off-line and usually involves editing and re-editing for flaws. In discourse, however, we have on-line development with multiple parties responsible for flow coordination. All parties have to organize their own turns, themes, and variations, in addition to their being able to integrate these items into co-conversants'.In their book, “Understanding Computers and Cognition,” Winograd and Flores (1987) cite the following from Gadamer (Winograd and Flores, 1987, p. 32):It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being ... the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something — whereby what we encounter says something to us. (Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 1976, p. 9). (shrink)

The identification of molecules controlling embryonic patterning and their functional analysis has revolutionized the fields of Developmental and Cell Biology. The use of new sequence information and modern bioinformatics tools has enriched the list of proteins that could potentially play a role in regulating cell behavior and function during early development. The recent application of efficient methods for gene knockout in zebrafish has accelerated the functional analysis of many proteins, some of which have been overlooked due to their small size. (...) Two recent publications report on the identification of one such protein and its role in zebrafish embryogenesis. The protein, currently designated Apela, was shown to act as a secreted protein whose absence adversely affected various early developmental processes. Additional signaling proteins that have been identified in one of the studies are likely to open the way to unraveling hitherto unknown developmental pathways and have the potential to provide a more comprehensive understanding of known developmental processes. (shrink)

This chapter examines the reliability of using the tosefta for historical research. It explains that the tosefta is a compilation of early rabbinic legal traditions which date from the first to the early third century CE. It discusses the different manuscripts, editions and translations of the tosefta. It concludes that the narratives or case stories in the tosefta possess significance for historical research and their relevance ranges from an increased understanding of the daily life of the Jews in Palestine and (...) the activity of the rabbis in society to the more precise determination of their power and position within society. (shrink)

Sometimes it takes years of debate for philosophers to discover what it is they really disagree about. Sometimes they talk past each other in long series of books and articles, never guessing at the root disagreement that divides them. But occasionally a day comes when something happens to coax the cat out of the bag. "Aha!" one philosopher exclaims to another, "so that's why you've been disagreeing with me, misunderstanding me, resisting my conclusions, puzzling me all these years!".

A remarkable number of Nietzsche's substantive moral psychological views have been borne out by evidence from the empirical sciences. Moral judgments are products of affects on Nietzsche's view, but the latter are in turn causally dependent upon more fundamental features of the individual. Nietzsche accepts a doctrine of types. The path is short from the acceptance of the Doctrine of Types to the acceptance of epiphenomenalism, as Leiter, and more recently, Riccardi argue. This chapter explains Nietzsche's phenomenological account of willing, (...) which serves as independent motivation for the view that Nietzsche denies the causal efficacy of conscious acts of willing. It also explores that in spite of an absence of volitional freedom, self‐control can be usefully understood on a strength‐model of motivational resources. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how Nietzsche, without employing the contemporary methods of empirical psychology, could nonetheless be such a prescient moral psychologist. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.

It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell's organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the recent introduction (...) of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell. This paper examines four major domains of current research in which the challenges to the machine conception of the cell are particularly pronounced: cellular architecture, protein complexes, intracellular transport, and cellular behaviour. It argues that a new theoretical understanding of the cell is emerging from the study of these phenomena which emphasizes the dynamic, self-organizing nature of its constitution, the fluidity and plasticity of its components, and the stochasticity and non-linearity of its underlying processes. (shrink)

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)

This paper will attempt to assess the primary differences between what I take to be the two primary philosophical "traditions" in contemporary French philosophy, using Derrida (transcendence) and Deleuze (immanence) as exemplary representatives. The body of the paper will examine the use of these terms in three different areas of philosophy on which Derrida and Deleuze have both written: subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. (1) In the field of subjectivity, the notion of the subject has been critiqued in two manners, either (...) by appealing either to the transcendence of the other (Levinas, Derrida) or to the immanent jlux of experience itself, in relation to which the Ego itself is trancendent (Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, James). (2) In the field of ontology, a purely "immanent" ontology would be an ontology in which there is neither a "beyond" or an "otherwise" Being, nor "interruptions" in Being, both of which would require an appeal to a formal element of transcendence (Deleuze). Such a "transcendent" and aporetic structure, which can never appear or be present as such within Being, is what lies at the basis of the project of deconstruction, with its attendant aporias (Derrida). (3) This distinction, finally, finds parallels in Kant's epistemology, for whom the possible experience is conditioned by purely immanent criteria (Deleuze), whereas what goes beyond the limits of possible experience is transcendent (Derrida). Drawing on these three thread of analysis, the paper concludes with an assessment of what is at stake in the ethical differences between the two traditions. The question of "transcendence" is "What mast I do?", which is the question of morality (a duty or obligation that is beyond being, an "ought" beyond the "is"). The question of "immanence" is "What can I do?" (my power or capacity as an existing individual within being). For Levinas and Derrida, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other); for Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (Spinoza). (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book, Daniel D. Novotny explores one of the most controversial topics of Suarez's philosophy: "beings of reason." Beings of reason are impossible intentional objects, such as blindness and square-circle.

Axiom weakening is a novel technique that allows for fine-grained repair of inconsistent ontologies. In a multi-agent setting, integrating ontologies corresponding to multiple agents may lead to inconsistencies. Such inconsistencies can be resolved after the integrated ontology has been built, or their generation can be prevented during ontology generation. We implement and compare these two approaches. First, we study how to repair an inconsistent ontology resulting from a voting-based aggregation of views of heterogeneous agents. Second, we prevent the generation of (...) inconsistencies by letting the agents engage in a turn-based rational protocol about the axioms to be added to the integrated ontology. We instantiate the two approaches using real-world ontologies and compare them by measuring the levels of satisfaction of the agents w.r.t. the ontology obtained by the two procedures. (shrink)