The Monty Hall Problem (MHP), a process of two-stage decision making, was presented in atypical form via a custom software game. Differing from the normal three-box MHP, the game added one additional box on-screen for each game—culminating on game 23 with 25 on-screen boxes to initially choose from. A total of 108 participants played 23 games (trials) in one of four conditions; (1) “Vanish” condition—all non-winning boxes totally removed from the screen; (2) “Empty” condition—all non-winning boxes remain on-screen, but with (...) an “empty” label on them; (3) “Steroids” condition—all non-winning boxes removed from the screen, with initially chosen box becoming 25% larger; (4) “Steroids2” condition—all non-winning boxes removed from the screen, box not currently chosen becomes 25% larger. Results indicate second-stage on-screen presence of boxes influences switching; with their absence having the opposite effect. Size manipulation appears to elicit demand characteristics resulting in indeterminate influence. (shrink)

Robots are being extensively used for the purpose of discovering and testing empirical hypotheses about biological sensorimotor mechanisms. We examine here methodological problems that have to be addressed in order to design and perform “good” experiments with these machine models. These problems notably concern the mapping of biological mechanism descriptions into robotic mechanism descriptions; the distinction between theoretically unconstrained “implementation details” and robotic features that carry a modeling weight; the role of preliminary calibration experiments; the monitoring of experimental environments for (...) disturbing factors that affect both modeling features and theoretically unconstrained implementation details of robots. Various assumptions that are gradually introduced in the process of setting up and performing these robotic experiments become integral parts of the background hypotheses that are needed to bring experimental observations to bear on biological mechanism descriptions. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of research projects have been proposed whose goal is to build large-scale simulations of brain mechanisms at unprecedented levels of biological accuracy. Here it is argued that the roles these simulations are expected to play in neuroscientific research go beyond the “synthetic method” extensively adopted in Artificial Intelligence and biorobotics. In addition we show that, over and above the common goal of simulating brain mechanisms, these projects pursue various modelling ambitions that can be sharply distinguished (...) from one another, and that correspond to conceptually different interpretations of the notion of “biological accuracy”. They include the ambition to reach extremely deep levels in the mechanistic decomposition hierarchy, to simulate networks composed of extremely large numbers of neural units, to build systems able to generate rich behavioural repertoires, to simulate “complex” neuron models, to implement the “best” theories available on brain structure and function. Some questions will be raised concerning the significance of each of these modelling ambitions with respect to the various roles played by simulations in the study of the brain. (shrink)

Robotics and Philosophy of Science What relationship holds between robotics and philosophy of science? Can robotics research contribute to research in philosophy of science? Conversely, can the results achieved by philosophers of science contribute to the progress of research in robotics? This article will deal with both questions based on the distinction between the so-called philosophy of general science and the philosophy of the particular sciences. It will draw relatively pessimistic conclusions about the possibility that robotics research shed light on (...) questions pertaining to the philosophy of general science, and more optimistic conclusions about the potential contribution of robotics research to the philosophy of particular sciences. The normative aspect of philosophy of science is consistent with the possibility that this field of research, taking robotics as its object of study, provides guidelines and regulative methodological principles for engineers and roboticists. Through these considerations, this article attempts to explore a possible field of interaction between philosophy and scientific-technological research, with reference to a discipline that is assuming an increasingly predominant role in many aspects of daily life. (shrink)

What can interactive robots offer to the study of social behaviour? Philosophical reflections about the use of robotic models in animal research have focused so far on methods involving robots which do not interact with the target system. Yet, leading researchers have claimed that interactive robots may constitute powerful experimental tools to study collective behaviour. Can they live up to these epistemic expectations? This question is addressed here by focusing on a particular experimental methodology involving interactive robots which has been (...) often adopted in animal research. This methodology is shown to differ from other robot-supported methods for the study of animal behaviour analysed in the philosophical literature, chiefly including the synthetic method. It is also discussed whether biomimicry and acceptability are necessary for an interactive robot to be sensibly used in animal research according to this method. (shrink)

Simulation studies have been carried out in robotics for a variety of epistemic and practical purposes. Here it is argued that two broad classes of simulation studies can be identified in robotics research. The first one is exemplified by the use of robotic systems to acquire knowledge on living systems in so-called biorobotics, while the second class of studies is more distinctively connected to cases in which artificial systems are used to acquire knowledge about the behaviour of autonomous mobile robots. (...) The two classes pertain to sub-areas of robotics which are apparently quite distant from one another in terms of goals, methodologies, technologies, and theoretical backgrounds. Still both are concerned with building, running, and experimenting on simulations of other systems. This paper aims to reveal and discuss some methodological commonalities between the two classes of studies. Philosophical literature on simulation methodologies has been traditionally focused on studies carried out in research fields other than robotics: this article may therefore contribute to shedding light on how the concept of simulation is used in robotics, and on the role simulation methodologies play in this research field. (shrink)

In their theoretical and experimental reflections on the capacities and behaviours of living systems, neuroscientists often formulate generalizations about the behaviour of neural circuits. These generalizations are highly idealized, as they omit reference to the myriads of conditions that could perturb the behaviour of the modelled system in real-world settings. This article analyses an experimental investigation of the behaviour of place cells in the rat hippocampus, in which highly idealized generalizations were tested by comparing predictions flowing from them with real-world (...) experimental results. The aim of the article is to identify under what conditions even single prediction failures regarding the behaviour of single cells sufficed to reject highly idealized generalizations, and under what conditions prima facie counter-examples were deemed to be irrelevant to the testing of highly idealized generalizations. The results of this analysis may contribute to understanding how idealized models are tested experimentally in neuroscience and used to make reliable predictions concerning living systems in real-world settings. (shrink)

Bionic systems, connecting biological tissues with computer or robotic devices through brain–machine interfaces, can be used in various ways to discover biological mechanisms. In this article I outline and discuss a “stimulation-connection” bionics-supported methodology for the study of the brain, and compare it with other epistemic uses of bionic systems described in the literature. This methododology differs from the “synthetic”, simulative method often followed in theoretically driven Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science, even though it involves machine models of biological systems. (...) I also bring the previous analysis to bear on some claims on the epistemic value of bionic technologies made in the recent philosophical literature. I believe that the methodological reflections proposed here may contribute to the piecewise understanding of the many ways bionic technologies can be deployed not only to restore lost sensory-motor functions, but also to discover brain mechanisms. (shrink)

Bionic technologies connecting biological nervous systems to computer or robotic devices for therapeutic purposes have been recently claimed to provide novel experimental tools for the investigation of biological mechanisms. This claim is examined here by means of a methodological analysis of bionics-supported experimental inquiries on adaptive sensory-motor behaviours. Two broad classes of bionic systems (regarded here as hybrid simulations of the target biological system) are identified, which differ from each other according to whether a component of the biological target system (...) is replaced by an artificial component, or else a component of an artificial system is replaced by a biological component. The role of these hybrid systems in the modelling of adaptive sensory-motor biological behaviours is discussed with reference to bionics-supported experiments on the mechanisms of body stabilization in lampreys. Methodological problems emerging from these case studies often arise in computer-based and biorobotic simulations of biological behaviours too. Accordingly, the present analysis contributes to identifying a more general regulative methodological framework for the machine-based modelling of biological systems. (shrink)

The advancement of computing technology makes it possible to build extremely accurate digital reconstructions of brain circuits. Are such unprecedented levels of biological accuracy essential for brain simulations to play the roles they are expected to play in neuroscientific research? The main goal of this paper is to clarify this question by distinguishing between various roles played by large-scale simulations in contemporary neuroscience, and by reflecting about what makes a simulation biologically accurate. It is argued that large-scale simulations may play (...) model-oriented and prediction-oriented roles in brain research, and that the concept of biological accuracy can be interpreted as related to the plausibility of the theoretical model implemented in the simulation system, to the accuracy of the computer implementation, and to the level of details of the implemented model. Building on these observations and distinctions, it is argued that biological accuracy is not essential for a computer simulation to play the epistemic roles it is expected to play in brain research. (shrink)

Research on hybrid bionic systems (HBSs) is still in its infancy but promising results have already been achieved in laboratories. Experiments on humans and animals show that artificial devices can be controlled by neural signals. These results suggest that HBS technologies can be employed to restore sensorimotor functionalities in disabled and elderly people. At the same time, HBS research raises ethical concerns related to possible exogenous and endogenous limitations to human autonomy and freedom. The analysis of these concerns requires reflecting (...) on the availability of scientific models accounting for key aspects of sensorimotor coordination and plastic adaptation mechanisms in the brain. (shrink)

In so-called ethorobotics and robot-supported social cognitive neurosciences, robots are used as scientific tools to study animal behavior and cognition. Building on previous epistemological analyses of biorobotics, in this article it is argued that these two research fields, widely differing from one another in the kinds of robots involved and in the research questions addressed, share a common methodology, which significantly differs from the “synthetic method” that, until recently, dominated biorobotics. The methodological novelty of this strategy, the research opportunities that (...) it opens, and the theoretical and technological challenges that it gives rise to, will be discussed with reference to the peculiarities of the two research fields. Some broad methodological issues related to the generalization of results concerning robot-animal interaction to theoretical conclusions on animal-animal interaction will be identified and discussed. (shrink)

A number of research projects have recently taken up the challenge of formulating large-scale models of brain mechanisms at unprecedented levels of detail. These research enterprises have raised lively debates in the press and in the scientific and philosophical literature, some of them revolving around the question whether the incorporation of so many details in a theoretical model and in a computer simulations of it is really needed for the model to be explanatory. Is there a “right” level of detail? (...) In this article I analyse the claim, made by two leading neuroscientists, according to which the content of the why-question addressed and the amount of computational resources available constrains the choice of the most appropriate level of detail in brain modelling. Based on the recent philosophical literature on scientific explanation, I distinguish between two kinds of details, called here mechanistic decomposition and property details, and argue that the nature of the why-question provides only partial constraints to the choice of the most appropriate level of detail under the two interpretations of the term considered here. (shrink)

Computer simulations are widely used for surrogative reasoning in scientific research. They also play a crucial role in engineering, more specifically in the design of new robotic systems, yet the nature of this role has been little discussed so far in the philosophy of technology literature. The main claim made in this article is that the notion of surrogative reasoning is central to understanding how computer simulations can serve the purpose of designing new robots. More specifically, it is argued that (...) computer simulations can support two forms of surrogative reasoning, which are called model-oriented and prediction-oriented, whose inferential structure is reconstructed to some extent. And it is argued that, when computer simulations are used to design new robots, they are distinctively used in the model-oriented way. By unravelling the structure of the computer simulation-supported methods adopted in robotic design, this article may contribute to a finer-grained understanding of the epistemic processes involved in technological research. (shrink)

Nijhawan argues convincingly that predictive mechanisms are pervasive in the central nervous system (CNS). However, scientific understanding of visual prediction requires one to formulate empirically testable neurophysiological models. The author's suggestions in this direction are to be evaluated on the basis of more realistic experimental methodologies and more plausible assumptions on the hierarchical character of the human visual cortex.

Abstract. The rapid developments of robotics technologies in the last twenty years of the XX century have greatly encouraged research on the use of robots for surgery, diagnosis, rehabilitation, prosthetics, and assistance to disabled and elderly people. This chapter provides an overview of robotic technologies and systems for health care, focussing on various ethical problems that these technologies give rise to. These problems notably concern the protection of human physical and mental integrity, autonomy, responsibility, ...

First of all, in this paper we provide some clarifications on the several meanings of the term ‘ethics’, above all in the light of contemporary discussions on this matter. Then we analyze an important ethical concept, i.e. the concept of moral responsibility, for the sake of clarifying some problems concerning the human-robot relationship. Finally, we try to develop a well defined pattern of “ethics of responsibility” in order to give a general background for resolving concrete dilemmas that may arise in (...) the artificial world. (shrink)

This article addresses prospective and retrospective responsibility issues connected with medical robotics. It will be suggested that extant conceptual and legal frameworks are sufficient to address and properly settle most retrospective responsibility problems arising in connection with injuries caused by robot behaviours (which will be exemplified here by reference to harms occurred in surgical interventions supported by the Da Vinci robot, reported in the scientific literature and in the press). In addition, it will be pointed out that many prospective responsibility (...) issues connected with medical robotics are nothing but well-known robotics engineering problems in disguise, which are routinely addressed by roboticists as part of their research and development activities: for this reason they do not raise particularly novel ethical issues. In contrast with this, it will be pointed out that novel and challenging prospective responsibility issues may emerge in connection with harmful events caused by normal robot behaviours. This point will be illustrated here in connection with the rehabilitation robot Lokomat. (shrink)

Over the course of its first seven editions, Principles of Biomedical Ethics has proved to be, globally, the most widely used, authored work in biomedical ethics. It is unique in being a book in bioethics used in numerous disciplines for purposes of instruction in bioethics. Its framework of moral principles is authoritative for many professional associations and biomedical institutions-for instruction in both clinical ethics and research ethics. It has been widely used in several disciplines for purposes of teaching in the (...) classroom, during conferences, etc. (shrink)

Cybernetics promoted machine-supported investigations of adaptive sensorimotor behaviours observed in biological systems. This methodological approach receives renewed attention in contemporary robotics, cognitive ethology, and the cognitive neurosciences. Its distinctive features concern machine experiments, and their role in testing behavioural models and explanations flowing from them. Cybernetic explanations of behavioural events, regularities, and capacities rely on multiply realizable mechanism schemata, and strike a sensible balance between causal and unifying constraints. The multiple realizability of cybernetic mechanism schemata paves the way to principled (...) comparisons between biological systems and machines. Various methodological issues involved in the transition from mechanism schemata to their machine instantiations are addressed here, by reference to a simple sensorimotor coordination task. These concern the proper treatment of ceteris paribus clauses in experimental settings, the significance of running experiments with correct but incomplete machine instantiations of mechanism schemata, and the advantage of operating with real machines ??? as opposed to simulated ones ??? immersed in real environments. (shrink)

The draft Code of Conduct for Research is an important initiative towards assisting the scientific community in complying with the provisions of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). However, its approach towards cross-border data sharing should be reconsidered to clarify the ambiguities inherent in the legal requirements for the cross-border sharing of health data in the POPIA. These ambiguities include the concept of ‘transfer of information’, the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer, the (...) nature of consent for cross-border sharing and the scope of the recipient third party. We suggest that the draft Code of Conduct for Research can be improved by: Explaining or defining the concept of ‘transfer of information’ and when it applies to cross-border sharing in research Clarifying the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer vis-à-vis the other alternatives Expanding on the interpretation and application of consent as a legal mechanism for cross-border transfers Expanding the category of persons who may be recipients of personal information in a third country. (shrink)

A substantial portion of Adam Smith's discussion of Stoicism in TMS VII is dedicated to the Stoic “principle of suicide,” according to which suicide is sometimes morally required. While scholars agree that Stoicism exercised considerable influence over Smith, no recent work has explored his views on suicide, despite the central role it plays in his treatment of Stoicism. I argue that Smith opposes the principle of suicide on both epistemic and moral grounds, providing an important critique of Stoicism. I also (...) show how Smith departs from other early modern accounts of suicide by offering a notably humane analysis of this tragic act. I conclude by considering what Smith's discussion of Stoicism and suicide tells us about his moral theory, and I forward a reading of Smith as a skeptic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 317-322 [Access article in PDF] On Wolfgang Blankenburg, Common Sense, and Schizophrenia Aaron L. Mishara Introduction In its increasing openness to neuroscience (Cowan, Harter, and Kandel 2000) and other of its neighboring disciplines, mainstream biological psychiatry has allowed psychopathology, philosophy, and philosophical approaches to psychopathology to play an increased role in current research interests. Given this new openness, and the acknowledgment of the (...) severity of one of psychiatry's most debilitating, costly, and intractable disorders, 1 the translation of W. Blankenburg's 1969 article concerning the psychopathology of common sense does not merely serve historical interest. It is an exceptional example of a not well-known trend in German- and French-speaking psychiatry to apply philosophical phenomenology and existentialism to psychopathological research. This trend, which reached a peak in the late 1950s and was strong well into the 1970s, has dwindling, but nevertheless, current representatives in Heidelberg and Zurich and is scattered in a few other places in Europe, Japan, the United States, and South America. The view of the Zeitgeist—which may sound astonishing, even antiquated to contemporary readers—was highly ambitious: Conceptual approaches, such as philosophical ("transcendental") phenomenology, were expected to supply knowledge about the structure of consciousness and its disturbance in various mental disorders.Following the lead of Binswanger and Szilasi, who viewed schizophrenia as an "experiment of nature" that enables us to view underlying processes otherwise hidden to "natural, everyday consciousness," Blankenburg believed that it may be possible to map the formal properties of the psychopathology of schizophrenia—precisely in the loss of common sense—as a disturbance to the basic organization of conscious experience. Any attempt to summarize this rather abstract and complex approach in a brief commentary would be ill advised. In passing, rather, I will remark that such efforts could have profound relevance to the current research of schizophrenia and its underlying neurobiology. This research has gradually acknowledged the importance of taking the patient's subjective experience of the disorder into account (Mishara, Parnas, and Naudin 1998). In this commentary, I will first give an account of the biographical and clinical reasons that led Blankenburg to turn to the problem of common sense and its relevance for schizophrenia. I will then explore what implications [End Page 317] his work may have for more recent findings concerning schizophrenia. Blankenburg's Intellectual Development Born in 1928, W. Blankenburg, the son of a Lufthansa pilot who pioneered transatlantic commercial flights, began his studies in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1947. While at Freiburg, Blankenburg heard lectures in philosophy given by E. Fink (the former assistant to Husserl) and Max Mueller, and in psychology, by R. Heiss and others. After three years, Blankenburg turned to the study of medicine, producing a dissertation in 1956 on an application of Daseinsanalysis (Heidegger and Binswanger) to a case of paranoid schizophrenia. Binswanger wrote the forward to the publication. Between 1956 and 1958, Blankenburg studied internal medicine in Heidelberg with the accomplished phenomenologist of bodily experience (Leibphaenomenologer) and student of V. von Weizsaecker Herbert Pluegge. He spent one semester in Goettingen where he attended lectures by the ontological philosopher Nicolai Hartmann, who provided for Blankenburg a more useful approach to the problem of nature and natural science than Heidegger's primary emphasis on the question of Being. During his Freiburg years, Blankenburg attended small seminars led by Heidegger in the Schwarzwald forest. (Heidegger had been forbidden to teach after the end of World War II.) Blankenburg recalls that the participants would sit on logs in an open field as if to invoke Heidegger's concept of the clearing (Lichtung) of Being. While not entirely sympathetic with Heidegger's philosophy, Blankenburg learned to carefully "listen"—as Heidegger would repeatedly emphasize—to language, not merely poetic or philosophical language, but the language of the patients he would meet in clinical practice.During this time, Blankenburg heard lectures by W. Szilasi, the philosopher-scientist who held Husserl's and Heidegger's chair in the department of philosophy. Szilasi collaborated with the phenomenological psychiatrist, L. Binswanger. Their effort to apply concepts from Husserl's... (shrink)

It is widely agreed among broadly Anselmian theists that God is in some sense the 'delimiter of possibilities.' In other words, the scope of possibility is explained by the manner in which the universe emanates from God. However, existing accounts of God's role here—in terms of freedom, choice, or power—face serious difficulties. The present paper provides a new account of God's role as the delimiter of possibilities in terms of the different manner in which the non-actuality of non-actual states of (...) affairs is explained. Intuitively and metaphorically, we can think of the menu of states of affairs being 'whittled down' in successive stages of a process of divine decision-making, with the different species of impossibility corresponding to when and how the states of affairs are ruled out. I argue that this approach provides genuine contingency while also preserving the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (shrink)

There is a prima facie conflict between the values of love and autonomy. How can we bind ourselves to a person and still enjoy the fruits of self-determination? This chapter argues that the solution to this conflict lies in recognizing that love is the basis of autonomy: one must love a person in order to truly appreciate their autonomy. To make this case, this chapter defends a minimalist account of love, according to which love is an agreeable sensation that is (...) experienced when considering the existence of another person. On this view, the lover does not desire anything from the beloved but works to attend to their presence. Love, then, puts us in a position to appreciate the beloved in their particular way of being. By accepting the presence of the beloved we gain a sense of their autonomy. The roots of this account of love are found in the writings of Damaris Cudworth Masham. This chapter draws on the work of Kieran Setiya, David Velleman, and Kyla Ebels-Duggan to elaborate on and defend Masham’s views. (shrink)

Comment by Aaron L. Mackler on “‘Through Her I Too Shall Bear a Child’: Birth Surrogates in Jewish Law” by Elie Spitz Reply by Elie Kaplan Spitz Research Note by G. Scott Davis.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Wilhelm Griesinger”Aaron L. Mishara (bio)Arens situates Wilhelm Griesinger in a historical context with which we are no longer familiar. In doing so, she has performed an important task for contemporary clinicians, philosophers, and historians. We find ourselves working and thinking (both in everyday clinical practice and in the construction of our models of mental disorder) with the same categories that Griesinger struggled to sort out and redefine; (...) we often do so, however, without awareness of their history or lack of permanence. Ackerknecht writes that all the dominant trends in modern psychiatry can be traced back to Griesinger; he states that Griesinger is the “founder of neuropsychiatry,” a “merging of the two disciplines” neurology and psychiatry. Griesinger presents us with a “systematic synthesis of the anatomical, physiological, psychological and clinical points of view” (Ackerknecht 1959, 63). Somewhat contrarily, Karl Jaspers, in his General Psychopathology, groups Griesinger with the great observers and describers of clinical experience rather than among the systematic analyzers (Jaspers 1963, 849–50). Although Griesinger is best known for his identification of mental disorders as a subset of brain diseases, Karl Bonhoeffer, a successor to Griesinger as director of the Charité Clinic in Berlin, cautions that Griesinger “continued to see in psychological causes the most frequent and abundant source of mental disorders” (Bonhoeffer 1911, 53). Kales, Kales, and Vela-Bueno, however, write, “Griesinger was representative of a clinical movement that minimized the value of psychological concepts in the understanding of mental diseases” (Kales, Kales, and Vela-Bueno 1990, 15). Precisely because of his importance, contention surrounds his legacy.If Griesinger is the pioneer of empirical approaches in biological neuropsychiatry (as Ackerknecht and others claim), he is also precursor to philosophical criticisms of their limits. It is not so easy to lump Griesinger to one side of the oppositions with which we think today: Griesinger’s scientific psychiatry (formed on the basis of the newly emergent empirical physiology) was meant to steer between the Scylla of the previously reigning overspeculative romantic medicine and the Charybdis of the antitheoretical and “positivistic” materialism of Magendie. As Arens suggests, even during the same generation of university psychiatry which Griesinger was critical in forming, he was posthumously denounced as belonging to the Hegelian idealists; later, he was proclaimed to be an empiricist. Griesinger’s work contained both idealism and empiricism in a fragile synthesis that soon broke asunder.Hermeneutic theory points out that we inevitably interpret an author, in this case, Griesinger, in terms of the prejudices of our own present context of understanding and our current problems of application to clinical practice (Gadamer 1993). On the one hand, we benefit from the advantage of seeing all that follows Griesinger’s work and are able to “understand the author [End Page 165] better than he understood himself.” We are able to see what he only anticipates but is still not able to explicitly articulate as the unpredicted effects of his work. On the other hand, our interpretations are encumbered by the sedimentations of the views of his successors: his work lies buried under the subsequent interpretations and vicissitudes of a reception with its own agendas, contexts of interpretation, and realms of application. It would be easier if we could simply assign him to one side of our current debates concerning mind/body, individual/culture, and explanation/understanding rather than seeing that our present quandaries in understanding, classifying, and treating mental disorder result precisely from a reading of Griesinger that is not careful enough. It is here that Arens can help us develop our present views further by reviewing their past.Although Griesinger is heralded as the pioneer of an empirical physiological approach which employs a natural scientific concept of mechanism (Ackerknecht, O. Marx, Verwey), Arens situates him in the tradition of Kant and German idealism. It is perhaps this solution of being both philosophical and empirical which seems hard for us, today, to understand. We have come to view these directions as contradictory, to be necessarily in a mutually exclusive relationship. (But that is rather the expression of the present impasse and not the way that Griesinger originally approached these problems.) Arens ambitiously retraces the genealogy of Griesinger’s model... (shrink)

The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very false, etc. The truth-value set, , of FL is assumed to be generated by a context-free grammar, with a semantic rule providing a means of computing the meaning of each linguistic truth-value in as a (...) fuzzy subset of [0, 1].Since is not closed under the operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction and implication, the result of an operation on truth-values in requires, in general, a linguistic approximation by a truth-value in . As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very, quite, more or less, etc. (shrink)

Fabi and Goldberg investigate how funding availability influences the landscape of bioethics as a field, and perpetuates forms of social and epistemic injustice while limitin...

This paper argues that forgiveness is not best understood in terms of waiving a requirement of justice, and, specifically, that forgiveness is distinct from mercy. I question some reasons philosophers have given for distinguishing forgiveness and mercy, but argue that the difference between the two notions can be clearly shown by considering the standard grounds for which they are granted. I argue that while mercy involves leniency in the infliction of punishment that is due in accordance with justice, forgiveness primarily (...) concerns the victim's feelings and attitudes towards the wrongdoer as a person. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 27 (1) 2008 pp. 1-9. (shrink)