The scope of this paper can be clarified by means of a well-known phenomenon that is usually called ‘industrial melanism’: the fact that the melanic form of the peppered moth became dominant in industrial areas in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such changes in relative phenotype frequencies are important explananda for population biologists. Apart from trying to explain such changes over time, population biologists also often try to explain differences between populations, e.g. why yellow shell (...) colour is dominant in certain colonies of land snails and almost absent in other colonies. The causal explanations that are given to address such explananda are the objects of analysis in this paper. Our primary aim is to explicate their structure: we want to capture the typical ingredients of causal explanations in population biology, and their organisation. Based on this explication, we discuss how natural selection fits into recent mechanical philosophy of science, and engage in the debate on the nature of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

C. S. Lewis is one of the most beloved Christian apologists of the twentieth century; David Hume and Bertrand Russell are among Christianity’s most important critics. This book puts these three intellectual giants in conversation with one another on various important questions: the existence of God, suffering, morality, reason, joy, miracles, and faith. Alongside irreconcilable differences, surprising areas of agreement emerge. Curious readers will find penetrating insights in the reasoned dialogue of these three great thinkers.

Kant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764–5 document a crucial turning point in his life and thought. Both reveal the growing importance for him of ethics, anthropology and politics, but with an important difference. The Observations attempts to observe human nature directly. The Remarks, by contrast, reveals a revolution in Kant's thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau, who 'turned him around' by disclosing to Kant the idea of a 'state of freedom' as a touchstone for his thinking. This and related (...) thoughts anticipate such famous later doctrines as the categorical imperative. This collection of essays by leading Kant scholars illuminates the many and varied topics within these two rich works, including the emerging relations between theory and practice, ethics and anthropology, men and women, philosophy, history and the 'rights of man'. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. Most logical pluralists think that logic is normative in the sense that you make a mistake if you accept the premisses of a valid argument but reject its conclusion. Some authors have argued that this combination is self-undermining: Suppose that L1 and L2 are correct logics that coincide except for the argument from Γ to φ, which is valid in L1 but invalid in L2. If you accept (...) all sentences in Γ, then, by normativity, you make a mistake if you reject φ. In order to avoid mistakes, you should accept φ or suspend judgment about φ. Both options are problematic for pluralism. Can pluralists avoid this worry by rejecting the normativity of logic? I argue that they cannot. All else being equal, the argument goes through even if logic is not normative. (shrink)

One can (for the most part) formulate a model of a classical system in either the Lagrangian or the Hamiltonian framework. Though it is often thought that those two formulations are equivalent in all important ways, this is not true: the underlying geometrical structures one uses to formulate each theory are not isomorphic. This raises the question of whether one of the two is a more natural framework for the representation of classical systems. In the event, the answer is yes: (...) I state and sketch proofs of two technical results—inspired by simple physical arguments about the generic properties of classical systems—to the effect that, in a precise sense, classical systems evince exactly the geometric structure Lagrangian mechanics provides for the representation of systems, and none provided by Hamiltonian. The argument not only clarifies the conceptual structure of the two systems of mechanics, but also their relations to each other and their respective mechanisms for representing physical systems. It also shows why naïvely structural approaches to the representational content of physical theories cannot work. [Lagrange] grasped that he had gained a method of stating dynamical truths in a way, which is perfectly indifferent to the particular methods of measurement employed in fixing the positions of the various parts of the system. Accordingly, he went on to deduce equations of motion, which are equally applicable whatever quantitative measurements have been made, provided that they are adequate to fix positions. The beauty and almost divine simplicity of these equations is such that these formulae are worthy to rank with those mysterious symbols which in ancient times were held directly to indicate the Supreme Reason at the base of all things. (Whitehead [1948], p. 63)1. Introduction2.Classical Systems3. The Possible Interactions of a Classical System and the Structure of Its Space of States4. Classical Systems Are Lagrangian5. Classical Systems Are Not Hamiltonian6. How Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics Represent Classical Systems7. The Conceptual Structure of Classical Mechanics. (shrink)

Angesichts der ökologischen Krise und der zunehmenden Zivilisationsprobleme ist es notwendig, einen philosophischen Naturbegriff, der das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Natur aufgrund dieser Tatsache neu bestimmt, zu entwickeln. Der Jesuit, Paläontologe und Philosoph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) ist ein herausragendes Beispiel einer Vermittlung von Naturwissenschaft und Naturphilosophie. Teilhard entwirft eine Zusammenschau von transzendent-metaphysischer Teleologie, die aus dem christlichen Glauben heraus Gott als einzige Zweckursache des Geschehens sieht, philosophischer Anthropologie und naturwissenschaftlich orientierter kausalmechanischer Evolutionstheorie, dem allmählichen Entwickeln eines höheren Zustands (...) aus einem vorhergehenden. Die in der Ursache gegründeten Seinszusammenhänge ergeben einen vom Ziel her bestimmten Zusammenhang. Gott ist Totum alles wirklich Seienden im Horizont des möglichen Seins. Das für Teilhard so wichtige teleologische Prinzip hat seinen philosophiehistorischen Ursprung bei Aristoteles, der damit eine Denktradition begründete, die im Gegensatz zum kausal-mechanischen Weltbild der Naturwissenschaften steht und die sich über Thomas von Aquin und Hegel bis zu Teilhard als vorläufig letztem Höhepunkt erhält. Der aus Teilhards Naturphilosophie folgende Optimismus kann von großer Bedeutung für die Gegenwart sein. Er resultiert aus der Übernahme von Verantwortung für die Schöpfung und ist die ethische Konsequenz aus Naturfinalität und christlichem Universalismus. Der Autor: Erik Lehnert, geb. 1975 in Berlin. Studium der Philosophie, Geschichte sowie Ur- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin, z. Z. Promotion über die Aktualität der Philosophie von Karl Jaspers. 1995 bis 1997 Mitherausgeber von "Aletheia - Neues kritisches Journal der Philosophie, Theologie, Geschichte und Politik", Veröffentlichungen u.a. zur Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. (shrink)

In Consequentialism Reconsidered, Carlson strives to find a plausible formulation of the structural part of consequentialism. Key notions are analyzed, such as outcomes, alternatives and performability. Carlson argues that consequentialism should be understood as a maximizing rather than a satisficing theory, and as temporally neutral rather than future oriented. He also shows that certain moral theories cannot be reformulated as consequentialist theories. The relevant alternatives for an agent in a situation are taken to comprise all actions that they can perform (...) in the situation. The defense of this idea necessitates certain modifications to the standard consequentialist criteria of obligatoriness, rightness and wrongness. The problem of whether agents should adapt their actions to their own future actions is also addressed. Further, a conditional analysis of performability is suggested, and it is argued that particular actions should in this connection be regarded as `abstract' rather than `concrete'. The final chapter sketches a consequentialist theory for collective agents. (shrink)

The book revives the neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell and applies the updated view to the problem of redefining physicalism, explaining the origins of sensation, and the problem of deriving extended physical objects and systems from an ontology of events.

There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called ‘laws’. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well-supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about (...) laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio-temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear-cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

Erik Wielenberg has presented an objection to divine command theory (DCT) alleging that DCT has the troubling implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations. Matthew Flannagan has replied to Wielenberg’s argument. Here, I defend the view that, despite Flannagan’s reply, the psychopath objection presents a serious problem for the versions of DCT defended by its most prominent contemporary advocates — Robert Adams, C. Stephen Evans, and William Lane Craig.

A consideration of Mach's elements, his philosophy of neutral monism, and philosophy of physics, especially space and time, much of it based on unpublished writings from the Nachlass and other original sources. The historical connection between Mach and logical positivism is shown to be superficial at best, and Mach's elements are shown to be mind independent natural qualities (world-elements) with dynamic force, not limited to human sensations.

In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing on unreflective expert action. More particularly, I use Wittgenstein’s examples of craftsmen (...) (tailors and architects) absorbed in action to introduce situated normativity. Situated normativity can be understood as the normative aspect of embodied cognition in unreflective skillful action. I develop Wittgenstein’s insight that a peculiar type of affective behaviour, ‘directed discontent’, is essential for getting things right without reflection. Directed discontent is a reaction of appreciation in action and is introduced as a paradigmatic expression of situated normativity. In the second part I discuss Wittgenstein’s ideas on the normativity of what he calls ‘blind’ rule-following and the ‘bedrock’ of immediate action. What matters for understanding the normativity of (even ‘blind’) rule-following, is not that one has the capacity for linguistic articulation or reflection but that one is reliably participating in a communal custom. In the third part I further investigate the complex relationships between unreflective skillful action, perception, emotion, and normativity. Part of this entails an account of the link between normativity at the level of the expert’s socio-cultural practice and the individual’s situated and lived normativity. (shrink)

Ruth Chang has defended a concept of "parity", implying that two items may be evaluatively comparable even though neither item is better than or equally good as the other. This article takes no stand on whether there actually are cases of parity. Its aim is only to make the hitherto somewhat obscure notion of parity more precise, by defining it in terms of the standard value relations. Given certain plausible assumptions, the suggested definiens is shown to state a necessary and (...) sufficient condition for parity, as this relation is envisaged by Chang. (shrink)

In a discussion of Parfit's Drops of Water case, Zach Barnett has recently proposed a novel argument against “No Small Improvement”; that is, the claim that a single drop of water cannot affect the magnitude of a thirsty person's suffering. We first show that Barnett's argument can be significantly strengthened, and also that the fundamental idea behind it yields a straightforward argument for the transitivity of equal suffering. We then suggest that defenders of No Small Improvement could reject a Pareto (...) principle that is presupposed in Barnett's argument and our developments of it. However, this does not save No Small Improvement, since there is a convincing argument against this claim that does not presuppose the Pareto principle. (shrink)

John Broome has argued that incomparability and vagueness cannot coexist in a given betterness order. His argument essentially hinges on an assumption he calls the ‘collapsing principle’. In an earlier article I criticized this principle, but Broome has recently expressed doubts about the cogency of my criticism. Moreover, Cristian Constantinescu has defended Broome’s view from my objection. In this paper, I present further arguments against the collapsing principle, and try to show that Constantinescu’s defence of Broome’s position fails.

The concept of ecosystem services is a way of visualizing the instrumental value that nature has for human beings. Most ecosystem services can be performed by more than one species. This fact is sometimes used as an argument against the preservation of species. However, even though substitutability does detract from the instrumental value of a species, it also adds option value to it. The option value cannot make a substitutable species as instrumentally valuable as a non-substitutable species, but in many (...) cases, it can add enough value to make the species more valuable than the projects that threaten its existence. (shrink)

Much controversy surrounds the question of what ought to be the proper definition of 'singularity' in general relativity, and the question of whether the prediction of such entities leads to a crisis for the theory. I argue that a definition in terms of curve incompleteness is adequate, and in particular that the idea that singularities correspond to 'missing points' has insurmountable problems. I conclude that singularities per se pose no serious problem for the theory, but their analysis does bring into (...) focus several problems of interpretation at the foundation of the theory often ignored in the philosophical literature. (shrink)

A full appreciation for Ernst Mach's doctrine of the economy of thought must take account of his direct realism about particulars (elements) and his anti-realism about space-time laws as economical constructions. After a review of thought economy, its critics and some contemporary forms, the paper turns to the philosophical roots of Mach's doctrine. Mach claimed that the simplest, most parsimonious theories economized memory and effort by using abstract concepts and laws instead of attending to the details of each individual event (...) or experiment. For Mach, the individual case never truly repeated in all of its uniqueness, nor was all of the individual detail of a physical element adequately captured in abstract laws and schemata, however necessary these were for the pursuit of science. As can be shown from specific passages, some already published, some not, Mach's elements included physical qualia in nature similar to Russell's unsensed sensibilia, which existed even where there were no conscious observers. An argument will be presented to make the case that Mach believed in the mind-independent elements from the 1870s on, while other aspects of his thought evolved over time; I have thus dated the references to reflect this historical progression. I concentrate on Mach's ontology, as it bears on economy of thought, not his epistemology per se, which might well have been restricted to observable elements/sensations. After his own conversion to neutral monism, in the 1920s, Bertrand Russell echoed Mach's call for a 'future science' capable of handling the 'intrinsic character' of qualitative data directly without the excessive abstraction of physics. (shrink)

Analyzing how Plotinus’ critical reception of the Aristotelian, Stoic and Middle-Platonist notions of 'that which depends on us' lead him to a highly original interpretation of the notion, this book shows the central role of this notion in the Plotinian account of human agency.

This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage.

Why do corporations and wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences? Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, this article shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas. SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations and libertarian business leaders in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, its intellectual work came to focus on the underlying (...) principles of adaptation, innovation, and decentralized coordination supposedly at work in ‘complex systems’ from biological ecosystems to markets and firms. This research cast the ideas of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek into a new scientific idiom. SFI also became a space where figures in business, media, academia, and politics could come to learn to see the world in a particular way—to acquire the subjectivity of what I call ‘the Santa Fe Institute libertarian’. At SFI, visitors did not simply learn the principles of neo-Hayekian complex system science. They came to see themselves as agents of social evolution, providing the spark that the free-market system needed to produce new technologies and new solutions to social problems without top-down political direction. For the Institute's corporate and libertarian financiers, SFI was not just a space where intellectuals described the world in favored ideological terms, but a space where elite actors became committed to the project of making a new political-economic order. (shrink)

Neutral monism is a position in metaphysics defended by Mach, James, and Russell in the early twentieth century. It holds that minds and physical objects are essentially two different orderings of the same underlying neutral elements of nature. This paper sets out some of the central concepts, theses and the historical background of ideas that inform this doctrine of elements. The discussion begins with the classic neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell in the first part of the paper, then (...) considers recent neo-Russellian versions in the second half. The chances for a revival of neutral monism are probably slight; its key ideas and starting points lie far from those in contemporary philosophy of mind. A better route might be through the philosophy of science and a deeper understanding of causation. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that normative error theorists are committed to the claim ‘Error theory is true, but I have no reason to believe it’, which to some appears paradoxical. Case (2019) has claimed that the normative error theorist cannot avoid this paradox. In this paper, we argue that there is no paradox in the first place, that is once we clear up the ambiguity of the word ‘reason’, both on the error theorist’s side and those that claim that there (...) is a self-defeat problem. Upon clarification, we also raise scepticism to what exactly the nature of self-defeat is meant to be. (shrink)

Gerald Harrison identifies two Euthyphro-related concerns for divine command theories and makes the case that to the extent that these concerns make trouble for divine command theories they also make trouble for non-naturalistic moral realism and naturalistic moral realism. He also offers responses to the two concerns on behalf of divine command theorists. I show here that the parity thesis does not hold for the most commonly discussed version of divine command theory. I further argue that his responses to the (...) two concerns fail. Finally, I draw on some of Harrison’s ideas to identify an advantage that non-naturalistic moral realism has over divine command theories and naturalistic moral realism. (shrink)

Frances Howard -Snyder has argued that objective consequentialism violates the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In most situations, she claims, we cannot produce the best consequences available, although objective consequentialism says that we ought to do so. Here I try to show that Howard -Snyder's argument is unsound. The claim that we typically cannot produce the best consequences available is doubtful. And even if there is a sense of ‘producing the best consequences’ in which we cannot do so, objective consequentialism (...) does not entail that we ought, in this sense, to produce the best consequences. (shrink)

The Precautionary Principle is both celebrated and criticized. It has become an important principle for decision making, but it is also subject to criticism. One problem that is often pointed out with the principle is that is not clear what it actually says and how to use it. I have taken on this problem by performing an analysis of some of the most influential formulations of the principle in an attempt to identify the core ideas behind it, with the purpose (...) of producing a formulation of the principle that is clear and practically applicable. It was found that what is called the Precautionary Principle is not a principle that tells us what do to achieve extra precaution or how to handle situations when extra precaution is called for. Instead, it was found to be a list of circumstances that each justify extra precaution. An analysis of some of the most common and influential formulations of the Precautionary Principle identified four such circumstances: (1) When we deal with important values that tend to be systematically downplayed by traditional decision methods – such as human health and the environment. (2) When we suspect that the decision might lead to irreversible and severe consequences and the values at stake are also irreplaceable, (3) When timing is at least as important as being right. (4) When it is more important to avoid false negatives than false positives. This interpretation of the Precautionary Principle does not say anything about what kind of actions to take when extra precaution is called for, but it does provide a clear and practically useful list of circumstances that call for extra precaution and that is not subject to the most common objections to the Precautionary Principle. (shrink)

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its (...) scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances. (shrink)

There are important structural similarities in the way that animals and humans engage in unreflective activities, including unreflective social interactions in the case of higher animals. Firstly, it is a form of unreflective embodied intelligence that is ‘motivated’ by the situation. Secondly, both humans and non-human animals are responsive to ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979); to possibilities for action offered by an environment. Thirdly, both humans and animals are selectively responsive to one affordance rather than another. Social affordances are a subcategory of (...) affordances, namely possibilities for social interaction offered by an environment: a friend’s sad face invites comforting behavior, a person waiting for a coffee machine can afford a conversation, and an extended hand affords a handshake. I will review recent insights in the nature of the bodily intentionality characteristic of unreflective action. Such ‘motor intentionality’ can be characterized as “our direct bodily inclination to act in a situated, environmental context” (Kelly 2005, p. 106). Standard interpretations of bodily intentionality see grasping an object as the paradigmatic example of motor intentionality. I will discuss the implications of another, novel perspective that emphasizes the importance of unreflective switches from one activity to another (Rietveld 2004) and understands bodily intentionality in terms of adequate responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. In the final section I will discuss some implications for cognitive neuroscientists who use empirical findings related to the ‘mirror neuron system’ as a starting point for a theory of motor intentionality and social cognition. (shrink)

A ubiquitous argument against mental-state accounts of well-being is based on the notion that mental states like happiness and satisfaction simply cannot be measured. The purpose of this paper is to articulate and to assess this “argument from measurability.” My main thesis is that the argument fails: on the most charitable interpretation, it relies on the false proposition that measurement requires the existence of an observable ordering satisfying conditions like transitivity. The failure of the argument from measurability, however, does not (...) translate into a defense of mental-state accounts as accounts of well-being or of measures of happiness and satisfaction as measures of well-being. Indeed, I argue, the ubiquity of the argument from measurability may have obscured other, very real problems associated with mental-state accounts of well-being – above all, that happiness and satisfaction fail to track well-being – and with measures of happiness and satisfaction – above all, the tendency toward reification. I conclude that the central problem associated with the measurement of, e.g., happiness as a subjectively experienced mental state is not that it is too hard to measure, but rather that it is too easy to measure. (shrink)

I examine the debate between substantivalists and relationalists about the ontological character of spacetime and conclude it is not well posed. I argue that the hole argument does not bear on the debate, because it provides no clear criterion to distinguish the positions. I propose two such precise criteria and construct separate arguments based on each to yield contrary conclusions, one supportive of something like relationalism and the other of something like substantivalism. The lesson is that one must fix an (...) investigative context in order to make such criteria precise, but different investigative contexts yield inconsistent results. I examine questions of existence about spacetime structures other than the spacetime manifold itself to argue that it is more fruitful to focus on pragmatic issues of physicality, a notion that lends itself to several different explications, all of philosophical interest, none privileged a priori over any of the others. I conclude by suggesting an extension of the lessons of my arguments to the broader debate between realists and instrumentalists. 1 Introduction2 The Hole Argument3 Limits of Spacetimes4 Pointless Constructions5 The Debate between Substantivalists and Relationalists6 Existence and Physicality: An Embarassment of Spacetime Structures7 Valedictory Remarks on Realism and Instrumentalism, and the Structure of Our Knowledge of Physics. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to the recent claims of physicists and philosophers of physics, general relativity requires no interpretation in any substantive sense of the term. I canvass the common reasons given in favor of the alleged need for an interpretation, including the difficulty in coming to grips with the physical significance of diffeomorphism invariance and of singular structure, and the problems faced in the search for a theory of quantum gravity. I find that none of them shows any defect (...) in our comprehension of general relativity as a physical theory. I conclude by comparing general relativity with quantum mechanics, a theory that manifestly does stand in need of an interpretation in an important sense. Although many aspects of the conceptual structure of general relativity remain poorly understood, it suffers no incoherence in its formulation as a physical theory that only an ‘interpretation’ could resolve. *Received November 2007; revised February 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 817 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: erik@strangebeautiful.com . When science starts to be interpretive it is more unscientific even than mysticism. (D. H. Lawrence, “Self‐Protection”). (shrink)

Daniel M. Hausman holds that preferences in economics are total subjective comparative evaluations—subjective judgments to the effect that something is better than something else all things told—and that economists are right to employ this conception of preference. Here, I argue against both parts of Hausman’s thesis. The failure of Hausman’s account, I continue, reflects a deeper problem, that is, that preferences in economics do not need an explicit definition of the kind that he seeks. Nonetheless, Hausman’s labors were not in (...) vain: his accomplishment is that he has articulated a useful model of the theory. (shrink)

An energy condition, in the context of a wide class of spacetime theories, is, crudely speaking, a relation one demands the stress-energy tensor of matter satisfy in order to try to capture the idea that "energy should be positive". The remarkable fact I will discuss in this paper is that such simple, general, almost trivial seeming propositions have profound and far-reaching import for our understanding of the structure of relativistic spacetimes. It is therefore especially surprising when one also learns that (...) we have no clear understanding of the nature of these conditions, what theoretical status they have with respect to fundamental physics, what epistemic status they may have, when we should and should not expect them to be satisfied, and even in many cases how they and their consequences should be interpreted physically. Or so I shall argue, by a detailed analysis of the technical and conceptual character of all the standard conditions used in physics today, including examination of their consequences and the circumstances in which they are believed to be violated. (shrink)

The E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al. 1998; 1999) provides a theoretical framework for understanding how word identification, visual processing, attention, and oculomotor control jointly determine when and where the eyes move during reading. In this article, we first review what is known about eye movements during reading. Then we provide an updated version of the model (E-Z Reader 7) and describe how it accounts for basic findings about eye movement control in reading. We then review several alternative models of (...) eye movement control in reading, discussing both their core assumptions and their theoretical scope. On the basis of this discussion, we conclude that E-Z Reader provides the most comprehensive account of eye movement control during reading. Finally, we provide a brief overview of what is known about the neural systems that support the various components of reading, and suggest how the cognitive constructs of our model might map onto this neural architecture. Key Words: attention; eye-movement control; E-Z Reader; fixations; lexical access; models; reading; regressions; saccades. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to use philosophy and, in particular ethical theory, to identify and explore some potential conflicts.

Subjective measures of well-being—measures based on answers to questions such as ‘Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?’—are often presented as superior to more traditional economic welfare measures, e.g., for public policy purposes. This paper aims to spell out and assess what I will call the argument from directness: the notion that subjective measures of well-being better represent well-being than economic measures do (...) because subjective measures (and subjective measures alone) are direct measures of well-being. My main thesis is that the argument begs the question against proponents of economic measures: it is based on a premise that they reject and that is no less in need of justification than the conclusion of the argument, namely, the proposition that well-being is constituted by subjectively experienced mental states. If subjective measures can be defended as valid measures of well-being at all, I will maintain, it is because they are (imperfect) indirect measures of well-being. (shrink)

Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory (...) (Rome) with the goal of addressing problems of these sorts through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. The interactions of world state, blue force status and associated plans are too complex for manual adaptive processes, and computer-aided plan review and maintenance is thus indispensable. We argue that appropriate semantic technology can 1) provide richer representation of plan-related data and semantics, 2) allow for flexible, non-disruptive, agile, scalable, and coordinated changes in plans, and 3) support more intelligent analytical querying of plan-related data. (shrink)