Since the inception of the Minimalist Program, Noam Chomsky has increasingly pushed the boundaries of a minimalist conception of grammar, one that pares the mechanisms specific to language down to the bare bones. In addition to the structure‐building operation of Merge, grammar involves some mechanism for feature interaction. Chomsky has explored several different varieties of a mechanism AGREE responsible for these kinds of feature interactions, for example feature matching, feature valuation, and feature movement, as discussed in this chapter. (...) The Minimalist Program leads to the question of whether Merge could be sufficient for narrow syntax. Actual implementations of even simple grammatical descriptions of real natural languages always appear to require more than Merge, but this chapter explores some of the ways in which various different mechanisms might be reduced to Merge, in the spirit of the Minimalist Program. (shrink)

This work considers the formalisation of the merging process of stratified belief bases, where beliefs are stored in different layers or strata. Their strata are ranked, following a total order, employing the value the agent using the belief base assigns to these beliefs. The agent uses an argumentation mechanism to reason from the belief base and obtain the final inferences. We present two ways of merging stratified belief bases: the first is defined by merging two strata without belief preservation, (...) and the second by merging two strata with belief preservation. For these operators, as layers merge, it is possible that some information has to be deleted from the stratum to maintain consistency. The latter merge operator will be defined as performing their actions so that information removed from the stratum is preserved after the merging by moving it to a stratum containing information perceived as having a lower value and where those beliefs may trigger a new revision, possibly starting a cascading effect. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the treatment of variables in dynamic semantics. Referent systems are introduced as a flexible mechanism for working with variables. In a referent system we carefully distinguish the variables themselves both from the machinery by which we manipulate them - their names - and from the information that we store in them - their values. It is shown that the referent systems provide a natural basis for dynamic semantics. The semantics with referent systems is compared (...) with the familiar formalisms in dynamic semantics, DRT and DPL. (shrink)

Primary and methyl aliphatic halides and tosylates undergo substitution reactions with nucleophiles in one step by the classic S N 2 mechanism, which is characterized by second-order kinetics and inversion of configuration at the reaction center. Tertiary aliphatic halides and tosylates undergo substitution reactions with nucleophiles in two (or more) steps by the classic S N 1 mechanism, which is characterized by first-order kinetics and incomplete inversion of configuration at the reaction center due to the presence of ion (...) pairs. When the nucleophile is also the solvent, the substitution reaction is called a solvolysis, and both the S N 2 and S N 1 reactions now obey first-order kinetics. Schleyer and Bentley have provided solid, but not conclusive, evidence that secondary substrates undergo solvolysis by a merged mechanism, one that blends characteristics of both the S N 2 and S N 1 mechanisms. The following paper presents the history of their sustained pursuit of a merged mechanism and subsequent rebuttals to this claim. Several issues related to the philosophy and sociology of science are also discussed. (shrink)

It is rare that we have Arthur Schopenhauer and Thomas Hobbes in the same publication, and when this occurs, it is usually aimed at exploring their dissenting political views. However, this study is based on the belief that both philosophers have significant similarities in their theories about the creation of the individual as a human being. Schopenhauer and Hobbes have, in their constructions, the pessimistic view of human nature and, furthermore, there are prominent similarities in the construction of the human (...) machinery, similarities that at times appear to merge. The goals that Hobbes and Schopenhauer had when they wrote their works were different, however, what we show in this study is that pessimism is a prolific path for philosophical theory. (shrink)

ID: 89 / Parallel 4k: 2 Single paper Topics: Philosophy of mind, Philosophy of science Keywords: Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Mechanistic explanations, Reductionism, Normativity, Generality, Emerging School of Philosophers of Science. The role of philosophy in cognitive science: mechanistic explanations, normativity, generality Mohammadreza Haghighi Fard Leiden University, Netherlands, The; [email protected] Introduction -/- Cognitive science, as an interdisciplinary research endeavour, seeks to explain mental activities such as reasoning, remembering, language use, and problem solving, and the explanations it advances commonly involve descriptions (...) of the mechanisms responsible for these activities. Cognitive mechanisms are distinguished from the mechanisms invoked in other domains of biology by involving the processing of information. Many of the philosophical issues discussed in the context of cognitive science involve the nature of information processing. For philosophy of science, a central question is what counts as a scientific explanation. But what is a mechanistic explanation and how does it work, how can philosophy of science use it as a solution for the problem of integration in cognitive science? By answering these questions and merging my answers with discussion of concepts of philosophy, normativity and generality, I will investigate the following claim. -/- I claim that philosophy by using strength concepts such as normativity, generality, and a mechanistic philosophy of explanations, can be a most important contributor to cognitive science. I also investigate how philosophy of science could be (can be) a bridge between psychology and neuroscience. We need a distinction between philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy in cognitive science; I am talking about the latter. -/- This claim is very important for the integration and the future of the interdisciplinary field known as cognitive science. -/- Philosophy as a true cognitive science -/- When the Cognitive Science Society was founded, in the late 1970s, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology were playing smaller roles. The three disciplines that formed the core group were artificial intelligence, psychology, and linguistics. The curious thing is that George Miller, a psychologist and an important founder of cognitive sciences in a hexagon diagram that he presented, put philosophy at the top of the diagram and neuroscience at the very bottom. There is enough agreement now that neuroscience is the most important contributor to cognitive science and there are fair connections between philosophy and neuroscience. In that diagram there was almost no connection between philosophy and neuroscience. -/- The developments and rise of cognitive science in the last half-century has been accompanied by considerable amount of philosophical activity. Perhaps no other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. (Bechtel and Graham, 1998. Rumelhart and Bly 1999. Bechtel, Mandik, Mundale 2001. Thagard, 2007. Bennett and Dennett et al, 2007. Bennett and Hacker, 2008. Andler, 2009. Frankish and Ramsey, 2012.) -/- Many philosophers of science offer conclusions that have a direct bearing on cognitive science and its practitioners can profit from closer engagement with the rest of cognitive science. For example, William Bechtel has discussed three projects, two in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years, that he contends, can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitive science (Bechtel, 2009). Paul Thagard is another example of the mentioned emerging school of philosophers of science that define cognitive science as the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence (Thagard, 2006). Thagard by presenting some general but important philosophical questions such as, “What is the nature of the explanations and theories developed in cognitive science?”, and by providing answers to these central questions has showed how philosophy of science can help cognitive science by the advantage of its generality. Andrew Brook, however, believes that philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitive science but he is listed in a group of the philosophers of science that they are contributing very closely the cognitive science (Brook, 2009). Daniel Dennett , as well as being a member the mentioned naturalistic philosophers of science, believes that there is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitive science if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science. -/- What are mechanisms? Let us begin abstractly before considering an example. Mechanisms are collections of entities and activities organized together to do something (cf. Machamer, Darden, & Craver, 2000; Craver & Darden, 2001; Bechtel &Richardson, 1993; Glennan, 1996). These explanations are known as ‘mechanistic explanations’. By using and developing these mechanistic explanations of philosophy of science one can draw normative consequences for cognitive science. Paul Thagard (Thagard, 2006 and 2009), William Bechtel (Bechtel, 2008 and 2009), Andrew Brook (Brook, 2008) investigated and promoted using the ‘normativity’ in philosophy to show a better and crucial role for philosophy of science in an interdisciplinary known as cognitive science. Some philosophers have thought that, in order to pursue this normative function, philosophy must distance itself from empirical matters, but there are examples where the investigations of descriptive and normative issues go hand in hand. ( Thagard, 2009). -/- I will investigate how we can reduce a higher-level science such as psychology to neuroscience without the problems of reductionism but via mechanistic explanations. By problem I mean psychology does not lose its autonomy. -/- Conclusion -/- If cognitive science is all about understanding the human mind, or if cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence, since the whole life of philosophy was involving with the ways of knowing (epistemology) and conceptions of reality (metaphysics), also philosophy has considered the so-called mind-body problem ( identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic identity theory) , then philosophy could be the most deserved discipline to be a most contributor in cognitive science. I tried to discuss this by using the three advantages in philosophy, normativity, and generality and by introducing an emerging school of mechanistic (not mechanical) philosophers. One thing left, as cognitive science is a two-way street, philosophers need also to stop in a station of cognitive science and learn from the most important advances in brain and neuroscience. Key references : Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Mechanistic explanations, Reductionism, Normativity, Generality, Emerging School of Philosophers of Science. (shrink)

For some time now, commentators in and out of the scientific community have been expressing concern over the direction of scientific research. Cogent critics have labeled it excessively commercial, out of touch with its “pure,” public-spirited roots, and generally too much a creature of its entrepreneurial, self-interested times. In most if not all of this hand-wringing, the scientific community's growing reliance on intellectual property rights, especially patents, looms large. Indeed, for many the pursuit of patents is emblematic of just what (...) is rotten in the republic of science today. (shrink)

Besides mechanistic explanations of phenomena, which have been seriously investigated in the last decade, biology and ecology also include explanations that pinpoint specific mathematical properties as explanatory of the explanandum under focus. Among these structural explanations, one finds topological explanations, and recent science pervasively relies on them. This reliance is especially due to the necessity to model large sets of data with no practical possibility to track the proper activities of all the numerous entities. The paper first defines topological explanations (...) and then explains why topological explanations and mechanisms are different in principle. Then it shows that they are pervasive both in the study of networks—whose importance has been increasingly acknowledged at each level of the biological hierarchy—and in contexts where the notion of selective neutrality is crucial; this allows me to capture the difference between mechanisms and topological explanations in terms of practical modelling practices. The rest of the paper investigates how in practice mechanisms and topologies are combined. They may be articulated in theoretical structures and explanatory strategies, first through a relation of constraint, second in interlevel theories, or they may condition each other. Finally, I explore how a particular model can integrate mechanistic informations, by focusing on the recent practice of merging networks in ecology and its consequences upon multiscale modelling. (shrink)

Inquiry into language evolution has been controversial, mainly because there is no consensus as to the nature of both ‘evolution’ and ‘language.’ Berwick and Chomsky make sense of the evolution of language by treating it as a biological phenomenon. In contrast to functional characterizations of language as ‘communication’ or ‘speech,’ the authors define it as, essentially, a mind-internal computational mechanism. Within their minimalist approach, hierarchical syntactic structure is achieved through the recursive application of a basic operation called ‘Merge.’ The (...) simplicity of the basic operation is consistent with archeological evidence suggesting an evolutionary recent origin of language. (shrink)

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the (...) lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine "I", who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject. (shrink)

Written for non-experts, this volume introduces the mechanisms that underlie reticulate evolution. Chapters are either accompanied with glossaries that explain new terminology or timelines that position pioneering scholars and their major discoveries in their historical contexts. The contributing authors outline the history and original context of discovery of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, hybridization or divergence with gene flow, and infectious heredity. By applying key insights from the areas of molecular (phylo)genetics, microbiology, virology, ecology, systematics, immunology, epidemiology and computational science, (...) they demonstrate how reticulate evolution impacts successful survival, fitness and speciation. Reticulate evolution brings forth a challenge to the standard Neo-Darwinian framework, which defines life as the outcome of bifurcation and ramification patterns brought forth by the vertical mechanism of natural selection. Reticulate evolution puts forward a pattern in the tree of life that is characterized by horizontal mergings and lineage crossings induced by symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, hybridization or divergence with gene flow, and infective heredity, making the “tree of life” look more like a “web of life.” On an epistemological level, the various means by which hereditary material can be transferred horizontally challenges our classic notions of units and levels of evolution, fitness, modes of transmission, linearity, communities, and biological individuality. The case studies presented examine topics including the origin of the eukaryotic cell and its organelles through symbiogenesis; the origin of algae through primary and secondary symbiosis and dinoflagellates through tertiary symbiosis; the superorganism and holobiont as units of evolution; how endosymbiosis induces speciation in multicellular life forms; transferrable and non-transferrable plasmids and how they symbiotically interact with their host; the means by which pro- and eukaryotic organisms transfer genes laterally (bacterial transformation, transduction and conjugation as well as transposons and other mobile genetic elements); hybridization and divergence with gene flow in sexually-reproducing individuals; current (human) microbiome and viriome studies that impact our knowledge concerning the evolution of organismal health and acquired immunity; and how symbiosis and symbiogenesis can be modelled in computational evolution. (shrink)

An integrated statement is made concerning the semantic status of nodes in a propositional semantic network, claiming that such nodes represent only intensions. Within the network, the only reference to extensionality is via a mechanism to assert that two intensions have the same extension in same world. This framework is employed in three application problems to illustrate the nature of its solutions.The formalism used here utilizes only assertional information and no structural, or definitional, information. This restriction corresponds to many (...) of the psychologically motivated network models. Some of the psychological implications of network processes called node merging and node splitting are discussed. Additionally, it is pointed out that both our networks and the psychologically based networks are prone to memory confusions about knowing unless augmented by domain‐specific inference processes, or by structural information. (shrink)

Argumentation represents a way of reasoning over a knowledge base containing possibly incomplete and/or inconsistent information, to obtain useful conclusions. As a reasoning mechanism, the way an argumentation reasoning engine reaches these conclusions resembles the cognitive process that humans follow to analyze their beliefs; thus, unlike other computationally reasoning systems, argumentation offers an intellectually friendly alternative to other defeasible reasoning systems. LogicProgrammingisacomputationalparadigmthathasproducedcompu- tationallyattractivesystemswithremarkablesuccessinmanyapplications. Merging ideas from both areas, Defeasible Logic Programming offers a computational reasoning system that uses an argumentation (...) engine to obtain answers from a knowledge base represented using a logic programming language extended with defeasible rules. This combination of ideas brings about a computationally effective system together with a human-like reasoning model facilitating its use in applications. (shrink)

Landauer's principle, often regarded as the basic principle of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment. Conversely, it is generally accepted that any logically reversible transformation of information can in principle be accomplished by an appropriate physical mechanism operating in (...) a thermodynamically reversible fashion. These notions have sometimes been criticized either as being false, or as being trivial and obvious, and therefore unhelpful for purposes such as explaining why Maxwell's Demon cannot violate the second law of thermodynamics. Here I attempt to refute some of the arguments against Landauer's principle, while arguing that although in a sense it is indeed a straightforward consequence or restatement of the Second Law, it still has considerable pedagogic and explanatory power, especially in the context of other influential ideas in nineteenth and twentieth century physics. Similar arguments have been given by Jeffrey Bub. (shrink)

Recently, the group of McBride reported a stunning observation regarding peroxisome biogenesis: newly born peroxisomes are hybrids of mitochondrial and ER-derived pre-peroxisomes. What was stunning? Studies performed with the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae had convincingly shown that peroxisomes are ER-derived, without indications for mitochondrial involvement. However, the recent finding using fibroblasts dovetails nicely with a mechanism inferred to be driving the eukaryotic invention of peroxisomes: reduction of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species generation associated with fatty acid oxidation. This not only explains (...) the mitochondrial involvement, but also its apparent absence in yeast. The latest results allow a reconstruction of the evolution of the yeast's highly derived metabolism and its limitations as a model organism in this instance. As I review here, peroxisomes are eukaryotic inventions reflecting mutual host endosymbiont adaptations: this is predicted by symbiogenetic theory, which states that the defining eukaryotic characteristics evolved as a result of mutual adaptations of two merging prokaryotes. See also the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/HtyKhQ3DSxg Eukaryotic peroxisomes illustrate effects of symbiogenesis, following the non-phagocytotic merger of an archaeon and a bacterium. Internal ROS formation upon fatty acid oxidation was reduced by the invention of peroxisomes for extra-mitochondrial FA oxidation. Both peroxisomal membranes and their oldest enzymes seem ultimately derived from the pre-mitochondrion. (shrink)

The concept of the republic is a complex meta-principle that facilitates and conceals global relations of domination. Specifically, it enables the invisibility of racism as the core of political power. From its very origins the concept of republic serves to seize constituent power or politeia. In modernity, as it merges with private property, it will serve as the launchpad of a vast colonization project that then evolves in a new form of power in coloniality. The article applies the theory of (...) the ‘encryption of power’—to decrypt the historical concept of the republic. In doing so, we will demonstrate the key antidemocratic role it has played at the heart of global coloniality. We will bear witness as to how, from within the concept of republic, a refined mechanism of domination raises and expands, conforming the most magnificent and lethal form of power of our times. We exemplify our theory showing that the concept of ‘republic’ is the common thread between the law that abolished slavery in Brazil and the 1988 constitution. Within this scope, we propose a vital space of reconsideration of political ontology through radical democracy as the only means to build the world from immanent difference. (shrink)

Adaptive phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental variability, and yet, despite its adaptive significance, phenotypic plasticity is neither ubiquitous nor infinite. In this review, we merge developmental and population genetic perspectives to explore costs and limits on the evolution of plasticity. Specifically, we focus on the role of modularity in developmental genetic networks as a mechanism underlying phenotypic plasticity, and apply to it lessons learned from population genetic theory on the interplay between relaxed selection and mutation accumulation. (...) We argue that the environmental specificity of gene expression and the associated reduction in pleiotropic constraints drive a fundamental tradeoff between the range of plasticity that can be accommodated and mutation accumulation in alternative developmental networks. This tradeoff has broad implications for understanding the origin and maintenance of plasticity and may contribute to a better understanding of the role of plasticity in the origin, diversification, and loss of phenotypic diversity. (shrink)

The Serial Endosymbiotic Theory explains the origin of nucleated eukaryotic cells by a merging of archaebacterial and eubacterial cells. The paradigmatic change is that the driving force behind evolution is not ramification but merging. Lynn Margulis describes the symbiogenetic processes in the language of mechanistic biology in such terms as “merging”, “fusion”, and “incorporation”. Biosemiotics argues that all cell-cell interactions are (rule-governed) sign-mediated interactions, i.e., communication processes. As the description of plant communication demonstrates, the biosemiotic approach is not limited to (...) the level of molecular biology, but is also helpful in examining all sign-mediated interactions between organisms on the phenotypic level. If biosemiotics also uses the notions of “language” and “communication” to describe non-human sign-mediated interactions, then the underlying scientific justification of such usage should be critically considered. Therefore, I summarize the history of this discussion held between 1920 and 1980 and present its result, the pragmatic turn. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century there were as many formulations of Darwinian evolution as there were Darwinians. Consequently, Michael Ruse defines a “Darwinian” as “someone who identified with Darwin, but not necessarily someone who accepted all of Darwin’s ideas.” Therefore, the only way to determine what William James meant by Darwinian evolutionary science is by checking his references to it and his adoption of recognizably Darwinian theory and methods. By “Darwinian evolution” he sometimes refers to a reductionist interpretation according to which (...) consciousness is nothing but brain processes, and survival of the fittest is applied to reality mechanistically. He excepted himself from this interpretation, however, and his own evolutionary Darwinism was a merging of idealist philosophical and empirical scientific commitments. James was confident that his reading of Darwin and particular application of it were consistent with the Darwinian texts and that the reductionist Darwinians who understood the survival of the fittest as a justification for a Hobbesian state of nature were misreading Darwin. (shrink)

I hypothesize that the appearance of sex facilitated the merging of the endosymbiont and host genomes during early eukaryote evolution. Eukaryotes were formed by symbiosis between a bacterium that entered an archaeon, eventually giving rise to mitochondria. This entry was followed by the gradual transfer of most bacterial endosymbiont genes into the archaeal host genome. I argue that the merging of the mitochondrial genes into the host genome was vital for the evolution of genuine eukaryotes. At the time this process (...) commenced it was unprecedented and required a novel mechanism. I suggest that this mechanism was meiotic sex, and that its appearance might have been THE crucial step that enabled the evolution of proper eukaryotes from early endosymbiont containing proto‐eukaryotes. Sex might continue to be essential today for keeping genome insertions in check. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/aVMvWMpomac. (shrink)

We address the question of why particular laws were selected for the universe, by proposing a mechanism for laws to evolve. Normally in physical theories, timeless laws act on time-evolving states. We propose that this is an approximation, good on time scales shorter than cosmological scales, beyond which laws and states are merged into a single entity that evolves in time. Furthermore the approximate distinction between laws and states, when it does emerge, is dependent on the initial conditions. (...) These ideas are illustrated in a simple matrix model. (shrink)

We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but still lost the battle and dropped out – we know so little about what becomes of them. This reflective article is about the betrayals of PhD supervisors in one institution, the trauma and stigma of withdrawing from that institution, writing poetry as a coping mechanism and the triumph in completing a Thesis by Publication (TBP) in another institution. Thus, I build on Lesley Saunders’s idea (...) about using poetry to operate on ‘a personal capacity’ in educational research. Accordingly, I present an original autoethnographic poem and other poetic artefacts as well as reflections to sharpen the sociological eye of my story. In it, I merge two different segments of experiences in poetry – trauma and triumph – to draw an image of my doctoral journey, in the moment and in retrospection. By doing so, I illuminate the struggles involved in becoming an independent researcher. I also encourage practitioners to conceive that their negative experiences in doing educational research can be transformed into an achievement depending on the stand they take when faced with it. Certainly, poor academic performance can be closely associated with abandoning doctoral studies, but that is not always the case. Therefore, it is my hope that this autoethnographic work may instill hope in doctoral candidates who are still in the struggle to find a voice. (shrink)

The widespread critical evidence surrounding executive compensation of listed corporations has boosted shareholder activism in recent decades. The say-on-pay (SOP) mechanism—a vote in which shareholders express their (dis)agreement with executive pay designs—is one of the corporate governance mechanisms that has led to this activism among listed firms. Merging agency and socioemotional wealth (SEW) arguments, this paper analyzes how effective SOP voting results are among listed family firms in terms of CEO compensation efficiency and equity. Using a sample of UK (...) listed firms from 2011 to 2018, our results show that SOP effectiveness is positively influenced by family ownership and is strongly moderated by family involvement in management and in governance as well as by family generation. Our findings stress the strong family effect and the ethical perceptions of family shareholders on SOP voting, showing how family participation in the firm encourages fairer and more aligned CEO compensation packages. SOP institutional and practical implications oriented to preserve shareholder value and family wealth are finally outlined. (shrink)

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)

Mammalian sperm undergo discharge of a single, anterior secretory granule following their attachment to the zona pellucida surrounding the oocyte. This secretory discharge is known for historical reasons as the acrosome reaction. It fulfils a number of purposes and without it, sperm are unable to penetrate the zona pellucida and fuse with the oocyte. In this review, we focus on the role of the acrosome reaction in the development of fusion competence in sperm. Any naturally occurring membrane fusion has two (...) major sequential steps: a docking or adhesion step, in which two membranes adhere, and a fusion step, in which their lipid bilayers are destabilized and merged and a cellular compartment is either created or destroyed. Recent evidence suggests that there is an important role for oocyte integrins and sperm‐bound disintegrins in mammalian sperm/oocyte adhesion and fusion. The fusion mechanism employed by sperm remains poorly understood, however, and circumstantial evidence suggests it is more complex than the interaction between a single protein species and its target. Sperm/oocyte fusion is probably the most accessible eukaryotic model for intercellular fusion currently available, partly because it is temporally separated from gene expression. Elucidation of the mechanism of sperm/oocyte fusion may throw light on the mechanism of other intercellular fusions such as myoblast fusion, and the evolutionary relationship of intercellular membrane fusion to intracellular membrane fusion. (shrink)

Descartes argued that productivity, namely our ability to generate an unlimited number of new thoughts or ideas from previous ones, derives from a single undividable source in the human soul. Cognitive scientists, in contrast, have viewed productivity as a modular phenomenon. According to this latter view, syntactic, semantic, musical or visual productivity emerges each from their own generative engines in the human brain. Recent evidence has, however, led some authors to revitalize the Cartesian theory. According to this view, a single (...) source or a single mechanism in the human brain produces productivity in every cognitive domain, whether in the domain of music, semantics or syntax. In this article, we will address recent evidence concerning the single source hypothesis from brain-imaging studies, linguistics, cognitive theories of music perception, biology of cognition and cognitive development, along with several objections that have been presented against this hypothesis. We formulate two versions of the Cartesian theory which combine the more recent computational theory of cognition with Descartes' view on productivity. (shrink)

A session-based recommendation system is designed to predict the user’s next click behavior based on an ongoing session. Existing session-based recommendation systems usually model a session into a sequence and extract sequence features through recurrent neural network. Although the performance is greatly improved, these procedures ignore the relationships between items that contain rich information. In order to obtain rich items embeddings, we propose a novel Recommendation Model based on Multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network for session-based recommendation, RMMCNN for brevity. Specifically, we (...) capture items' internal features from three dimensions through multi-channel convolutional neural network firstly. Next, we merge the internal features with external features obtained by a GRU unit. Then, both internal features and external features are merged by an attention mechanism together as the input of the transformation function. Finally, the probability distribution is taken as the output after the softmax function. Experiments on various datasets show that our method's precision and recommendation performance are better than those of other state-of-the-art approaches. (shrink)

Kojin Karatani wrote the essays in _History and Repetition_ during a time of radical historical change, triggered by the collapse of the Cold War and the death of the Showa emperor in 1989. Reading Karl Marx in an original way, Karatani developed a theory of history based on the repetitive cycle of crises attending the expansion and transformation of capital. His work led to a rigorous analysis of political, economic, and literary forms of representation that recast historical events as a (...) series of repeated forms forged in the transitional moments of global capitalism. _History and Repetition_ cemented Karatani's reputation as one of Japan's premier thinkers, capable of traversing the fields of philosophy, political economy, history, and literature in his work. The first complete translation of _History and Repetition_ into English, undertaken with the cooperation of Karatani himself, this volume opens with his innovative reading of _The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte_, tracing Marx's early theoretical formulation of the state. Karatani follows with a study of violent crises as they recur after major transitions of power, developing his theory of historical repetition and introducing a groundbreaking interpretation of fascism as the spectral return of the absolutist monarch in the midst of a crisis of representative democracy. For Karatani, fascism represents the most violent materialization of the repetitive mechanism of history. Yet he also seeks out singularities that operate outside the brutal inevitability of historical repetition, whether represented in literature or, more precisely, in the process of literature's demise. Closely reading the works of Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima Yukio, Nakagami Kenji, and Murakami Haruki, Karatani compares the recurrent and universal with the singular and unrepeatable, while advancing a compelling theory of the decline of modern literature. Merging theoretical arguments with a concrete analysis of cultural and intellectual history, Karatani's essays encapsulate a brilliant, multidisciplinary perspective on world history. (shrink)

In an attempt to develop a synthesis between biology and metaphysics, the author argues that the categories of metaphysics should properly come not from an abstract logic, but rather from "organic nature." The arguments of the mechanists and vitalists are re-interpreted; the position of the vitalist is defended and broadened so as to provide a foundation for the new science of psycho-biology, which is to merge with metaphysics.--A. R.

This is another one of those “let’s see how we can misuse the insights of modern physics to justify a crackpot theory of the universe” type of books. The most worthy such attempt known to me is. It is difficult to take seriously an author who claims that Nazism is an “astral epidemic”, who sees trinitarian implications in the American constitutional system of checks and balances, who accepts without qualification the statement of another researcher that subjects under the influence of (...) LSD were able to recall events in the womb, who is enthusiastic about reincarnation, going so far as to claim that “…we are living within the vortex of all the previous cultures”, and who alleges that the full meaning of a symbol is to be grasped through meditation that removes the opposition of the cognizer and the cognized, through entering of the essence of the object and complete merging with it”. Skepticism toward any of this, moreover, is treated as a sign of latent mechanism, the product of “…a scornful attitude toward human inner experience”, and analogous to the disbelief which at first greeted the Wright brothers. If you like Jung, particularly the theories of archetypes and collective unconscious, you will love Nalimov. He is a talk show host’s dream: full of stories and experiments [sic] similar to those concocted by Targ and Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s—all of which have been thoroughly discredited by. His sincerity is undeniable; he is just an incredibly bad, or else naive, scientist, at least concerning this motley collection of subjects. He is also prone to gobbledygook, for example: when characterizing the difference between humans and computers, he writes “…an illusion is semantically meaningful. We call this semantics illusory only because we are ignorant of the mechanism of interaction of the unconscious myth-like images with the manifestations of consciousness”. Or, talking about “bimodal distribution functions” for a set of exclusive disjunctions, the author alludes to “…the increasing informational entropy of concepts” which creates “…smoothed bimodality”. Very impressive, but what does it mean in plain English—or plain Russian, if the translator is to blame? (shrink)

The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have (...) assimilated their conception of explanation to the ontic conception. (shrink)

Any successful account of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation must satisfy at least five key desiderata. In this article, I lay out these five desiderata and explain why existing accounts of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation fail to satisfy them. I then present an alternative account that does satisfy the five desiderata. According to this alternative account, we must resort to a type of ontological entity that is new to metaphysics, but not to science: constraints. In this article, I explain (...) how a constraints-based metaphysics fits best with the emerging consensus on the nature of mechanistic explanation. 1Introduction2Renormalizability2.1The first two desiderata: Intrinsicness and productivity2.2The third desideratum: Scientific validity or non-mysteriousness2.3The fourth desideratum: Directionality2.4The fifth desideratum: Perspectival nature of mechanisms3Constraints and Causation3.1Multi-perspectival realism and causal structure3.2Causal structure as laws3.3Causal structures in analytical mechanics: Constraints3.4A metaphysics inspired by analytical mechanics: Constraints as ontologically primitive modal structures4Constraints and Mechanistic Causal Powers 4.1Inter- versus intra-perspectival categories4.2Mechanistic causal powers are grounded by constraints4.3Intrinsicness and constraints4.4Constraints and productiveness4.5Constraints and directionality5Conclusion. (shrink)

Explanations in cognitive science and computational neuroscience rely predominantly on computational modeling. Although the scientific practice is systematic, and there is little doubt about the empirical value of numerous models, the methodological account of computational explanation is not up-to-date. The current chapter offers a systematic account of computational explanation in cognitive science and computational neuroscience within a mechanistic framework. The account is illustrated with a short case study of modeling of the mirror neuron system in terms of predictive coding.

In a recent book and an article, Carl Craver construes the relations between different levels of a mechanism, which he also refers to as constitutive relations, in terms of mutual manipulability (MM). Interpreted metaphysically, MM implies that inter-level relations are symmetrical. MM thus violates one of the main desiderata of scientific explanation, namely explanatory asymmetry. Parts of Craver’s writings suggest a metaphysical interpretation of MM, and Craver explicitly commits to constitutive relationships being symmetrical. The paper furthermore explores the option (...) of interpreting MM epistemologically, as a means for individuating mechanisms. It is argued that MM then is redundant. MM should therefore better be abandoned. (shrink)

We study the phenomenon of merging of opinions for computationally limited Bayesian agents from the perspective of algorithmic randomness. When they agree on which data streams are algorithmically random, two Bayesian agents beginning the learning process with different priors may be seen as having compatible beliefs about the global uniformity of nature. This is because the algorithmically random data streams are of necessity globally regular: they are precisely the sequences that satisfy certain important statistical laws. By virtue of agreeing on (...) what data streams are algorithmically random, two Bayesian agents can thus be taken to concur on what global regularities they expect to see in the data. We show that this type of compatibility between priors suffices to ensure that two computable Bayesian agents will reach inter-subjective agreement with increasing information. In other words, it guarantees that their respective probability assignments will almost surely become arbitrarily close to each other as the number of observations increases. Thus, when shared by computable Bayesian learners with different subjective priors, the beliefs about uniformity captured by algorithmic randomness provably lead to merging of opinions. (shrink)

This volume offers a broad, philosophical discussion on mechanical explanations. Coverage ranges from historical approaches and general questions to physics and higher-level sciences . The contributors also consider the topics of complexity, emergence, and reduction. Mechanistic explanations detail how certain properties of a whole stem from the causal activities of its parts. This kind of explanation is in particular employed in explanatory models of the behavior of complex systems. Often used in biology and neuroscience, mechanistic explanation models have been often (...) overlooked in the philosophy of physics. The authors correct this surprising neglect. They trace these models back to their origins in physics. The papers present a comprehensive historical, methodological, and problem-oriented investigation. The contributors also investigate the conditions for using models of mechanistic explanations in physics. The last papers make the bridge from physics to economics, the theory of complex systems and computer science . This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy of science, scientific explanation, complex systems, models of explanation in physics higher level sciences, and causal mechanisms in science. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the (...) conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions. (shrink)

Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To defend this thesis, we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic decision making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to account for all the available data on phonemic decision making. The modular Race model (Cutler (...) & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by some recent results, however. We therefore present a new modular model of phonemic decision making, the Merge model. In Merge, information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account for the data through a process of competition between lexical hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of language processing and conclude that modular models are particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech recognition. Key Words: computational modeling; feedback; lexical processing; modularity; phonemic decisions; reading; speech recognition; word recognition. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the ways that mechanisms are invoked in neuroscience and looks at a selection of the philosophical problems that arise when trying to understand mechanistic explanations. It introduces a series of historical case studies that illustrate how neuroscientists have depended on mechanistic metaphors in their efforts to understand the mind and brain, and how their mechanistic explanations have developed over time. The chapter highlights what contemporary philosophers have identified as the fundamental features of mechanisms and mechanistic (...) explanation. It considers some of the methodological issues that arise in neuroscience including how to integrate psychological with neural models, how to generalize findings in model organisms like the sea slug Aplysia to human learning and memory, and whether to favor top-down or bottom-up methods. Constructing multi-level mechanistic explanations involves intensive collaboration across different branches of science, and involves many challenges, both pragmatic and methodological. (shrink)

The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner.We propose to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e. as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals into an adequate collective decision. That is, we propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first step in this direction, we (...) formulate several desirable properties for ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of these properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation procedures. Our approach is closely related to work in judgment aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open world assumption, by distinguishing between facts not included in an agent’s ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent’s ontology. (shrink)

Many logical systems today describe intelligent interacting agents over time. Frameworks include Interpreted Systems (IS, Fagin et al. [8]), Epistemic-Temporal Logic (ETL, Parikh & Ramanujam [22]), STIT (Belnap et al. [5]), Process Algebra and Game Semantics (Abramsky [1]). This variety is an asset, as different modeling tools can be fine-tuned to specific applications. But it may also be an obstacle, when barriers between paradigms and schools go up. This paper takes a closer look at one particular interface, between two systems (...) that both address the dynamics of knowledge and information flow in multi-agent systems. One is IS/ETL (IS and ETL are, from a technical point of view, the same up to model transformations, cf. [20]), which uses linear or branching time models with added epistemic structure induced by agents’ different capabilities for observing events. These models provide a Grand Stage where histories of some process unfold constrained by a protocol, and a matching epistemic-temporal language describes what happens. The other framework is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, [10, 4, 34]) that describes interactive processes in terms of epistemic event models which may occur inside modalities of the language. Temporal evolution is then computed from some initial epistemic model through a process of successive ‘product updates’. It has long been unclear how to best compare IS/ETL and DEL. Various aspects have been investigated in [10, 30, 32], but in this paper, we study the interface in a more systematic way. Often, DEL and ETL are presented as alternative ways of adding dynamics to multi-agent epistemic models. In this paper, we rather focus on how merging the two different modeling choices leads to interesting new questions. Our leading interest here will be a view of informational processes as evolving over time. To see what we mean, consider the simplest version of DEL, viz. the logic of public announcements PAL ([23]) which adds a very specific type of communicative 1 action to epistemic models: a public announcement.. (shrink)

We explore the question of whether sustained rational disagreement is possible from a broadly Bayesian perspective. The setting is one where agents update on the same information, with special consideration being given to the case of uncertain information. The classical merging of opinions theorem of Blackwell and Dubins shows when updated beliefs come and stay closer for Bayesian conditioning. We extend this result to a type of Jeffrey conditioning where agents update on evidence that is uncertain but solid. However, merging (...) of beliefs does not generally hold for Jeffrey conditioning on evidence that is fluid. Several theorems on the asymptotic behavior of subjective probabilities are proven. Taken together they show that while a consensus nearly always emerges in important special cases, sustained rational disagreement can be expected in many other situations. (shrink)

The present paper introduces a belief merging procedure by majority using the standard format of Adaptive Logics. The core structure of the logic ADM c (Adaptive Doxastic Merging by Counting) consists in the formulation of the conflicts arising from the belief bases of the agents involved in the procedure. A strategy is then defined both semantically and proof-theoretically which selects the consistent contents answering to a majority principle. The results obtained are proven to be equivalent to a standard majority operator (...) for bases with partial support. (shrink)

The merging/fusion of belief/data collections in propositional logic form is a topic that has received due attention within the domains of database and AI research. A distinction can be made between two types of scenarios to which the process of merging can be applied. In the first type, the collections represent preferences, such as the voting choices of a group of people, that need to be aggregated so as to give a consistent result that in some way best represents the (...) collective judgement of the group. In the second type, the collections represent factual data that is to be aggregated with an aim of obtaining a result that maximises factual correctness. After introducing a general framework for belief merging via some prominent literature on the topic, this paper then introduces and considers a method for belief merging with the second type of scenario in mind. Its suitability is corroborated by demonstrating how it can be seen as a special case of a merging procedure that combines aggregation of probabilities and maximisation of expected truthlikeness. (shrink)

This paper describes the construction method of a legal application ontology. This method is based on the merging of micro-ontologies built from European community directives. The terminae construction method from texts enhanced by an alignment process with a core legal ontology is used for building micro-ontologies. A merging process allows constructing the legal ontology.

This paper surveys the interface between the two major logical trends that describe agents’ intelligent interaction over time: dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) and epistemic temporal logic (ETL). The initial attempt to “merge” DEL and ETL was made in van Benthem et al. (Merging frameworks for interaction: DEL and ETL, 2007) and followed up by van Benthem et al. (J Phil Logic 38(5):491–526, 2009) and Hoshi (Epistemic dynamics and protocol information. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University Stanford, 2009a). The merged framework provides (...) a systematic comparison between these two logical systems and studies new logics of intelligent interaction. This paper presents the main results and the recent developments at the interface between DEL and ETL. (shrink)