In important respects measurement practices underlay both the Second Scientific Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution. Such practices, using increasingly accurate and precise instruments, both turned laboratories into factories for the production of exact measurement and also made factories the sites of laboratory-type and laboratory-quality measurement. Those who had learnt the protocols of precise, instrumentational measurement in university science and engineering classrooms, used those instruments and their skills to monitor and control industrial production, exchange technical data within and among (...) firms and formulate and implement technical standardization in industry. That these instruments measured not natural phenomena but technological ones made them no different in kind from what are more conventionally regarded as scientific instruments. Some indeed were simply instruments developed for scientific investigation and adapted for industrial use while others were created specifically for particular industrial applications. But more than the purely technical was going on in the use of those instruments. In addition to their function of producing knowledge they were also, in industrial production, instruments of hegemony – hegemony which, as Gramsci reminds us, begins in the factory. Among the lesser known of these devices is the freeness tester, used in production to control the manufacture of pulp and also in industrial research laboratories for the investigation of the pulping process. The Canadian Standard Freeness Tester (CSFT), developed at a Canadian government research facility on the campus of McGill University in the 1920s, quickly became a standard instrument in the pulp mills of North America and gained wide acceptance in other countries; it remains in use to this day. An understanding of its creation and function can provide a useful case study of the general observations discussed above. (shrink)

The article presents proofs of the context freeness of a family of typelogical grammars, namely all grammars that are based on a uni- ormultimodal logic of pure residuation, possibly enriched with thestructural rules of Permutation and Expansion for binary modes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate a relationship between egalitarian equivalence and envy-freeness in a continuum-agent economy, where tastes vary continuously across individuals. Under efficiency, the two criteria of equity are not compatible, except in the knife-edge case. In particular, when individual utility functions are restricted to the class of Cobb–Douglas-type functions, there exists an efficient, egalitarian-equivalent, and envy-free allocation if and only if all individuals have the same taste over commodities.

In this paper, a theory T H based on combining type freeness with logic is introduced and is then used to build a theory of properties which is applied to determiners and quantifiers.

Suppose you and I are dividing a cake between us. If you divide and I choose, then—under standard assumptions—the distribution will be not only fair, but also envy-free. That is, neither of us prefers the other slice. The question that interests me in this essay, however, is the relationship between envy and fairness. Specifically, is it merely a coincidence that the envy-free distribution is fair, or does envy-freeness capture something important about fairness? I argue that envy-freeness does indeed (...) capture something about fairness. Yet, envy-minimizing—the compromise approach—does not. I first show that fairness does not plausibly require envy-minimizing; I then offer an explanation. Namely, envy-minimizing depends on the assumption that all envy is normatively equivalent. This assumption, however, is false. To illustrate, I introduce two types of envy—personal envy and impersonal envy—and show that impersonal envy is normatively significant in a way that personal envy is not. Specifically, impersonal envy is compatible with the rules of mutual justifiability; personal envy is not. I then use this distinction to explain the relationship between fairness and envy-freeness. In the process, the essay provides guidance on the fair division of heterogeneous and non-divisible goods. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting further (...) questions to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

We show a sense in which the spacetime property of effective completeness—a type of “local hole-freeness” or “local inextendibility”—is not stable.

We sketch an axiomatic reformalization of Generalized Phrase StructureGrammar (GPSG) – a definition purely within the language ofmathematical logic of the theory GPSG embodies. While this treatment raisesa number of theoretical issues for GPSG, our focus is not thereformalization itself but rather the method we employ. The model-theoreticapproach it exemplifies can be seen as a natural step in the evolution ofconstraint-based theories from their grammar-based antecedents. One goal ofthis paper is to introduce this approach to a broader audience and todemonstrate (...) its application to an existing theory. As such, it joins agrowing literature of similar studies. Prior studies, however, have had anumber of weaknesses – they generally offer little in the way ofconcrete examples of the advantages the approach has to offer, theytypically ignore significant portions of the theories they address, and, byfully abstracting away from the notion of grammar mechanism, they largelyabandon the possibility of establishing meaningful complexity results. Thesecond goal of the paper is to address these issues. Our thrust is to sketchthe reformalization sufficiently to illustrate the way in which it capturesFeature Specification Defaults (FSDs) and the Exhaustive Constant PartialOrdering (ECPO) property. Our definition of FSDs is considerably simplifiedrelative to the original formalization and is free of the procedural flavorthat has led some to assume that FSDs are inherently dynamic. Our treatmentof ECPO uncovers a gap in its definition in the context of partialcategories that has heretofore gone unnoticed. We offer these as ademonstration of the kind of insight that a model-theoretic reinterpretationcan bring to an existing theory. Further, since these are the types ofproperties that prior studies in this genre have failed to address, FSDs andECPO provide a means for us to explore the limitations of these approachesand to offer ways of overcoming them. Finally, the logical framework weemploy has a well defined generative capacity – definability in thisframework characterizes strong context-freeness in a particular sense. Thus,despite being more abstract than its constraint-based predecessors, themodel-theoretic approach, as exemplified here, can offer stronger complexityresults than are typically available in the constraint-based framework. (shrink)

Envy is sometimes suggested as an underlying motive in the assessment of different economic allocations. In the theoretical literature on fair division, following Foley [Foley, D. (1967), Yale Economic Essays, 7, 45–98], the term “envy” refers to an intrapersonal comparison of different consumption bundles. By contrast, in its everyday use “envy” involves interpersonal comparisons of well-being. We present, discuss results from free-form bargaining experiments on fair division problems in which inter-and intrapersonal criteria can be distinguished. We find that interpersonal comparisons (...) play the dominant role. The effect of the intrapersonal criterion of envy freeness is limited to situations in which other fairness criteria are not applicable. (shrink)

The role played by continuous morphisms in propositional modal logic is investigated: it turns out that they are strictly related to filtrations and to suitable variants of the notion of a free algebra. We also employ continuous morphisms in incremental constructions of (standard) finitely generated free ????4-algebras.

This paper is a continuation of [27], where we provide the background and the basic tools for studying the structural properties of classes of models over languages without equality. In the context of such languages, it is natural to make distinction between two kinds of classes, the so-called abstract classes, which correspond to those closed under isomorphic copies in the presence of equality, and the reduced classes, i.e., those obtained by factoring structures by their largest congruences. The generic problem described (...) in [27] is to investigate under what conditions this reduction process does not alter the metatheory of a class. Here we focus our attention on a concrete aspect of this generic problem that we import from universal algebra, namely the existence and description of free models. As in [27], we can find here again the basic notion of protoalgebraicity, which was originally introduced in [7] as the weakest condition to guarantee that the reduction process behaves reasonably well from an algebraic point of view. Our concern, however, takes us to handle a further notion, that of semialgebraicity, which corresponds to the notion of equivalential logic of [18]; semialgebraicity turns out to be the property which ensures that freeness is fully preserved by the reduction process. (shrink)

Higher-order logic, with its type-theoretic apparatus known as the simple theory of types (STT), has increasingly come to be employed in theorizing about properties, relations, and states of affairs—or ‘intensional entities’ for short. This paper argues against this employment of STT and offers an alternative: ordinal type theory (OTT). Very roughly, STT and OTT can be regarded as complementary simplifications of the ‘ramified theory of types’ outlined in the Introduction to Principia Mathematica (on a realist reading). While STT, (...) understood as a theory of intensional entities, retains the Fregean division of properties and relations into a multiplicity of categories according to their adicities and ‘input types’ and discards the division of intensional entities into different ‘orders’, OTT takes the opposite approach: it retains the hierarchy of orders (though with some modifications) and discards the categorisation of properties and relations according to their adicities and input types. In contrast to STT, this latter approach avoids intensional counterparts of the Epimenides and related paradoxes. Fundamental intensional entities lie at the base of the proposed hierarchy and are also given a prominent part to play in the individuation of non-fundamental intensional entities. (shrink)

Recent debates in metaphysics have highlighted the significance of type theories, such as Simple Type Theory (STT), for our philosophical analysis. In this chapter, I present the salient features of a constructive type theory in the style of Martin-Löf, termed CTT. My principal aim is to convey the flavour of this rich, flexible and sophisticated theory and compare it with STT. I especially focus on the forms of quantification which are available in CTT. A further aim is (...) to argue that a comparison between a plurality of theories is beneficial to the philosophical analysis. We may, for example, discover helpful features of one theory that we may want to import into another context, thus enriching our repertoire of formal tools. Or, through comparison with a less well-known theory, we may gain a better understanding of the characteristics of the theories we are familiar with. As argued in this chapter, CTT has much to offer in all of these respects. (shrink)

In this paper we isolate a notion that we call “formalism freeness” from Gödel's 1946 Princeton Bicentennial Lecture, which asks for a transfer of the Turing analysis of computability to the cases of definability and provability. We suggest an implementation of Gödel's idea in the case of definability, via versions of the constructible hierarchy based on fragments of second order logic. We also trace the notion of formalism freeness in the very wide context of developments in mathematical logic (...) in the 20th century. (shrink)

Type theory is a fast-evolving field at the crossroads of logic, computer science and mathematics. This gentle step-by-step introduction is ideal for graduate students and researchers who need to understand the ins and outs of the mathematical machinery, the role of logical rules therein, the essential contribution of definitions and the decisive nature of well-structured proofs. The authors begin with untyped lambda calculus and proceed to several fundamental type systems culminating in the well-known and powerful Calculus of Constructions. (...) The book also covers the essence of proof checking and proof development, and the use of dependent type theory to formalize mathematics. The only prerequisites are a good knowledge of undergraduate algebra and analysis. Carefully chosen examples illustrate the theory throughout. Each chapter ends with a summary of the content, some historical context, suggestions for further reading and a selection of exercises to help readers familiarize themselves with the material. (shrink)

In light of the ongoing validity crisis in psychiatric classification, phenomenologically oriented psychiatric study has gained traction. This paper assesses two modes of investigation proposed by phenomenologists in studying mental disorders: the ideal type approach and the essential type approach. Despite the recent suggestion that they are antithetical approaches, I argue that they should constantly constrain and inform each other. In short, I advance a mutual complementarity thesis. Having established this thesis, I conclude by demonstrating how this proposal (...) can function as an heuristic strategy for effectively facilitating the recently proposed psychiatric research initiative, i.e. the ontological project of phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

In this paper we isolate a notion that we call "formalism freeness" from Gödel's 1946 Princeton Bicentennial Lecture, which asks for a transfer of the Turing analysis of computability to the cases of definability and provability We suggest an implementation of Gödel's idea in the case of definability, via versions of the constructible hierarchy based on fragments of second order logic. We also trace the notion of formalism freeness in the very wide context of developments in mathematical logic (...) in the 20th century. (shrink)

Belief in destiny is one of the principles of faith. Although the belief in fate is not explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an, there are many verses that indicate this belief. There are many hadiths about fate that have reached us from the Prophet. Although there are schools that deny destiny, Ahl al-Sunnah schools Ash‘aris and Maturidis accept the existence of belief in destiny. The definitions of destiny of these schools are expressed with words that can be used interchangeably. However, fate (...) should not be evaluated in a single category. It also has varieties. If destiny is perceived as only one kind of Forced destiny, it is inevitable to cause misunderstandings. Forced fate; it is destiny that does not give freedom to beings; It happens with the knowledge, will, power and creation of Allah. Some destinies of inanimate substances, plants, animals and humans are of this type. Jabr and responsibility are incompatible. Although some actions take place in their own bodies, people are not responsible for their forced destiny. Man is a freely created being within certain limits. The ability of intellect, will, power, and carrying out actions has been granted to them. By using them, a person performs his acts of will, and as a result, he becomes responsible for his actions. Having free will and freedom distinguishes humans from other living things. Where there is no human freedom, there is no responsibility. Human life is not uniform, it is in a state of constant change and transformation. In addition to these two types of fate, there is also a type of fate that turns into willful fate, although it was forced in the beginning. In addition to this, there are some actions that start with the will of man and later turn into forced fate. There are also types of disability that we have examined in connection with the belief in destiny and its types. Allah has sent humans to the world to be tested. Illness and disability are also part of the test. Diseases; they may be due to genetic, environmental factors, and food-related. Congenital diseases and disabilities can sometimes cause the world test to be difficult. The biological rules set by Allah are also valid for humans. Genetic hereditary diseases and disabilities occur when the genes carried by the parents are passed on to the child. While some genes are recessive, some genes are dominant. Genes that cause hereditary diseases and disabilities show an uneven distribution depending on their geographical habitats, sharing the same environment in the historical process, and the extent of intermingling of their lineages through marriages. While recessive genes can be passed on from generation to generation, dominant genes that cause death generally do not have the opportunity to pass on to the next generation. In today’s context, the diagnosis of genetic diseases and disabilities is attainable, enabling the implementation of necessary precautions accordingly; furthermore, partial or even complete treatment opportunities can be available depending on the circumstances. In this respect, all of the congenital diseases and disabilities due to genes are a forced fate that is not in the hands of man. As for those diseases and disabilities for which treatment opportunities exist, they fall under the category of fate that transitions from forced fate to willful destiny. Some genetic diseases and disabilities of people may appear in later ages. However, non-genetic diseases and disabilities are also facts of life. Every individual can become ill and experience disability during certain periods of their life. Diseases and disabilities can occur with a number of factors that do not depend on an individual's will, actions, or behaviors. Such diseases are also within the scope of forced fate. A person can also be disabled due to one’s own mistakes and negligence. However, it is a behavior befitting a Muslim to be treated in cases of all kinds of diseases and disabilities. The treatment of diseases for which there is a cure is a willed destiny. Diseases and obstacles that cannot be cured are forced fate. (shrink)

This paper introduces a local version of envy-freeness and investigates its implications in a continuum agent economy with connected preferences. We show that the set of locally envy-free and Pareto efficient allocations coincides with the set of equal-income Walrasian allocations.

This paper proposes a concept of local strict envy-freeness (LS-envy-freeness), which is a local version of Zhou’s (1992) strict envy-freeness, and investigates its implications in large economies. In spite of the weakness of this concept, it works effectively by combining with efficiency. It is shown that an LS-envy-free and efficient allocation is a strict envy-free allocation. That is, efficiency expands the local version of strict envy-freeness into strict envy-freeness. Therefore, the set of LS-envy-free and efficient (...) allocations coincides with the set of equal-income Walrasian allocations. (shrink)

This volume presents a Type Theory of Law (TTL), claiming that this is a unique theory of law that stems from the philosophical understanding of Jung's psychological types applied to the phenomenon of law. Furthermore, the TTL claims to be a universal, general and descriptive account of law. To prove that, the book first presents the fundamentals of Jungian psychological types, as they had been invented by Jung and consequently developed further by his followers. The next part of the (...) book describes how the typological structure of an individual determines their understanding of law. It then addresses the way in which inclusive legal theory can be understood based on this typology. Finally, the book describes the TTL in general and descriptive terms and puts it into context. All in all, the book shows how the integral or inclusive approach to understanding the nature of law is not only in tune with our time, but also relevant for presenting a more persuasive picture of law than the older exclusivist or dualist approaches of strict natural law and rigid legal positivism did. (shrink)

Is mathematics 'entangled' with its various formalisations? Or are the central concepts of mathematics largely insensitive to formalisation, or 'formalism free'? What is the semantic point of view and how is it implemented in foundational practice? Does a given semantic framework always have an implicit syntax? Inspired by what she calls the 'natural language moves' of Gödel and Tarski, Juliette Kennedy considers what roles the concepts of 'entanglement' and 'formalism freeness' play in a range of logical settings, from computability (...) and set theory to model theory and second order logic, to logicality, developing an entirely original philosophy of mathematics along the way. The treatment is historically, logically and set-theoretically rich, and topics such as naturalism and foundations receive their due, but now with a new twist. (shrink)

This book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To evaluate an argument correctly (...) one must be able to distinguish the sound instances of a certain argument type from its unsound instances. This book promotes the development of theoretical tools for this task. (shrink)

Guy Rohrbaugh and Allan Hazlett have provided two arguments against the thesis that musical works are types. In short, they assume that, according to our modal talk and intuitions, musical works are modally flexible entities; since types are modally inflexible entities, musical works are not types. I argue that Rohrbaugh’s and Hazlett’s arguments fail and that the type/token theorist can preserve the truth of our modal claims and intuitions even if types are modally inflexible entities. First, I consider two (...) alternatives for the type/token theorist proposed in recent literature about the topic: the created types’ solution and the created abstract objects’ solution. I argue that none of them is attractive for the type/token theorist because they do not preserve the theoretical advantages of type/token theories to explain musical works’ repeatable nature. Then, I focus on the arguments’ common premise that musical works are modally flexible entities. A deeper analysis of musical practice will show that this premise is not true: our modal claims do not imply that musical works could have had different intrinsic but, instead, extrinsic properties. Finally, I show how the nested types theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of this fact and how it captures the truth of our modal talk about musical works. (shrink)

”It is often assumed that knowledge claims must be justified. But what kind of justification is required for knowledge ? . . . ” (*) -/- presupposition: the kind of epistemic justification depends on the type of the knowledge claim and its respective knowledge claim tradeoff ’vague vs. precise’. -/- procedere: in two - almost purely logical - case studies I account for this tradeoff and question in each case what (if any) were its general outcome wrt justification -/- (...) first for basic measurement statements of the form ′′ϕ(x) = r ∈ IR ± δ′′ (wrt ”measurement accuracy realism” debate) -/- and secondly predication statements of the form ′′x is ( a case of )P′′ (wrt ”epistemic vagueness” debate). (shrink)

In this book, Linda Wetzel examines the distinction between types and tokens and argues that types exist (as abstract objects, since they lack a unique ...

It is the aim of INDICES to document recent explorations in the various fields of philosophical logic and formal linguistics and their applications in other disciplines. The main emphasis of this series is on self-contained monographs covering particular areas of recent research and surveys of methods, problems, and results in all fields of inquiry where recourse to logical analysis and logical methods has been fruitful. INDICES will contain monographs dealing with the central areas of philosophical logic (extensional and intensional systems, (...) indexical logics, non-classical logics, philosophy of logic, etc.) as well as studies in which these systems are applied to specific issues in philosophy, in the formal semantics of natural languages, the foundations of linguistic theory, in computational linguistics, and in theoretical computer science. Constructive type theory was first presented in 1970, by the Swedish logician Per Martin-Lof. It has become one of the main approaches used in the foundations of mathematics and computer science. But it has remained relatively unknown among linguists and philosophers, although it provides a considerable extension of the concepts and techniques of logic. The book first gives an introduction to type theory from the point of view of linguistics and the philosophy of language. Type theory is then applied in the areas of quantification, anaphora, temporal reference, and the structure of text and discourse. By virtue of the type-theoretical concepts of proof object and context, various phenomena of dependence and progression in language can be discussed in precise terms, and several well-known problems can be solved. A categorial grammar is presented togenerate formally a fragment of English, together with an example of a computer implementation. (shrink)

The distinction between a type and its tokens is a useful metaphysical distinction. In §1 it is explained what it is, and what it is not. Its importance and wide applicability in linguistics, philosophy, science and everyday life are briefly surveyed in §2. Whether types are universals is discussed in §3. §4 discusses some other suggestions for what types are, both generally and specifically. Is a type the sets of its tokens? What exactly is a word, a symphony, (...) a species? §5 asks what a token is. §6 considers the relation between types and their tokens. Do the type and all its tokens share the same properties? Must all the tokens be alike in some or all respects? §7 explains some problems for the view that types exist, and some problems for the view that they don't. §8 elucidates a distinction often confused with the type-token distinction, that between a type (or token) and an occurrence of it. It also discusses some problems that occurrences might be thought to give rise to, and one way to resolve them. (shrink)

The paper uses the Neo-Kantian distinction between Natural and Human sciences and its methodological implications to navigate W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Alain L. Locke’s theories of race. In tracing a continuity between these two figures, the paper also shows how their respective reliance on Neo-Kantian categories leads them to different results. The goal is to show how, while Du Bois’s Neo-Kantianism is best understood as a Diltheyan Neo-Kantianism of the psycho-physical unity of human nature influenced by an anti-metaphysical (...) orientation, Locke’s Neo-Kantianism can be seen as a Neo-Kantianism whose focus is the rejection of causality and of the causal nexus between biological and non-biological traits. (shrink)

The inflation of Type I error rates is thought to be one of the causes of the replication crisis. Questionable research practices such as p-hacking are thought to inflate Type I error rates above their nominal level, leading to unexpectedly high levels of false positives in the literature and, consequently, unexpectedly low replication rates. In this article, I offer an alternative view. I argue that questionable and other research practices do not usually inflate relevant Type I error (...) rates. I begin with an introduction to Type I error rates that distinguishes them from theoretical errors. I then illustrate my argument with respect to model misspecification, multiple testing, selective inference, forking paths, exploratory analyses, p-hacking, optional stopping, double dipping, and HARKing. In each case, I demonstrate that relevant Type I error rates are not usually inflated above their nominal level, and in the rare cases that they are, the inflation is easily identified and resolved. I conclude that the replication crisis may be explained, at least in part, by researchers’ misinterpretation of statistical errors and their underestimation of theoretical errors. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine a fundamental problem that appears in Greek philosophy: the paradoxes of self-reference of the type of “Third Man” that appears first in Plato’s 'Parmenides', and is further discussed in Aristotle and the Peripatetic commentators and Proclus. We show that the various versions are analysed using different language, reflecting different understandings by Plato and the Platonists, such as Proclus, on the one hand, and the Peripatetics (Aristotle, Alexander, Eudemus), on the other hand. We show that (...) the Peripatetic commentators do not focus on Plato’s solution but primarily on the formulation of the “Third Man” paradox. On the contrary, Proclus seems to be convinced that Plato suggests a sound solution to the paradox by defining the predicate of similarity (homogeneity) that demarcates two types of homogeneous entities – the eide and the participants in them in a way that their confusion would be inadmissible. We claim that Plato’s solution follows a sound line of reasoning that is formalisable in a language of Frege-Russell type; hence there exists a model in which Plato’s reasoning is valid. Furthermore, we notice that Plato’s definition of the second-order predicate of similarity is attained by resorting to first-order entities. In this sense, Plato’s definition is comparable to Eudoxus’ definition of ratio, which is also attained by resorting to first-order objects. Consequently, Plato seems to follow a logical practice established by the mathematicians of the 5th century, notably Eudoxus, in his solution to the paradox. (shrink)

The replication crisis has caused researchers to distinguish between exact replications, which duplicate all aspects of a study that could potentially affect the results, and direct replications, which duplicate only those aspects of the study that are thought to be theoretically essential to reproduce the original effect. The replication crisis has also prompted researchers to think more carefully about the possibility of making Type I errors when rejecting null hypotheses. In this context, the present article considers the utility of (...) two types of Type I error probability: the Neyman–Pearson long run Type I error rate and the Fisherian sample-specific Type I error probability. It is argued that the Neyman–Pearson Type I error rate is inapplicable in social science because it refers to a long run of exact replications, and social science deals with irreversible units that make exact replications impossible. Instead, the Fisherian sample-specific Type I error probability is recommended as a more meaningful way to conceptualize false positive results in social science because it can be applied to each sample-specific decision about rejecting the same substantive null hypothesis in a series of direct replications. It is concluded that the replication crisis may be partly due to researchers’ unrealistic expectations about replicability based on their consideration of the Neyman–Pearson Type I error rate across a long run of exact replications. (shrink)

Blindsight is a kind of residual vision found in people with lesions to V1. Subjects with blindsight typically report no visual awareness, but they are nonetheless able to make above-chance guesses about the shape, location, color and movement of visual stimuli presented to them in their blind field. A different kind of blindsight, sometimes called type 2 blindsight, is a kind of residual vision found in patients with V1 lesions in the presence of some residual awareness. Type 2 (...) blindsight differs from ordinary visual experience in lacking the particularity, transparency and fine-grainedness often taken to be essential to visual experience, at least in veridical cases. I argue that the case of type 2 blindsight provides a counterexample to the view that these characteristics are essential to veridical visual experience and that this gives us reason to resist the view that visual experience is essentially a perceptual relation to external objects. In the second part of the paper I argue that the case of type 2 blindsight yields important insights into the effects of attentional modulation on perceptual content and that cases of attentional modulation of appearance are not at odds with the view that the phenomenology of visual experience flows from its content. (shrink)

Au cours des quatre derniers siècles, les projets de pacification permanente de l’Europe, ou du monde entier, ont constitué un véritable genre littéraire. À un premier niveau, le plus superficiel, le livre offre une vue panoramique de ces projets, depuis le « Grand Dessein » attribué à Henri IV jusqu’à la Charte de l’ONU, en passant par les propositions de William Penn, de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, d’Emmanuel Kant, du comte de Saint-Simon et de tant d’autres, célèbres, moins connus ou oubliés. (...) De règle, ces auteurs sont qualifiés, non sans condescendance, d’utopistes : à un deuxième niveau, le livre est une critique de cet usage paresseux, et les traite comme membres de la famille des réformateurs radicaux. Ayant dressé, chacun à son époque, un réquisitoire sans indulgence contre l’état existant des rapports entre les nations, ils en proposent une réorganisation profonde. Ennemis de l’ordre international établi - un désordre intolérable à leurs yeux -, ils se font les architectes d’un monde nouveau, le meilleur des mondes possibles, dont ils précisent le mode de construction. Si différents soient-ils, leurs écrits se prêtent à être classifiés en un petit nombre de catégories : à un troisième niveau, le livre est un essai typologique. Il suggère une conceptualisation du « système international parfait » qui comporte cinq grands modèles et permet donc de répartir l’ensemble des auteurs passés en revue dans cinq traditions intellectuelles, dont la plus récente est longue de deux siècles et la plus ancienne de sept. (shrink)