Stephen Yablo offers a solution to the problem of mental causation by claiming that the physical is a determinate of the mental's determinable, and therefore the mental and physical do not compete for causal relevance. I present Yablo's solution and argue that the mental‐physical relation cannot meet three necessary conditions for determination. That relation fails to meet the requirements that determinates of the same determinable be incompatible and that no property can be a determinate of more than one determinable. Further, (...) the mental and physical do not fall under the same series of scope inclusions as determinables and their determinates must. Yablo's conception of determination might be rendered more general to avoid these objections, but doing so would prevent it from functioning as a competitor to extant theories of the mental‐physical relation. Thus, Yablo's solution to the problem of mental causation cannot be both adequately specific and correct. (shrink)

We have investigated the emotional profile of dreams and the relationship between dream emotion and cognition using a form that specifically asked subjects to identify emotions within their dreams. Two hundred dream reports were collected from 20 subjects, each of whom produced 10 reports. Compared to previous studies, our method yielded a 10-fold increase in the amount of emotion reported. Anxiety/fear was reported most frequently, followed, in order, by joy/elation, anger, sadness, shame/guilt, and, least frequently, affection/eroticism. Unexpectedly, there was no (...) significant difference in the profiles of emotion reported by men and women. When the reports were scored for bizarreness, a significant correlation was found between the occurrence of bizarreness and major shifts in emotion. These results support the conclusion that dreaming is a mental state whose general emotional features are widely shared across individuals and strongly linked to cognitive features within individual dreams. (shrink)

Stephen Yablo offers a solution to the problem of mental causation by claiming that the physical is a determinate of the mental's determinable, and therefore the mental and physical do not compete for causal relevance. I present Yablo's solution and argue that the mental‐physical relation cannot meet three necessary conditions for determination. That relation fails to meet the requirements that determinates of the same determinable be incompatible and that no property can be a determinate of more than one determinable. Further, (...) the mental and physical do not fall under the same series of scope inclusions as determinables and their determinates must. Yablo's conception of determination might be rendered more general to avoid these objections, but doing so would prevent it from functioning as a competitor to extant theories of the mental‐physical relation. Thus, Yablo's solution to the problem of mental causation cannot be both adequately specific and correct. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

Dr Edwards' stimulating and provocative book advances the thesis that the appropriate axiomatic basis for inductive inference is not that of probability, with its addition axiom, but rather likelihood - the concept introduced by Fisher as a measure of relative support amongst different hypotheses. Starting from the simplest considerations and assuming no more than a modest acquaintance with probability theory, the author sets out to reconstruct nothing less than a consistent theory of statistical inference in science.

This 2 part book, originally published in 1890, was written to help students of morals comprehend the significance of morals. The questions with which an historian of morals is chiefly concerned are the changes that have taken place in the moral standard and in the moral type, the degrees in which, in different ages, recognised virtues have been enjoined and practiced and the relative importance that in different ages has been attached to different virtues.

A major barrier to recombination between bacterial species lies in the mismatch repair system, a complex of proteins that has evolved to proof‐read freshly replicated DNA. It now appears that a second system, involving an inducible DNA recombination, repair and mutagenesis pathway, also regulates interspecies recombination, but in a positive way, being required for recombination between Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium(1). Thus the rate at which newly emerging species of bacteria diverge can be seen as a balance between a permissive (...) state associated with inducible repair and recombination, and the proof‐reading of intermediates in the recombination pathway by the mismatch correction system. (shrink)

When it comes to scientific explanation, our parsimonious tendencies mean that we focus almost exclusively on those dispositions whose manifestations result in some sort of change – changes in properties, locations, velocities and so on. Following this tendency, our notion of causation is one that is inherently dynamic, as if the maintenance of the status quo were merely a given. Contrary to this position, I argue that a complete concept of causation must also account for dispositions whose manifestations involve no (...) changes at all, and that a causal theory that fails to include these ‘static’ dispositions alongside the dynamic ones renders static occurrences miraculous. (shrink)

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically connected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and interventions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences — a high-level candidate OBO Foundry ontology that (...) provides a set of general classes that can be used to describe general aspects of medical science. ND is being built with classes utilizing both textual and axiomatized definitions that describe and formalize the relations between instances of other classes within the ontology itself as well as to external ontologies such as the Gene Ontology, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest. In addition, references to similar or associated terms in external ontologies, vocabularies and terminologies are included when possible. Initial work on ND is focused on the areas of Alzheimer’s and other diseases associated with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease. Extensions to additional groups of neurological diseases are planned. The second ontology, the Neuro-Psychological Testing Ontology (NPT), is intended to provide a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data. The intention of this ontology is to allow for the integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests that assay similar measures of cognitive functioning. Neuro-psychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical picture used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. NPT is being developed as an extension to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. (shrink)

The contents include chapters covering: theory of command; theory of sovereignty; evidence of law; theory of legal duty theory of legal sanctions; theory of the legal object; theory of imputation; theory of legal rights; rights related to ownership; foreign rights; codification of the law; & others.

"Under the editorship of Edward M. Sait." Bibliography at end of each chapter.

Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience.

This chapter contains section titled: The Problem of Induction: Hume's Problem The Regularity Theory of Causation Hume and Cognitive Science Hume and Naturalized Epistemology Hume as anti‐Metaphysician References Further Reading.

His authority is always grounded in the very authority he deposes, with the result that his voice is little more than a theatrical performance that unwittingly re-enacts the rhetorical maneuvers of deposed father figures.