What holds together the various fields, which - considered together - are supposed to constitute the general intellectual discipline that people now call cognitive science? Some theorists identify the common subject matter as the mind, but scientists have not been able to agree on any single, satisfactory answer to the question of what the mind is. This book argues that all cognitive sciences are not equal, and that rather only neurophysiology and cultural psychology are suited to account for the mind's (...) ontology. (shrink)

Philosophers in the tradition of Berkeley say that the first step in gaining knowledge from perception is to report or describe one's perceptual data, or that which one sees ‘immediately'. Further, perceptual data are existing things of some sort, and always are exactly as they appear to be since, as H. H. Price says, “in the sphere of the given … what seems, is”. However, these two claims about perceptual data are sometimes incompatible, as the following case shows. Suppose a (...) man looking at a speckled hen reports that it has many speckles but is not able to report the exact number of speckles it has. If above is correct, the man's perceptual datum, as opposed to the physical hen itself which he sees—according to Berkeleians—in a merely indirect sense, would have to be indeterminate in character. Yet we assume that everything which exists ) is and has to be completely determinate. A person's knowledge is indeterminate if he knows that the planet Mars has either two or three satellites and doesn't know which. But Mars itself at any moment has to have some definite number of satellites. (shrink)

The basic idea of the particular way of understanding mental phenomena that has inspired the "cognitive revolution" is that, as a result of certain relatively recent intellectual and technological innovations, informed theorists now possess a more powerfully insightful comparison or model for mind than was available to any thinkers in the past. The model in question is that of software, or the list of rules for input, output, and internal transformations by which we determine and control the workings of a (...) computing machine's hardware. Although this comparison and its many implications have dominated work in the philosophy, psychology, and neurobiology of mind since the end of the Second World War, it now shows increasing signs of losing its once virtually unquestioned preeminence. Thus we now face the question of whether it is possible to repair and save this model by means of relatively inessential "tinkering", or whether we must reconceive it fundamentally and replace it with something different. In this book, twenty-eight leading scholars from diverse fields of "cognitive science"-linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology, and philosophy- present their latest, carefully considered judgements about what they think will be the future course of this intellectual movement, that in many respects has been a watershed in our contemporary struggles to comprehend that which is crucially significant about human beings. Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Boden, Ulric Neisser, Rom Harre, Merlin Donald, among others, have all written chapters in a non-technical style that can be enjoyed and understood by an inter-disciplinary audience of psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists alike. (shrink)

As a new field, cognitivism began with the total rejection of the old, traditional views of language acquisition and of learning ─ individual and collective alike. Chomsky was one of the pioneers in this respect, yet he clouds issues by excessive claims for his originality and by not allowing the beginner in the art of the acquisition of language the use of learning by making hypotheses and testing them, though he acknowledges that researchers, himself included, do use this method. The (...) most important novelty of Chomsky's work is his idealization of the field by postulating the existence of the ideal speaker-hearer and his suggestion that the hidden structure of sentences is revealed by studying together all sentences that are logically equivalent to each other. This is progress, but his tests of equivalence are insufficient, as they all are within classical logic. This limitation rests on the greatest shortcoming of Chomsky's view, his idea that every sentence has one subject or subject-part, contrary to the claim of Frege and Russell that assertions involving relations (with two-place predicates) are structurally different from those involving properties (with one-place predicates). (See the Appendix below.). (shrink)

Abstract Is it plausible to claim (some) non?human animals have beliefs, on the (non?behaviourist) assumption that believing is or involves subjects? engaging in practical reasoning which takes account of meanings? Some answer Yes, on the ground that evolutionary continuities linking humans with other animals must include psychological ones. But (1) evolution does not operate?even primarily?by means of continuities. Thus species, no matter how closely related (in fact, sometimes even conspecifics) operate with very different adaptive ?tricks'; and it is plausible to (...) think these, rather than the physiological ?groundings? underlying them, are the best means of (analogies for) explaining beliefs. Also (2) it is reasonable to assimilate most cases ?down? to creatures (e.g. flies) that obviously lack beliefs rather than ?up? to others (chimpanzees) that apparently possess belief?like states (proto?beliefs), because observation shows the internal workings of such middle animals? ?beliefs? differ markedly from the corresponding things humans do. For example, ducks do not have beliefs about the numbers of objects, because although they estimate numerically, they do it in a way that is much more firmly connected to perceiving than would be the case either with counting or a counting?like process. (shrink)

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Contrary to what many philosophers believe, Calvinism neither makes the problem of evil worse nor is it obviously refuted by the presence of evil and suffering in our world. Or so most of the authors in this book claim. While Calvinism has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years amongst theologians and laypersons, many philosophers have yet to follow suit. The reason seems fairly clear: Calvinism, many think, cannot handle the problem of evil with the same kind of plausibility as other (...) more popular views of the nature of God and the nature of God's relationship with His creation. This book seeks to challenge that untested assumption. With clarity and rigor, this collection of essays seeks to fill a significant hole in the literature on the problem of evil. (shrink)

Acculturation is the process through which an individual's cultural behaviors and values change via contact with a majority or host culture. Although some individuals accomplish acculturation smoothly, most experience psychological stress during the acculturation process. When psychologists encounter individuals struggling to acculturate, they are mandated by ethical guidelines and principles to help through several steps: (a) recognize their own biases, beliefs, and attitudes that may influence their work with the acculturating individual; (b) develop competence to work with individuals whose cultural (...) beliefs and practices differ from their own; (c) counsel the acculturating individual using scientifically supported techniques; and (d) intervene without discrimination or disrespect. Two case studies are presented to illustrate how psychologists can ethically and effectively encourage mentally healthy acculturation. Keywords: acculturation, ethics, cultural differences. (shrink)

BackgroundRobust ethics consultation services cannot be sustained by all hospitals; consultative service from a high-volume center via teleconferencing is an attractive alternative. This pilot study was conceived to explore the feasibility and understand the practical implications of offering such a service.MethodsHigh-definition videoconferencing was used to provide real-time interaction between the rounding clinicians and a remote clinical ethicist. Data collection included: (1) evaluation of the hardware and software required for teleconferencing, and (2) comparison of ethics trigger counts between the remote and (...) on-site ethicist during rounds.ResultsIssues with audio represented the majority of technical problems. Once technical difficulties were addressed, the onsite ethicist’s count of “triggers” was not statistically different from the count of the remote ethicist.ConclusionRemote clinical ethics rounding is feasible when the equipment is optimized. Remote ethicists can identify similar numbers of “triggers” for possible ethical issues when compared to on-site ethicist numbers. (shrink)

The understanding of decision-making systems has come together in recent years to form a unified theory of decision-making in the mammalian brain as arising from multiple, interacting systems (a planning system, a habit system, and a situation-recognition system). This unified decision-making system has multiple potential access points through which it can be driven to make maladaptive choices, particularly choices that entail seeking of certain drugs or behaviors. We identify 10 key vulnerabilities in the system: (1) moving away from homeostasis, (2) (...) changing allostatic set points, (3) euphorigenic signals, (4) overvaluation in the planning system, (5) incorrect search of situation-action-outcome relationships, (6) misclassification of situations, (7) overvaluation in the habit system, (8) a mismatch in the balance of the two decision systems, (9) over-fast discounting processes, and (10) changed learning rates. These vulnerabilities provide a taxonomy of potential problems with decision-making systems. Although each vulnerability can drive an agent to return to the addictive choice, each vulnerability also implies a characteristic symptomology. Different drugs, different behaviors, and different individuals are likely to access different vulnerabilities. This has implications for an individual's susceptibility to addiction and the transition to addiction, for the potential for relapse, and for the potential for treatment. (shrink)

An infinite number of elastically colliding balls is considered in a classical, and then in a relativistic setting. Energy and momentum are not necessarily conserved globally, even though each collision does separately conserve them. This result holds in particular when the total mass of all the balls is finite, and even when the spatial extent and temporal duration of the process are also finite. Further, the process is shown to be indeterministic: there is an arbitrary parameter in the general solution (...) that corresponds to the injection of an arbitrary amount of energy (classically), or energy-momentum (relativistically), into the system at the point of accumulation of the locations of the balls. Specific examples are given that illustrate these counter-intuitive results, including one in which all the balls move with the same velocity after every collision has taken place. (shrink)

The prevailing “segregated model” for understanding clinical research sharply separates it from clinical care and subjects it to extensive regulations and guidelines. This approach is based on the fact that clinical research relies on procedures and methods—research biopsies, blinding, randomization, fixed treatment protocols, placebos—that pose risks and burdens to participants in order to collect data that might benefit all patients. Reliance on these methods raises the potential for exploitation and unfairness, and thus points to the need for independent ethical review (...) and more extensive informed consent. In contrast, it is widely assumed that clinical care does not raise these ethical concerns because it is designed to promote the best interests of individual patients. The segregation of clinical research from clinical care has been largely effective at protecting research participants. At the same time, this approach ignores the fact that several aspects of standard clinical care, such as clinician training and scheduling, also pose some risks and burdens to present patients for the benefit of all patients. We argue that recently proposed learning health care systems offer a way to address this concern, and better protect patients, by developing integrated review and consent procedures. Specifically, current approaches base the need for independent ethical review and more extensive informed consent on whether an activity is categorized as clinical research or clinical care. An ethically sounder approach, which could be incorporated into learning health care systems, would be to base the need for independent ethical review and more extensive informed consent on the extent to which an activity poses risks to present patients for the benefit of all patients. (shrink)

Conscious technology features in many Black Mirror episodes. For example, there are the cookies in White Christmas, the people uploaded into the San Junipero simulation, Robert Daly's digital copies of his coworkers in USS Callister, and the copy of Clayton Leigh that is exhibited in Black Museum. But would such pieces of technology really be conscious? Would they, for example, feel pain? And how could we tell? Is uploading or replicating someone's consciousness even possible? This chapter explores these questions and (...) discusses the ethical issues that are raised by consciousness technology. (shrink)

PET studies in domains like vision and attention have been successful because the experiments are the product of highly articulated theories. In contrast, the results of PET studies investigating language processing are difficult to interpret. We suggest that this difficulty is due to the more tentative connection of these experiments with the insights of psycholinguistics and linguistic theory.

An actual infinity of colliding balls can be in a configuration in which the laws of mechanics lead to logical inconsistency. It is argued that one should therefore limit the domain of these laws to a finite, or only a potentially infinite number of elements. With this restriction indeterminism, energy nonconservation and creatio ex nihilo no longer occur. A numerical analysis of finite systems of colliding balls is given, and the asymptotic behaviour that corresponds to the potentially infinite system is (...) inferred. (shrink)

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

The orphaned son of an Anglican clergyman, David Hartley (1705–57) was originally destined for holy orders. Declining to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he turned to medicine and science yet remained a religious believer. This, his most significant work, provides a rigorous analysis of human nature, blending philosophy, psychology and theology. First published in two volumes in 1749, Observations on Man is notable for being based on the doctrine of the association of ideas. It greatly influenced scientists, theologians, social (...) reformers and poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who named his eldest son after Hartley, had his portrait painted while holding a copy. In Volume 1, Hartley utilises Newtonian science in his observations, presenting his theory of 'vibrations'. Volume 2 is particularly concerned with human morality and the duty and expectations of mankind. Hartley is keen to show that scientific observation is not necessarily in conflict with religious conviction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I would like to begin by thanking the Journal of Japanese Philosophy for making space in these pages for a review of my monograph Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. Although book reviews do not usually receive a reply from the author—much less one as lengthy as the article that follows—one seemed necessary in this instance because my ideas, unfortunately, have been seriously mis-represented (...) here. Moreover, the number and kinds of misreadings, mistakes, misunderstandings, and omissions are so extensive that even a brief attempt to address the main points at issue is no small task. But the primary problem is that the reviewer contends that I say the opposite of what I actually maintain with regard to some of the central claims of the book. These mistaken assertions are primarily the consequence of a failure to understand crucial philosophical concepts (especially metaphysical nondualism, being-in-the-world, intentionality, and disclosure). But they also stem from a series of errors ranging from the exclusion of some of the fundamental ideas and arguments of the book to the misreading of pivotal claims and the mistranslation of the Japanese-language primary sources.I begin with a single but telling example that is characteristic of the way the reviewer repeatedly portrays me as saying the opposite of what I actually say. Droz states that “For Johnson, while human beings taken collectively as a whole have the capacity to transcend the fūdo, individual human beings apparently do not” (Droz, 133). But what I actually say is that Watsuji “has not shown that this same capacity belongs to the individual human being” (Johnson, 191). I then give a series of examples of individual transcendence: “the forms of transcendence that are evident in, for example, the complex identities of immigrants, of those who have lived in multiple countries, of those who live in multiple milieus at the same time [...] of those who develop a very different character from their compatriots even as they live together in the same place” (Johnson, 191). [End Page 167] I go on to point out that “we also need a subtler account, on a much smaller scale, of the ways the self is both constituted by and is also able to transcend its fūdo. In what follows we will give an indication of some of the issues involved” (Johnson, 191). I then proceed to give such an overview, concluding with the point that “the strong identification with one aspect of one’s milieu rather than another shows that the self is much more than the simple expression of its fūdo. This form of transcendence, I suggest, can be studied with profit as an instance of what Watsuji calls the individual dimension of human beings” (Johnson, 192).Misrepresentations of this sort abound. The most serious instance of this kind concerns one of the central theses of this study. At the beginning of her review, the author purports to recount two criteria that I propose “to clarify what the philosophical concept of fūdo entails” (Droz, 129). But in fact, I list four criteria under two distinct categories. First, in order to determine the scope and boundaries of a fūdo, I propose the following two criteria:1. certain regions as articulated wholes found in nature itself, which is what Watsuji attempts to articulate with his taxonomy of basic types of fūdo (Johnson, 34).2. a relational whole of disclosure, self-interpretation, and natural locale (Johnson, 34).But the reviewer takes note of (1) and passes over (2) in silence—this omission is significant and, as we will see shortly, it leads her into later difficulties. Droz instead moves directly to a second topic, namely, what I intend by the term nature, which is a concept found in both of these criteria. Here I follow Mill in thinking that we need some way to distinguish between nature and nonnature if nature is not simply to be equated with everything. I therefore propose two criteria that we might use to distinguish nature from artifice within a fūdo: A. nature as all-encompassing space and place B. the sheerly given self-unfolding of things . (shrink)

[Open access] In this book symposium the author takes up questions from phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethical theory, and intellectual history raised by a group of scholarly interlocutors from a range of backgrounds. In the course of engaging with these issues, he discusses, inter alia, McDowell’s realism, Jonathon Lear’s work on the end of a world, Michael Oakeshott’s view of selfhood, Heidegger’s conception of Jemeinigkeit, Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of truth.

Understanding the mechanisms of early embryonic patterning and the timely allocation of specific cells to embryonic regions and fates as well as their development into tissues and organs, is a fundamental problem in Developmental Biology. The classical explanation for this process had been built around the notion of positional information. Accordingly the programmed appearance of sources of Morphogens at localized positions within a field of cells directs their differentiation. Recently, the development of organs and tissues from unpatterned and initially identical (...) stem cells (adult and embryonic) has challenged the need for positional information and even the integrity of the embryo, for pattern formation. Here we review the emerging area of organoid biology from the perspective of Developmental Biology. We argue that the events underlying the development of these systems are not purely linked to “self‐organization,” as often suggested, but rather to a process of genetically encoded self‐assembly where genetic programs encode and control the emergence of biological structures. (shrink)

Although research has found that long-term mindfulness meditation practice promotes executive functioning and the ability to sustain attention, the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training have not been fully explored. We examined whether brief meditation training affects cognition and mood when compared to an active control group. After four sessions of either meditation training or listening to a recorded book, participants with no prior meditation experience were assessed with measures of mood, verbal fluency, visual coding, and working memory. Both interventions (...) were effective at improving mood but only brief meditation training reduced fatigue, anxiety, and increased mindfulness. Moreover, brief mindfulness training significantly improved visuo-spatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning. Our findings suggest that 4 days of meditation training can enhance the ability to sustain attention; benefits that have previously been reported with long-term meditators. (shrink)

The focus on translational research in clinical trials has the potential to generate clinically relevant genetic data that could have importance to patients. This raises challenging questions about communicating relevant genetic research results to individual patients. An exploratory pharmacogenetic analysis was conducted in the international ovarian cancer phase III trial, AGO-OVAR 16, which found that patients with clinically important germ-line BRCA1/2 mutations had improved progression-free survival prognosis. Mechanisms to communicate BRCA results were evaluated, because these findings may be beneficial to (...) patients and their families. Communicating individual BRCA results was not anticipated during clinical trial design. Consequently, options were not available for patients to indicate their preference for receiving their individual results when they signed pharmacogenetic informed consent. Differences in local requirements, clinical practice, and opinion regarding the ethical aspects of how to convey genetic results to patients are all potential barriers to returning individual BRCA results to patients. Communicating the aggregate BRCA result from this study provided clinical investigators with a mechanism to disseminate the overall study finding to patients while taking individual circumstances, local guidelines and clinical practice into account. This study illustrates the importance of increasing the clarity and scope of informed consent and the need for patient engagement to ensure clinical trial participants can indicate their preference regarding receipt of potentially important individual pharmacogenetic results. This study was registered in the NCT Clinical Trial Registry under NCT00866697 on March 19, 2009, following approval from participating ethics committees. (shrink)

There is little to indicate from, her circumstances that events would propel Helga Wanglie, an 86-year-old Minneapolis woman, into the center of public controversy. We know little of her life prior to the events that removed her from the world of conscious, sentient beings. By the time of her death on 4 July 1991, Mrs. Wanglie had become the focus of a nationwide public and professional debate on the rights of a patient in a persistent vegetative state to receive aggressive (...) medical treatment when such treatment is felt by the patient's doctors not to be in the patient's best interests. (shrink)

Xenophon's Socratic Works demonstrates that Xenophon, a student of Socrates, military man, and man of letters, is an indispensable source for our understanding of the life and philosophy of Socrates. David M. Johnson restores Xenophon's most ambitious Socratic work, the Memorabilia, to its original literary context, enabling readers to experience it as Xenophon's original audience would have, rather than as a pale imitation of Platonic dialogue. He shows that the Memorabilia, together with Xenophon's Apology, provides us with our (...) best evidence for the trial of Socrates, and a comprehensive and convincing refutation of the historical charges against Socrates. Johnson's account of Socrates' moral psychology shows how Xenophon's emphasis on control of the passions can be reconciled with the intellectualism normally attributed to Socrates. Chapters on Xenophon's Symposium and Oeconomicus reveal how Xenophon used all the literary tools of Socratic dialogue to defend Socratic sexual morality and debate the merits and limits of conventional elite values. Throughout the book, Johnson argues that Xenophon's portrait of Socrates is rich and coherent, and largely compatible with the better-known portrait of Socrates in Plato. Xenophon aimed not to provide a rival portrait of Socrates, Johnson shows, but to supplement and clarify what others had said about Socrates. Xenophon's Socratic Works thus provides readers with a far firmer basis for reconstruction of the trial of Socrates, a key moment in the history of Athenian democracy, and for our understanding of Socrates' seminal impact on Greek philosophy. This volume introduces Xenophon's Socratic works to a wide range of readers, from undergraduate students encountering Socrates or ancient philosophy for the first time to scholars with interests in Socrates or ancient philosophy more broadly. It is also an important resource for readers interested in Socratic dialogue as a literary form, the trial of Socrates, Greek sexual morality, or Greek social history. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel efficient algorithm is presented for locating and tracking object parts in low resolution videos using Lowe's SIFT keypoints with a nearest neighbor object detection approach. Our interest lies in using this information as one step in the process of automatically programming service, household, or personal robots to perform the skills that are being taught in easily obtainable instructional videos. In the reported experiments, the system looked for 14 parts of inanimate and animate objects in 40 (...) natural outdoor scenes. The scenes were frames from a low-resolution instructional video on cleaning golf clubs containing 2,405 frames of 180 by 240 pixels. The system was trained using 39 frames that were half-way between the test frames. Despite the low resolution quality of the instructional video and occluded training samples, the system achieved a recall of 49% with a precision of 71% and an F1 of 0.58, which is better than that achieved by less demanding applications. In order to verify that the reported results were not dependent on the specific video, the proposed technique was applied to another video and the results are reported. (shrink)