Is human cognition best described by optimal models, or by adaptive but suboptimal heuristic strategies? It is frequently hard to identify which theoretical model is normatively best justified. In the context of information search, naoptimal” models.

Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is often modeled by assuming that people's goal is to reduce uncertainty about possible states of the world. In cognitive science, psychology, and medical decision making, Shannon entropy is the most prominent and most widely used model to formalize probabilistic uncertainty and the (...) reduction thereof. However, a variety of alternative entropy metrics (Hartley, Quadratic, Tsallis, Rényi, and more) are popular in the social and the natural sciences, computer science, and philosophy of science. Particular entropy measures have been predominant in particular research areas, and it is often an open issue whether these divergences emerge from different theoretical and practical goals or are merely due to historical accident. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, we show that several entropy and entropy reduction measures arise as special cases in a unified formalism, the Sharma–Mittal framework. Using mathematical results, computer simulations, and analyses of published behavioral data, we discuss four key questions: How do various entropy models relate to each other? What insights can be obtained by considering diverse entropy models within a unified framework? What is the psychological plausibility of different entropy models? What new questions and insights for research on human information acquisition follow? Our work provides several new pathways for theoretical and empirical research, reconciling apparently conflicting approaches and empirical findings within a comprehensive and unified information-theoretic formalism. (shrink)

Phyllis Illari and Jon Williamson propose a formulation for a general mechanistic account, the purpose of which is to capture the similarities across mechanistic accounts in the sciences. Illari and Williamson extract insight from mechanisms in astrophysics—which are notably different from the typical biological mechanisms discussed in the literature on mechanisms—to show how their general mechanistic account accommodates mechanisms across various sciences. We present argumentation that demonstrates why an amendment is necessary to the ontology referred to by the general mechanistic (...) account provided by Illari and Williamson. The amendment is required due to the variability of some components in computing mechanisms: the very same component serves as either entity or activity, both between levels and within the same level of the explanatory hierarchy. We argue that the proper ontological account of these mechanistic components involves disambiguation via explicitly indexing them as entities or activities. (shrink)

The probabilistic analysis of functional questions is maturing into a rigorous and coherent research paradigm that may unify the cognitive sciences, from the study of single neurons in the brain to the study of high level cognitive processes and distributed cognition. Endless debates about undecidable structural issues (modularity vs. interactivity, serial vs. parallel processing, iconic vs. propositional representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models) may be put aside in favor of a rigorous understanding of the problems solved by organisms in their natural (...) environments. [Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths]. (shrink)

Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept of universal human rights. This collection of essays explores the foundations of universal human rights in four sections devoted to their nature, application, enforcement, and limits, concluding that shared rights help to constitute a universal human community, which supports local customs and separate state sovereignty. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives how human rights can help to bring moral order to an (...) otherwise divided world. (shrink)

Humans excel in categorization. Yet from a computational standpoint, learning a novel probabilistic classification task involves severe computational challenges. The present paper investigates one way to address these challenges: assuming class-conditional independence of features. This feature independence assumption simplifies the inference problem, allows for informed inferences about novel feature combinations, and performs robustly across different statistical environments. We designed a new Bayesian classification learning model that incorporates varying degrees of prior belief in class-conditional independence, learns whether or not independence holds, (...) and adapts its behavior accordingly. Theoretical results from two simulation studies demonstrate that classification behavior can appear to start simple, yet adapt effectively to unexpected task structures. Two experiments—designed using optimal experimental design principles—were conducted with human learners. Classification decisions of the majority of participants were best accounted for by a version of the model with very high initial prior belief in class-conditional independence, before adapting to the true environmental structure. Class-conditional independence may be a strong and useful default assumption in category learning tasks. (shrink)

Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger, Progress in bioethics: Science, policy, and politics, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010, reviewed by James Lindemann Nelson.

In this paper we present a category equivalent to that of tense Nelson algebras. The objects in this new category are pairs consisting of an IKt-algebra and a Boolean IKt-congruence and the morphisms are a special kind of IKt-homomorphisms. This categorical equivalence permits understanding tense Nelson algebras in terms of the better–known IKt-algebras.

In this paper, we continue with the study of tense operators on Nelson algebras (Figallo et al. in Studia Logica 109(2):285–312, 2021, Studia Logica 110(1):241–263, 2022). We define the variety of algebras, which we call tense Nelson D-algebras, as a natural extension of tense De Morgan algebras (Figallo and Pelaitay in Logic J IGPL 22(2):255–267, 2014). In particular, we give a discrete duality for these algebras. To do this, we will extend the representation theorems for Nelson algebras (...) given in Sendlewski (Studia Logica 43(3):257–280, 1984) to the tense case. (shrink)

Second century documents such as the Epistle to Diognetus can give us an insight into the creation of identity when Christianity was just starting to flourish. This study uses definitions of identity from the perspective of several scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith and Denise Kimber Buell, as well as others. The aim of this work is to understand how identity was imagined in one important early Christian document.

Renowned moral philosopher Jonathan Glover confronts the brutal history of the twentieth century to unravel the mystery of why so many atrocities occurred. In a new preface, Glover brings the book through the post-September 11 era and into our own time—and asks whether humankind can "weaken the grip war has on us." _Praise for the first edition:_ “It is hard to imagine a more important book. Glover makes an overwhelming case for the need to understand our own inhumanity, and (...) reduce or eliminate the ways in which it can express itself—and he then begins the task himself. _Humanity _is_ _an extraordinary achievement.”—Peter Singer, Princeton University “This is an extraordinary book: brilliant, haunting and uniquely important. Almost 40 years ago a president read a best seller and avoided a holocaust. I like to think that some of the leaders and followers of tomorrow will read _Humanity._”_—_Steven Pinker, _New York Times Book Review_. (shrink)

Essays discuss cognition, perception, art, science, truth, metaphor, education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.

Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes (...) available. So far, proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not resolved the problem. Waskan proposes the Intrinsic Cognitive Models hypothesis, according to which representational states can be concpetualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models.Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: the capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations. The ICM hypothesis, he claims, can be distinguished from sentence-based accounts of truth preservation in a way that is fully compatible with what is known about the brain. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century theologian_Jonathan Edwards remains a significant influence on modern religion, and this book constitutes his most important contribution to Christian thought. Edwards_raises timeless questions about desire, choice, good, and evil, contrasting the opposing Calvinist and Arminian views of free will and addressing issues related to God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency.

Jonathan Kvanvig presents a compelling new work in philosophical theology on the universe, creation, and the afterlife. Organised thematically by the endpoints of time, the volume begins by addressing eschatological matters and the doctrines of heaven and hell and ends with an account of divine deliberation and creation. Kvanvig develops a coherent theistic outlook which reconciles a traditional, high conception of deity, with full providential control over all aspects of creation, with a conception of human beings who are free (...) and morally responsible. The resulting position and defense is labeled "Philosophical Arminianism," and deserves attention in a broad range of religious traditions. (shrink)

The last two decades have witnessed a crescendo of allegations that clinical translation is rife with waste and inefficiency. Patient advocates argue that excessively demanding regulations delay access to life‐saving drugs, research funders claim that too much basic science languishes in academic laboratories, journal editors allege that biased reporting squanders public investment in biomedical research, and drug companies (and their critics) argue that far too much is expended in pharmaceutical development.But how should stakeholders evaluate the efficiency of translation and proposed (...) reforms to drug development? Effective reforms require an accurate model of the systems they aspire to improve—their components, their proper functions, and their pathologies. However, there is currently no explicit and well‐developed model of translation for evaluating such criticisms.In what follows, we offer an explicit model of clinical translation. Many discussions of clinical translation and its pathologies presume that its main output is tangible: new drugs, vaccines, devices, and diagnostics. We disagree. We argue that the principal output of clinical translation is information—in particular, information about the coordinated set of materials, practices, and constraints needed to safely unlock the therapeutic or preventive activities of drugs, biologics, and diagnostics. To develop this information calls for a process far different from a simple linear progression of clinical trials; it requires exploratory sampling of many different elements in this set. Our model points to some limitations and liabilities of influential proposals for reforming research. It also reveals some underrecognized opportunities for improving the efficiency of clinical translation. (shrink)

From Odysseus' seduction by the song of the Sirens to Oscar Moore's 1991 novel A Matter of Life and Sex , whose protagonist courts death through sex and dies of AIDS, the frustrated relationship between death and desire has fixated the Western imagination. Philosophers have grappled with it and poets have told of its beauty and pain. In this strikingly original work, cultural critic Jonathan Dollimore once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to take on the complex and reveal its (...) relevance with eloquence and grace. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual. An immensely important book, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a challenge to the way we understand desire, sexuality, and the very notion of identity. (shrink)

How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with (...) what we want to happen in the actual world? In Apt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to those that govern our affective attitudes toward analogous things in the real world. In short, it can be right to embrace within a story what one would condemn in real life. The theory Gilmore defends in this volume helps to explain our complex and sometimes conflicted attitudes toward works of the imagination; challenges the popular view that fictions serve to refine our moral sensibilities; and exposes a kind of autonomy of the imagination that can render our responses to art immune to standard real-world epistemic, practical, and affective kinds of criticism. (shrink)

Experimental manipulations are a key means to establish causal relationships in microbiology. However, challenges remain to establish the applicability of such experiments beyond the precise conditions in which they were conducted. Ecological information can help address these challenges by describing the extent to which an experimentally-determined mechanism can explain the natural phenomenon that it is purported to cause.

Metaphysical semantics is supposed to connect the nonfundamental to the fundamental in a distinctively “linguistic” way, explaining how nonfundamental truths can be grounded in fundamental facts , and so inducing a radically eliminative vision of the nonfundamental as mere talk. I wonder how the story goes when a single nonfundamental truth can be grounded in many different fundamental facts. For instance, the truth that Moore has hands can presumably be grounded in many different distributions of fields, arrangements of particles, vibrations (...) of strings, or whatnot. I am asking how metaphysical semantics can accommodate this sort of multiple realizability. (shrink)

Jonathan Lear; XII*—Aristotelian Infinity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pages 187–210, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

Wainwright and Reingold presented equations for various versions of the process dissociation procedure that has been used to separate conscious and unconscious memory processes. In the present reply it is suggested that these equations, though helpful, may not capture some of the key theoretical possibilities that could help to resolve apparent contradictions and paradoxes in the empirical literature. Specifically, there could be an independence ofprocessesthat might be estimated to a sufficient degree of accuracy for some theoretical purposes despite a violation (...) of the assumption ofstochasticindependence. (shrink)