Fechner's conception of psychophysics included both “outer psychophysics” the relation between stimulus intensity and the response reflecting sensation strength, and “inner psychophysics” the relation between neurelectric responses and sensation strength. In his own time outer psychophysics focussed on the form of the psychophysical law, with Fechner espousing a logarithmic law, Delboeuf a variant of the logarithmic law incorporating a resting level of neural activity, and Plateau a power law. One of the issues on which the dispute was focussed concerned the (...) appearance of contrasts if the overall illumination was increased or decreased; another issue was the question of whether a sensation of a “just noticeable difference” established for one value of a sensory dimension appeared the same for a value elsewhere on the dimension. The development of “inner psychophysics” led through the works of Delboeuf, Solomons, Jastrow, and Thurstone to modern signal detection theory. A third line of research, devoted to the question of what was meant by the “measurement” of sensation strength, stemmed from the criticism of Fechner's work by von Kries (1882) and others. Although a valid body of science could be built up without the intervening variable called “sensation strength,” such a science might be a cumbersome representation of reality. When an optical contrast is set up, and its overall illumination is increased or decreased, subjective contrasts involving medium levels of lightness vary little as illumination varies (as a power law based on sensation ratios or a logarithmic law based on sensation differences predict), but subjective contrasts involving extreme levels of lightness might be subject to the effects of other variables. (shrink)

Using a particular formula for quantifying the effortlessness that Perruchet & Vinter suggest accompanies the detection of repetition among a set of representations concurrently in consciousness, it is shown that both the Sternberg function and the Cavanagh function, associated with immediate probed recognition tasks and memory span tasks, can be predicted.

Grodzinsky has argued that the traces deleted in Broca's aphasia are “phonetically silent but syntactically active” (sect. 2.). If we assume such traces to be visuospatial in nature, and adopt the term “overwriting” from the author's partial matching theory (1998), we can account for the errors made by Broca's aphasics in comprehending Grodzinsky's Examples (5a), (5b), and (6).

What are the ethical concerns among the growing populations of business people in Central & Eastern Europe, and how might they be dealt with practically in the course of business life? David Murray has been a management consultant since 1979 working primarily with the Hay Group in the area of strategic organisational change. Since founding Maine Consulting Services in 1991 he spends most of his time in the field of business and professional ethics, also holding a Visiting Fellowship (...) at the University of Central Lancashire. He is chairman of the Professional & Technical Board at the (British) Institute of Quality Assurance and a coordinating editor of the quarterly Organisations & People. Marek Kucia is a social researcher operating his own research agency (which organised the Polish part of this exercise) and an academic teaching sociology, and conducting and co‐ordinating Central European Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. He studied political science, sociology and philosophy at Krakow and studied for his PhD at Oxford. He has also worked for Gallup, London, in opinion and market research. This survey report is based on presentations made in April 1994 to the EBEN Research Centres Conference in Prague, and in June 1994 to the conference on “Ethics in Transition” organised in Gödöllö, Hungary, by the Democracy after Communism Foundation, Budapest. The authors wish to acknowledge the major contribution to this work of Mr Juraj Kusnierik of the Central European Foundation, SEN, Bratislava, who co‐ordinated the survey exercise. The project was sponsored by The Ethics Development Initiative, CARE, London; the Central European Foundation, SEN, Bratislava, Slovakia; SIS Ltd., Bratislava, Slovakia; and Maine Consulting Services, 16 Acrefield, Blackburn, Lancashire, England BB2 7BJ, to which all correspondence connected with this report should be addressed. (shrink)

What are the ethical concerns among the growing populations of business people in Central & Eastern Europe, and how might they be dealt with practically in the course of business life? David Murray has been a management consultant since 1979 working primarily with the Hay Group in the area of strategic organisational change. Since founding Maine Consulting Services in 1991 he spends most of his time in the field of business and professional ethics, also holding a Visiting Fellowship (...) at the University of Central Lancashire. He is chairman of the Professional & Technical Board at the (British) Institute of Quality Assurance and a coordinating editor of the quarterly Organisations & People. Marek Kucia is a social researcher operating his own research agency (which organised the Polish part of this exercise) and an academic teaching sociology, and conducting and co‐ordinating Central European Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. He studied political science, sociology and philosophy at Krakow and studied for his PhD at Oxford. He has also worked for Gallup, London, in opinion and market research. This survey report is based on presentations made in April 1994 to the EBEN Research Centres Conference in Prague, and in June 1994 to the conference on “Ethics in Transition” organised in Gödöllö, Hungary, by the Democracy after Communism Foundation, Budapest. The authors wish to acknowledge the major contribution to this work of Mr Juraj Kusnierik of the Central European Foundation, SEN, Bratislava, who co‐ordinated the survey exercise. The project was sponsored by The Ethics Development Initiative, CARE, London; the Central European Foundation, SEN, Bratislava, Slovakia; SIS Ltd., Bratislava, Slovakia; and Maine Consulting Services, 16 Acrefield, Blackburn, Lancashire, England BB2 7BJ, to which all correspondence connected with this report should be addressed. (shrink)

According to a “presence/absence hypothesis,” the hippocampus is not necessary for the formation of learned associations between currently present stimuli and responses (as in classical conditioning), but is necessary whenever a stimulus, if it is to activate a particular response, must first activate a memory-representation of something not present in the here-and-now. The distinction between responses made to present stimuli as opposed to (memories of) absent stimuli was first stressed by Romanes (1889), but we find evidence in the target article (...) that supports the relevance of this distinction to our understanding of hippocampal functioning. (shrink)

Partial matching theory, which maintains that some memory representations of target items in immediate memory are overwritten by others, can predict both a “theoretical” and an “actual” maximum memory span provided no chunking takes place during presentation. The latter is around 4 ± 2 items, the exact number being determined by the degree of similarity between the memory representations of two immediately successive target items.

Indirect speech acts—responding “I forgot to wear my watch today” to someone who asked for the time—are ubiquitous in daily conversation, but are understudied in current neurobiological models of language. To comprehend an indirect speech act like this one, listeners must not only decode the lexical-semantic content of the utterance, but also make a pragmatic, bridging inference. This inference allows listeners to derive the speaker’s true, intended meaning—in the above dialog, for example, that the speaker cannot provide the time. In (...) the present work, we address this major gap by asking non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and brain-damaged controls with amnestic mild cognitive impairment to judge simple question-answer dialogs of the form: “Do you want some cake for dessert?” “I’m on a very strict diet right now,” and relate the results to structural and diffusion MRI. Accuracy and reaction time results demonstrate that subjects with bvFTD, but not MCI, are selectively impaired in indirect relative to direct speech act comprehension, due in part to their social and executive limitations, and performance is related to caregivers’ judgment of communication efficacy. MRI imaging associates the observed impairment in bvFTD to cortical thinning not only in traditional language-associated regions, but also in fronto-parietal regions implicated in social and executive cerebral networks. Finally, diffusion tensor imaging analyses implicate white matter tracts in both dorsal and ventral projection streams, including superior longitudinal fasciculus, frontal aslant, and uncinate fasciculus. These results have strong implications for updated neurobiological models of language, and emphasize a core, language-mediated social disorder in patients with bvFTD. (shrink)

This paper explores how the Bayesian program benefits from allowing for objective chance as well as subjective degree of belief. It applies David Lewis’s Principal Principle and David Christensen’s principle of informed preference to defend Howard Raiffa’s appeal to preferences between reference lotteries and scaling lotteries to represent degrees of belief. It goes on to outline the role of objective lotteries in an application of rationality axioms equivalent to the existence of a utility assignment to represent preferences in (...) Savage’s famous omelet example of a rational choice problem. An example motivating causal decision theory illustrates the need for representing subjunctive dependencies to do justice to intuitive examples where epistemic and causal independence come apart. We argue to extend Lewis’s account of chance as a guide to epistemic probability to include De Finetti’s convergence results. We explore Diachronic Dutch book arguments as illustrating commitments for treating transitions as learning experiences. Finally, we explore implications for Martingale convergence results for motivating commitment to objective chances. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Contents:Acknowledgements Foreword (Lt. Ervin J. Rokke)Preface (Davis S. Alberts and Thomas Czerwinski)SETTING THE SCENEThe Simple and the Complex (Murray Gell-Mann)America in the World Today (Zbigniew Brzezinski)COMPLEXITY THEORY and NATIONAL SECURITY POLICYComplex Systems: The Role of Interactions (Robert Jervis)Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs (James N. Rosenau)Complexity, Chaos, and National Security Policy: Metaphors or Tools? (Alvin M. Saperstein)The Reaction to Chaos (Steven R. Mann)COMPLEXITY THEORY, STRATEGY, and OPERATIONSClausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Importance of Imagery (Alan D. Beyerchen)Complexity and (...) Organization Management (Robert R. Maxfield)Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory (John F. Schmitt)Complexity Theory and Air Power (Steven M. Rinaldi)Chaos Theory and U. S. Military Strategy: A "Leapfrog" Strategy for U.S. Defense Policy (Michael J. Mazarr)Contributors EditorsBibliography. (shrink)

Over the last decade a handful of cognitive models of religious belief have begun to coalesce in the literature. Attempts to offer “scientific explanations of religious belief ” are nothing new, stretching back at least as far as David Hume, and perhaps as far back as Cicero. What is also not new is a belief that scientific explanations of religious belief serve in some way to undermine the justification for those beliefs.

The view from inside : gendered embodiment and the medical representation of sex / Shelley Wall -- The politics of medico-legal recognition : the terms of gendered subjectivity in the UK Gender Recognition Act / Sarah Burgess -- Journeys of choice? : abortion, travel, and women's autonomy / Christabelle Sethna and Marion Doull -- The code of ethics in medicine : intertextuality and meaning in Plato's Sophist and Hippocrates' oath / Twyla Gibson -- Sleeping ethics : gene, episteme, and the (...) body politic / Deborah Lynn Steinberg -- The last temptation of Marion Woodman : the anorexic remainder in bone : dying into life / David L. Clark. (shrink)

This volume provides a balanced set of reviews which introduce the central topics in the philosophy of time. This is the first introductory anthology on the subject to appear for many years; the contributors are distinguished, and two of the essays are specially written for this collection. In their introduction, the editors summarize the background to the debate, and show the relevance of issues in the philosophy of time for other branches of philosophy and for science. Contributors include J.M.E. McTaggart, (...) Arthur N. Prior, D.H. Mellor, Sydney Shoemaker, Graeme Forbes, Lawrence Sklar, Michael Dummett, David Lewis, W.H. Newton-Smith, and Anthony Quinton. (shrink)

[This is an edited version of a keynote talk at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on November 28, 2022, with some minor additions and subtractions.] -/- There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their (...) lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future. (shrink)

*[[This paper appears in _Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates_ (S. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak, and A.Scott, eds), published with MIT Press in 1998. It is a transcript of my talk at the second Tucson conference in April 1996, lightly edited to include the contents of overheads and to exclude some diversions with a consciousness meter. A more in-depth argument for some of the claims in this paper can be found in Chapter 6 of my (...) book _The Conscious Mind_ (Chalmers, 1996). ]]. (shrink)

Confronted with the apparent explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness, there are many possible reactions. Some deny that any explanatory gap exists at all. Some hold that there is an explanatory gap for now, but that it will eventually be closed. Some hold that the explanatory gap corresponds to an ontological gap in nature.

The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend (...) a form of strong artificial intelligence and to analyze some problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates (...) the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries. (shrink)

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates (...) the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries. (shrink)

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates (...) the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries. (shrink)

[[This was written as a commentary on Ned Block 's paper "On A Confusion about a Function of Consciousness" . It appeared in _Behavioral_ _and Brain Sciences_ 20:148-9, 1997, and also in the collection _The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates_ edited by Block, Flanagan, and Guzeldere. ]].

Charles Murray describes himself as a libertarian, most notably in his short book, What it Means to be a Libertarian. He might more accurately have described himself as having libertarian tendencies. My reading of Simple Justice is that the views it espouses are far more traditionalist than libertarian. Neither traditionalist state-retribution nor modernist state-leniency is libertarian. Nor does either provide as just or efficient a response to crime as does libertarian restitution, including restitutive retribution. Here, I shall respond directly (...) only to Murray's views, rather than also deal with state-leniency. This is because I accept Murray's thesis, without endorsing his specific arguments for it, that state-leniency is disastrous as a response to crimes against persons and their justly acquired property. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy of using a priori methods to draw conclusions about what is possible and what is necessary, and often in turn to draw conclusions about matters of substantive metaphysics. Arguments like this typically have three steps: first an epistemic claim , from there to a modal claim , and from there to a metaphysical claim.

Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by experiments with (...) quantum computers. The upshot is not that consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there is a research program here worth exploring. (shrink)