We introduce a reducibility preordering between classes of countable structures, each class containing only structures of a given similarity type (which is allowed to vary from class to class). Though we sometimes work in a slightly larger context, we are principally concerned with the case where each class is an invariant Borel class (i.e. the class of all models, with underlying set $= \omega$, of an $L_{\omega_1\omega}$ sentence; from this point of view, the reducibility can be thought of as a (...) (rather weak) sort of $L_{\omega_1\omega}$-interpretability notion). We prove a number of general results about this notion, but our main thrust is to situate various mathematically natural classes with respect to the preordering, most notably classes of algebraic structures such as groups and fields. (shrink)
Robert Aumann presents his Agreement Theorem as the key conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some prior μ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates (...) on the prior by conditionalization; (3) that agents commonly know that if an agent knows a proposition, she knows that she knows that proposition (the “K K” principle); (4) that agents commonly know that they each update only on true propositions. It is shown that natural weakenings of any one of these strong assumptions can lead to countermodels to Aumann’s key conditional. Examples are given in which agents who have a common prior and commonly know what probability they each assign to a proposition nevertheless assign that proposition unequal probabilities. To alter Aumann’s famous slogan: people can “agree to disagree”, even if they share a common prior. The epistemological significance of these examples is presented in terms of their role in a defense of the Uniqueness Thesis: If an agent whose total evidence is E is fully rational in taking doxastic attitude D to P, then necessarily, any subject with total evidence E who takes a different attitude to P is less than fully rational. (shrink)
In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled (...) experiments (aside from the ligature experiment in De Motu Cordis), tends to dismiss the value of instruments such as the microscope, and emphasizes instead the privileged status of ‘observed experience’. To use a contemporary term, Harvey appears to rely on, and chiefly value, ‘tacit knowledge’. Secondly, Locke’s project is often explained with reference to the image he uses in the Epistle to the Reader of his Essay, that he was an “underlabourer” of the sciences. In fact, despite the significant medical phase of his career, Locke’s ‘empiricism’ turns out to be above all a practical (i.e. ‘moral’) project, which focuses on the delimitation of our powers in order to achieve happiness, and rejects the possibility of naturalizing knowledge. When combined, these two cases suggest a different view of some canonical moments in early modern natural philosophy. (shrink)
Student authentication and authorship checking systems are intended to help teachers address cheating and plagiarism. This study set out to investigate higher education teachers’ perceptions of the prevalence and types of cheating in their courses with a focus on the possible changes that might come about as a result of an increased use of e-assessment, ways of addressing cheating, and how the use of student authentication and authorship checking systems might impact on assessment practice. This study was carried out within (...) the context of the project TeSLA which is developing a system intended for integration within an institution’s Virtual Learning Environment offering a variety of instruments to assure student authentication and authorship checking. Data was collected at two universities that were trialling the TeSLA system, one in Turkey, where the main modes of teaching are face-to-face teaching and distance education, and one in Bulgaria, where the main modes of teaching are face-to-face teaching and blended learning. The study used questionnaires and interviews, building on existing TeSLA project evaluation activities and extending these to explore the specific areas we wished to examine in more depth.In three of the four contexts cheating was seen by teachers as a serious and growing problem, the exception was the distance education context where the teachers believed that the existing procedures were effective in controlling cheating. Most teachers in all four contexts expected cheating to become a greater problem with increased use of e-assessment. Student authentication was not seen as a major problem in any of the contexts, as this was felt to be well controlled through face-to-face proctored assessments, though the problem of assuring effective authentication was seen by many teachers as a barrier to increased use of e-assessment. Authorship checking was seen as a major issue in all contexts, as copying and pasting from the web, ghost writing and plagiarism were all reported as widely prevalent, and authorship checking was seen as becoming even more important with increased use of e-assessment. Teachers identified a third category of cheating behaviours, which was the accessing of information from other students, from written materials, and from the internet during assessments.Teachers identified a number of approaches to addressing the problem of cheating: education, technology, assessment design, sanctions, policy, and surveillance. Whilst technology was not seen as the most important approach to prevention, student authentication and authorship checking systems were seen as relevant in terms of reducing reliance on face-to-face proctored examinations, and in improving the quality of assessment through supporting the employment of a wider range of assessment methods. The development of authorship checking based on computational linguistic approaches was an area of particular interest. Student authentication and authorship checking systems were not seen as being able to address the third category of cheating behaviours that the study identified. (shrink)
The complex global business environment has created a host of problems for managers, none of which is more difficult to address than bullying in the workplace. The rapid rate of change and the everincreasing complexity of organizational environments of business throughout the world have increased the opportunity for bullying to occur more frequently. This article addresses the foundations of bullying by examining the nature' (i.e., bullying behavior influenced by the innate genetic make-up of an individual) and the nurture' (i.e., individuals (...) learn to be bullies and environments allow the behavior to perpetuate) arguments for the occurrence of bullying behavior. In addition, guidelines are presented for managers in global organizations to use in assessing and monitoring bullying activities in global organizations. (shrink)
The two books discussed here make important contributions to our understanding of the role of spacetime concepts in physical theories and how that understanding has changed during the evolution of physics. Both emphasize what can be called a ‘dynamical’ account, according to which geometric structures should be understood in terms of their roles in the laws governing matter and force. I explore how the books contribute to such a project; while generally sympathetic, I offer criticisms of some historical claims concerning (...) Newton, and argue that the dynamical account does not undercut ontological issues as the books claim. *Received January 2009; revised March 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 1423 University Hall MC 267, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607; e‐mail: huggett@uic.edu. (shrink)
Remaining important tasks in finding and developing new drugs and vaccines for HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer and other diseases require continued industry research and development. Industry’s research and development pipeline has produced drugs that have saved AIDS victims previously facing certain death, but still no cure nor vaccine is yet available. Experience with the process of research and development indicates that it requires more than a decade of development to produce a new drug with costs in the hundreds of millions of (...) dollars. Intellectual property protection is critically important in assuring that drug development continues. Partnerships between industry and the public sector have increased access to new therapies in developing countries and promise to enhance access to both patented and generic medicines in the future. (shrink)
Context: Distributed language and interactivity are central members of a set of concepts that are rapidly developing into rigorous, exciting additions to 4E cognitive science. Because they share certain assumptions and methodological commitments with enactivism, the two have sometimes been confused; additionally, while enactivism is a well-developed paradigm, interactivity has relied more on methodological development and on a set of focal examples. Problem: The goal of this article is to clarify the core conceptual commitments of both interactivity-based and enactive approaches (...) to cognitive science by contrasting the two and highlighting their differences in assumptions, focus, and explanatory strategies. Method: We begin with the shared commitments of interactivity and enactivism - e.g., antirepresentationalism, naturalism, interdisciplinarity, the importance of biology, etc. We then give an overview of several important varieties of enactivism, including sensorimotor and anti-representationalist enactivism, and then walk through the history of the “core” varieties, taking care to contrast Maturana’s approach with that of Varela and the current researchers following in Varela’s footsteps. We then describe the differences between this latter group and interactivity-based approaches to cognitive science. Results: We argue that enactivism’s core concepts are explanatorily inadequate in two ways. First, they mis-portray the organization of many living systems, which are not operationally closed. Second, they fail to realize that most epistemic activity depends on engagement with non-local resources. Both problems can be dealt with by adopting an interactivity-based perspective, in which agency and cognition are fundamentally distributed and involve integration of non-local resources into the local coupling of organism and environment. Implications: The article’s primary goal is theoretical clarification and exposition; its primary implication is that enactive concepts need to be modified or extended in some way in order to explain fully many aspects of cognition and directed biological activity. Or, read another way, the article’s primary implication is that interactivity already provides a rich set of concepts for doing just that, which, while closely allied with enactivism in several ways, are not enactivist concepts. Constructivist content: The article consists entirely of a comparison between two constructivist fields of theory. Key Words: Interactivity, enactivism, distributed language, radical embodied cognitive science, ecological psychology, autonomy. (shrink)
1. Transfer principles from N to On. A. Mahlo cardinals. B. Weakly compact cardinals. C. Ineffable cardinals. D. Ramsey cardinals. E. Ineffably Ramsey cardinals. F. Subtle cardinals. G. From N to (...) 4. Decidability of statements on N. 5. Decidability of statements on shrink)
This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.
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.
This article applies formal modeling to study a terrorist group''s choice of whether to attack or not, and, in the case of an attack, which of two potential targets to strike. Each potential target individually takes protective measures that influence the terrorists'' perceived success and failure, and, hence, the likelihood of attack. For domestic terrorism, a tendency for potential targets to overdeter is indicated. For transnational terrorism, cases of overdeterrence and underdeterrence are identified. We demonstrate that increased information about terrorists'' (...) preferences, acquired by the targets, may exacerbate inefficiency when deterrence efforts are not coordinated. In some cases, perfect information may eliminate the existence of a noncooperative solution. (shrink)
The aim of this paper is to illustrate four properties of the non-relativistic limits of relativistic theories: that a massless relativistic field may have a meaningful non-relativistic limt, that a relativistic field may have more than one non-relativistic limit, that coupled relativistic systems may be "more relativistic" than their uncoupled counterparts, and that the properties of the non-relativistic limit of a dynamical equation may differ from those obtained when the limiting equation is based directly on exact Galilean kinematics. These properties (...) are demonstrated through an examination of the non-relativistic limit of the familiar equations of first-quantized QED, i.e., the Dirac and Maxwell equations. The conditions under which each set of equations admits non-relativistic limits are given, particular attention being given to a gauge-invariant formulation of the limiting process especially as it applied to the electromagnetic potentials. The difference between the properties of a limiting theory and an exactly Galilean covariant theory based on the same dynamical equation is demonstrated by examination of the Pauli equation. (shrink)
Remaining important tasks in finding and developing new drugs and vaccines for HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer and other diseases require continued industry research and development. Industry’s research and development pipeline has produced drugs that have saved AIDS victims previously facing certain death, but still no cure nor vaccine is yet available. Experience with the process of research and development indicates that it requires more than a decade of development to produce a new drug with costs in the hundreds of millions of (...) dollars. Intellectual property protection is critically important in assuring that drug development continues. Partnerships between industry and the public sector have increased access to new therapies in developing countries and promise to enhance access to both patented and generic medicines in the future. (shrink)
We say that E is R-sparse if f(Ek) has no interior, for each k 2 N and f : Rk ! R de nable in R. (Throughout, \de nable" means \de nable without parameters".) In this note, we consider the extent to which basic metric and topological properties of subsets of R de nable in (R;E)# are determined by the corresponding properties of subsets of R de nable in (R;E), when R is an o-minimal expansion of (R;<;+;0;1) and E is (...) R-sparse. The precise statement of the main result is a bit complicated, but we can state some special cases now. (shrink)
The Complete Theory of Everything (CTE) is based on certain axioms of indiscernibility. Such axioms of indiscernibility have been given a philosophical justification by Kit Fine. I want to report on an attempt to give strong indiscernibility axioms which might also be subject to such philosophical analysis, and which prove the consistency of set theory; i.e., ZFC or more. In this way, we might obtain a (new kind of) philosophical consistency proof for mathematics.
For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography (...) of MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)
A bi-infinite approximate fixed point of type (n,k) is an approximate fixed point of type (n,k) whose terms are biinfinite; i.e., contain infin-itely many positive and infinitely many negative elements.
S. Adams, W. Ambrose, A. Andretta, H. Becker, R. Camerlo, C. Champetier, J.P.R. Christensen, D.E. Cohen, A. Connes. C. Dellacherie, R. Dougherty, R.H. Farrell, F. Feldman, A. Furman, D. Gaboriau, S. Gao, V. Ya. Golodets, P. Hahn, P. de la Harpe, G. Hjorth, S. Jackson, S. Kahane, A.S. Kechris, A. Louveau,, R. Lyons, P.-A. Meyer, C.C. Moore, M.G. Nadkarni, C. Nebbia, A.L.T. Patterson, U. Krengel, A.J. Kuntz, J.-P. Serre, S.D. Sinel'shchikov, T. Slaman, Solecki, R. Spatzier, J. Steel, D. Sullivan, S. (...) Thomas, A. Valette, V.S. Varadarajan, B. Velickovic, B. Weiss, J.D.M. Wright, R.J. Zimmer. (shrink)
