The current public health crisis has exposed deep cracks in social equality and justice for marginalised and vulnerable communities around the world. The reported rise in the number of ‘do not resuscitate’ orders being imposed on people with disabilities has caused particular concerns from a human rights perspective. While the evidence of this is contested, this article will consider the human rights implications at stake and the dangers associated with using ‘quality of life’ measures as determinant of care in medical (...) decision-making and triage assessments. (shrink)

Starting with Jaakko Hintikka’s seminal work, epistemic logic has now grown up to a huge academic industry. When we look back to its history, however, there is a practical paradox. While Hintikka’s original purpose was to facilitate epistemological discussion, most subsequent work of epistemic logic has been done outside of philosophy, and has been ignored by most mainstream epistemologists. At the current point, one might naturally wonder, does epistemic logic still have something to do with epistemology? Along with Hintikka and (...) a growing number of formal epistemologists, we believe the answer is “yes”. Contemporary epistemology has largely focused on the goal of providing an analysis of knowledge and an answer to skepticism. To avoid skepticism, many epistemologists prefer to define knowledge in terms of evidence and relevant alternatives. A typical saying is that “in order to know that p, one only needs evidence to eliminate all relevant alternatives, rather than all alternatives”. We see such a project as perfectly congenial to the spirit of Hintikka’s epistemic logic. In this paper, we propose an epistemic logic to deal with evidence and relevant alternatives explicitly, and extend EREL to its dynamic version to investigate how different notions of knowledge behavior with the decrease and increase of relevant alternatives. To illustrate its philosophical application, we provide a new formalization of the so called factivity problem of epistemic contextualism. We conclude with some remarks on further developments of our framework. (shrink)

In biology the term “vitalism” is usually associated with Hans Driesch’s doctrine of the entelechy: entelechies were nonmaterial, bio-specific agents responsible for governing a few peculiar biological phenomena. Since vitalism defined as such violates metaphysical materialism, the received view refutes the doctrine of the entelechy as a metaphysical heresy. But in the early twentieth century, a different, non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism was endorsed by some biologists and philosophers, which finally led to a logical refutation of the doctrine of the entelechy. (...) In this non-metaphysical evaluation, first, vitalism was not treated as a metaphysical heresy but a legitimate response to the inadequacy of mechanistic explanations in biology. Second, the refutation of vitalism was logically rather than metaphysically supported by contemporary biological knowledge. The entelechy was not a valid concept, because vitalists could neither formulate vital laws, nor offer convincing examples of experimental indeterminism. (shrink)

This paper examines the conceptions of logic from Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein and Ayer, and regards the six philosophers as the representatives of logical exceptionalism. From their standpoints, this paper refines the tenets of logical exceptionalism as follows: logic is exceptional to all other sciences because of four reasons: (i) logic is formal, neutral to any domain and any entities, and general; (ii) logical truths are made true by the meanings of logical constants they contain or by logicians' rational (...) insight to consequence relations; (iii) logical truths are analytical, a prior and necessary, so not‐revisable; and (iv) logical laws are normative for how to correctly think. However, logical exceptionalism has encountered difficult open problems: What are logical constants? How to justify basic laws of logic? How are logical laws accessible to us? How to explain the reasonability of rival logics and select from them? How to explain the universal applicability of logical laws? How to explain the normativity of logical laws for correct thinking? This paper concludes that logical anti‐exceptionalism is more hopeful to successfully answer these questions than logical exceptionalism. (shrink)

Naturalism is the dominant characteristic of W. V. Quine’s philosophy. The current study presents a more comprehensive and sympathetic clarification of Quine’s naturalized epistemology (NE hereafter), and vindicates its main positions by critically responding to the three objections to Quine’s NE: it is the replacement of traditional epistemology (TE hereafter), it is viciously circular, and it is devoid of normative dimension, and to Williamson’s three charges to naturalism (mainly Quine’s brand), finally concludes that the three objections and Williamson’s three charges (...) to Quine’s NE are mainly perhaps caused by misreading or misinterpretation, so all of them failed, and that there are still illuminating, reasonable, and valuable insights in Quine’s NE, which are worthy of further development. (shrink)

Traditional correspondence theory of truth with the concept of fact encounters many serious difficulties, main one of which is that it is too difficult to explain clearly the concept of ‘fact’ and how propositions ‘correspond’ to facts. This does not mean that we should abandon the traditional correspondence theory of truth and turn to some other type theories of truth. In order to guarantee the objectivity of truth, any reasonable theory of truth must adhere to the core insight of the (...) traditional correspondence theory: it is not something in our language, nor in our mind, but something in the external world, that make the propositions we use to describe the states of affairs in the world either true or false. It is entirely possible to formulate a new correspondence theory of truth without the concept of fact but still adhering to the core insights mentioned above of the traditional correspondence theory. New correspondence theory of truth has its own metaphysical and epistemological assumptions, and also its assumption in the philosophy of language. Because of the generativity of language, in defining the concept of truth, the new correspondence theory of truth must resort to Tarskian recursive procedure. First, it gives the semantic value of the components of a proposition, defines the truth of its atomic propositions, then gradually defines the truth of its more and more complex propositions and finally of the whole proposition. Coherence is the intrinsic element of truth. The concept of truth is by no means trivial and insignificant; on the contrary, it is very substantive. The pursuit of truth is our mission. (shrink)

There are two versions of the correspondence theory of truth: the object-based correspondence theory and the fact-based correspondence theory. Some scholars have put forward their objections to my rejection of the concept of a fact and their defence of that concept. But their arguments are not cogent, since they haven’t clarified the relation between facts and propositions, haven’t successfully argued for the necessity and feasibility of introducing the concept of a fact, and haven’t provided an acceptable standard of identity for (...) facts. Under the framework of the fact-based correspondence theory, a “negative fact” is usually introduced to explain the falsehood of an affirmative proposition and the truth of a negative proposition. But, after careful analysis, we find that the positing of negative facts is the result of the concurrence of three factors: the positive states of objects, the expectations of cognitive subjects, and certain kinds of inferences, Thus, negative facts at most have a sort of inferential “existence” without independent ontological status. The positing of negative facts has been criticized for many reasons, such as the ontological inflation of negative facts, the supervenience of negative facts on positive facts, the imperceptibility of negative facts, and the lack of causal force of negative facts. Many replies to these criticisms have been put forward, such as the dilemma argument, the self-defeating argument, and the role-making of negative facts: constitution (e.g. hole-making), causation (event-making), chance-making, and truth-making. However, these replies can also be reasonably rejected. The final conclusion of this article is that, in order to account for the falsehood of an affirmative proposition and the truth of a negative proposition, we can appeal to the object-based correspondence theory of truth without appealing to the concept of a fact, let alone the concept of a “negative fact”. (shrink)

The view of embodied cognition believes that cognition is embodied in nature, only the dynamics involved in the interaction between cognitive activities and the nervous system, body and environment, only by closely linking the correct evaluation of time-dependent and relationship, then only can make a correct understanding of cognitive activities. The core concepts of body and environment involved in embodied cognition are different from the body and environment in the usual sense. In terms of research methods, dynamic research methods that (...) are different from traditional computer simulations are also adopted. The article first integrates and analyzes the basic position and general propositions in the discipline, then the embodied cognition are explained based on author's understanding. In addition, the suitability of dynamic research methods, its advantages and disadvantages is analyzed, and finally, a brief summary of the current status of embodied cognition research. (shrink)

Philosophy is a cognitive enterprise. In multiple senses, it is continuous with other sciences (including natural sciences, social sciences, and Humanities). (1) As far as its subject matter is concerned, like other sciences, philosophy is also a part of the overall efforts of human beings to understand the world in which we live. (2) In terms of their methodologies, there is no substantive difference between philosophy, common sense, and science. Just as scientific methodology is the refinement of common-sense methodology, philosophical (...) methodology is also the refinement and summary of common sense and scientific methodologies. (3) In terms of their utilities, philosophy and science are both designed to help people live better in the world, and to lead a decent and dignified life, especially a meaningful and valuable life. (4) It is the correct attitude and practice of dealing with the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy to study and enter philosophy through the history of philosophy, to critically reflect on the previous philosophical theories, to open up new fields, to use new methods, and to put forward new theories to develop philosophy. (5) The following two assertions about philosophy and science are just taken for granted, and specious: science relies on observation and experiment, and philosophy resorts to interpretation and understanding, while science focuses on "what is" and philosophy focuses on "what it should be". (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis which has witnessed consumers experiencing significant anxiety provoked by the threats to their health and even lives. Meanwhile, consumers have been observed to make more ethical purchases since the start of the pandemic. Drawing on literature on terror management and negotiable fate, this research employs a moderated moderating model to investigate how consumers’ perception of the pandemic severity leads to ethical consumption as a defensive mechanism against death-related anxiety, as well as the differential (...) role of consumers’ belief in negotiable fate in moderating this pandemic impact across tight and loose cultures. We conducted two cross-cultural studies with 592 and 423 respondents, respectively, at different times during the pandemic. Results consistently show that perceived pandemic severity increases consumers’ intention to consume ethically. Consumers’ belief in negotiable fate directly enhances ethical consumption, but it alleviates the effect of pandemic severity on ethical consumption among consumers who live in a tight culture. Our findings reveal the existential meaning of ethical consumption as a buffer against pandemic-triggered mortality salience, identify the positive psychological functions of negotiable fate in promoting ethical consumption but mitigating consumers’ need to buffer death-related concerns, and advances the importance of investigating the cultural variances in the terror management process toward ethical consumption. The findings offer insights for marketers and policy makers to develop effective strategies to support consumers’ ethical coping during societal crises. (shrink)

A longstanding criticism of Ernest Nagel's model of reduction is that it fails to take theory change into account. This criticism builds on the received view that Nagelian reductions are incompatible with theory change. This article challenges the received view by showing that Nagel's model can easily accommodate theory change. Indeed, Nagel's model is essentially static as it only gives unchanging formal and nonformal conditions for reduction; in contrast, theory change belongs to the dynamic history of science; as a result, (...) the application of Nagel's model to scientific knowledge from different historical periods yields a series of Nagelian reductions of different degrees of reductive success. This Nagelian treatment of theory change is illustrated by considering the enterprise of reducing thermodynamics to statistical mechanics in the late nineteenth century. It is also contended that, in handling theory change Nagel's model has greater merits than subsequent models (exemplified by Kenneth Schaffner's general reduction-replacement model). This article concludes by suggesting that Nagel's model of reduction deals with theory change exactly in the same way as logical empiricism does with historicism. (shrink)

This article adopts a minimal definition of biological usage to demonstrate that the debate over biological function encompasses two distinct dimensions: descriptive and prescriptive. In the descriptive dimension, biological usage serves as the final arbiter for evaluating different accounts of biological function. Conversely, in the prescriptive dimension, accounts are formulated despite biological usage. The main thesis of this article is that the descriptive/prescriptive distinction helps make better sense of the biological function debate from a novel perspective. This is elucidated by (...) meticulously analyzing the two dimensions and subsequently providing a global overview of the debate. (shrink)

This article outlines the history of logic in China from 1949 to 2019. Firstly, it presents a rough picture of Chinese logic before 1949 using broad brushstrokes. Secondly, it divides the whole process of development into two stages. In the first 30 years from 1949 to 1979, Chinese logic made some achievements, but also went along some detours, and its overall situation was unsatisfactory. In the latter 40 years from 1979 to 2019, due to Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up, (...) many Chinese logicians went abroad for academic visits or to study degrees in foreign universities or research institutes, gradually became familiar with and even integrated into the international mainstream of logic teaching and research, and ushered in the great flourishing of logic in China we see today. Finally, it draws four lessons from this process of development, as follows. 1) Let politics and academia live in peace, by respecting and adhering to the idea of academic freedom. 2) Academic advances cannot be achieved in isolation from the world, so we should fully embrace the international academic community, while insisting on our own independent thinking. 3) We should always adhere to the policy of “letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend”, so that different academic viewpoints and tendencies can be improved and developed in their mutual collision. 4) We should culti- vate academic self-confidence, gradually make the change from pure follow-up learning to original work in some fields of logic. (shrink)

This paper examines Hume’s formulations and uses of the conceivability principle and the inconceivability principle. In Hume’s works, we identify different versions of CP and ICP, including proper CP, proper ICP, the weak versions of CP and ICP, the epistemic versions of CP and ICP, and show that Hume not only expresses ICP, but also really maintains it. Assuming an axiomatic characterization of modalities, we argue that if there is a sharp distinction between levels of modalities, then Hume’s conceivability arguments (...) do not hold. But, in a rather different way, we also argue that if Hume’s conceivability arguments hold, then there should be no distinction between levels of modalities. Finally, we argue that after Hume, there are lots of endeavors in logic and philosophy to distinguish different levels of modalities, and to accept new concepts of necessity other than logical necessity. (shrink)

In this study, we are concerned with how agents can best amalgamate their private information about a binary state of Nature. The agents are heterogeneous in their “ability”, the quality of their private information. The agents cannot directly communicate their private information but instead can only vote between the two states. We first describe possible methods of sequential majority voting, and then we analyze a particular one: the first n-1\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n-1$$\end{document} jurors vote (...) simultaneously and, in the case of a tie, the remaining juror has the casting vote. We prove that when n=3\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n=3$$\end{document}, the probability of a correct verdict is maximized when the agent of median ability has the casting vote. (shrink)

Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: " organicism ". And philosophers since the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Frank and later Nagel) criticized Driesch and Bergson's " neovitalism " as a too-strong ontological commitment (...) to the existence of certain entities or " forces ", over and above the system of causal relations studied by mechanistic science, rejecting the weaker form, organicism, as well. But there has been some significant scholarly " push-back " against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the 18th-century Montpellier vitalists to show that there are different historical forms of vitalism, including how they relate to mainstream scientific practice (Wolfe and Normandin, eds. 2013). Additionally, some trends in recent biology that run counter to genetic reductionism and the informational model of the gene present themselves as organicist (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, Moreno and Mossio 2015). Here, we examine some cases of vitalism in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and scientific model. We argue for vitalism's conceptual originality without either reducing it to mainstream models of science or presenting it as an alternate model of science, by focusing on historical forms of vitalism, logical empiricist critiques thereof and the impact of synthetic biology on current (re-)theorizing of vitalism. (shrink)

Starting from Denis Noble’s criticism on the modern synthesis, this article argues that the author’s presentation of the modern synthesis focusses too one-sidedly on the phenomenal characteristics of the living, whereby it is made easily suitable to his criticisms, but risks to remain trapped in a territory-struggle; this criticism lacks an explicit focus on logical matters, and more in particular on the synthetic principles required to situate the relevancy or irrelevancy of phenomenal characteristics beyond territory-struggles. A brief sketch of how (...) the principle of teleology calls for reflexivity allows us to reveal the tension in Noble’s account between, on the one hand, the way in which he stresses the importance of metaphors and language, and, on the other hand, the way in which he invokes empirical arguments to assess the illusory character of certain metaphors. (shrink)

Kripke's epistemic argument against descriptivism is reconstructed as follows. Premise 1: if descriptivism is correct, then “N is the F” should be knowable a priori; Premise 2: in fact, “N is the F” is not knowable a priori; Conclusion: descriptivism is wrong. This article accepts P2 of the argument as true, but rejects P1 by arguing for the evolution of language and the growth of meaning; so it concludes that the argument fails. It also criticizes Kripke's conception of “a priori,” (...) and interprets why “N is the F” is not knowable a priori. Sometimes this article uses materials from Chinese ancient philosophers, for example, Xunzi and later Moists, to support its arguments. (shrink)

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence will be the twenty-first century logic development of the main power source, and in the twenty-first century will largely determine the face of logic. At least in the early twenty-first century, logic will focus on the following topics: how to deal with common sense reasoning in the logic of Eph coordination, non-monotonic and fault tolerance factors? how to make robots with human intelligence and creativity, as established from the empirical evidence used to guide future action (...) in the induction of judgments can be wrong? how the knowledge representation and knowledge reasoning, in particular, is based on the existing knowledge base and between the cognitive subject knowledge and the reasoning? how contextual factors, combined with a variety of natural language understanding and reasoning, so that intelligent robots to employing natural language for successful communication with people? . . . . And so on. (shrink)

This book conducts a historico-critical investigation into a proposal to transform philosophy in the early twentieth century. Driven by the Great Differentiation, the emancipation of the sciences from philosophy in the nineteenth century, several early twentieth-century philosophical movements advocated the transformation of philosophy from an endeavor to unify all conceivable human knowledge into a practice focused on the logical analysis of the differentiated sciences and broader human knowledge. However, this proposal was not subsequently adopted, leading to the establishment of academic (...) philosophy as a discipline characterized by unique philosophical problems and solutions. Drawing on a variety of sources, this book posits that the transformation proposal offers crucial insights for understanding the history of philosophy, especially at its critical turning point in the early twentieth century. Moreover, although not pursued in academic philosophy today, this proposal still offers insights for rethinking the future role of philosophy. In response to Max Weber's fundamental challenge to philosophy post-Differentiation, it is argued that logical analysis offers a viable methodological approach and that the realm of values serves as a remaining substantive domain for practical philosophy. The book will be attractive to researchers and students interested in the history of philosophy and science as well as general intellectual history. (shrink)

本书围绕《马克思主义哲学学习纲要》的内容,以问答形式解释其难点重点,并提出其要点。.

Recent research on body and head positions has shown that postural changes may induce varying degrees of changes on acoustic speech signals and articulatory gestures. While the preservation of formant profiles across different postures is suitably accounted for by the two-tube model and perturbation theory, it remains unclear whether it is resulted from the accommodation of tongue postures. Specifically, whether the tongue accommodates the changes in head angle to maintain the target acoustics is yet to be determined. The present study (...) examines vowel acoustics and their correspondence with the articulatory maneuvers of the tongue, including both tongue postures and movements of the tongue center, across different head angles. The results show that vowel acoustics, including pitch and formants, are largely unaffected by upward or downward tilting of the head. These preserved acoustics may be attributed to the lingual gestures that compensate for the effects of gravity. Our results also reveal that the tongue postures in response to head movements appear to be vowel-dependent, and the tongue center may serve as an underlying drive that covariates with the head angle changes. These results imply a close relationship between vowel acoustics and tongue postures as well as a target-oriented strategy for different head angles. (shrink)

More and more research on left ventricle quantification skips segmentation due to its requirement of large amounts of pixel-by-pixel labels. In this study, a framework is developed to directly quantify left ventricle multiple indices without the process of segmentation. At first, DenseNet is utilized to extract spatial features for each cardiac frame. Then, in order to take advantage of the time sequence information, the temporal feature for consecutive frames is encoded using gated recurrent unit. After that, the attention mechanism is (...) integrated into the decoder to effectively establish the mappings between the input sequence and corresponding output sequence. Simultaneously, a regression layer with the same decoder output is used to predict multi-indices of the left ventricle. Different weights are set for different types of indices based on experience, and l2-norm is used to avoid model overfitting. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method can not only produce more competitive results but also be more flexible. This is because the prediction results in our study can be obtained for each frame online while the SOTA only can output results after all frames are analyzed. (shrink)

Faster R-CNN architecture is used to solve the problems of moving path uncertainty, changeable coverage, and high complexity in cold-air induced large-scale intensive temperature-reduction detection and classification, since those problems usually lead to path identification biases as well as low accuracy and generalization ability of recognition algorithm. In this paper, an improved recognition method of national ITR path in China based on faster R-CNN in complicated meteorological systems is proposed. Firstly, quality control of the original dataset of strong cooling processes (...) is carried out by means of data filtering. Then, according to the NITR standard and the characteristics of NITR, the NITR dataset in China is established by the intensive temperature-reduction areas located through spatial transformation. Meanwhile, considering that the selection of regularization parameters of Softmax classification method will cause the problem of probability calculation, support vector machine is used for path classification to enhance the confidence of classification. Finally, the improved faster R-CNN model is used to identify, classify, and locate the path of NITR events. The experimental results show that, compared to other models, the improved faster R-CNN algorithm greatly improves the performance of NITR’s path recognition, especially for the mixed NITR paths and single NITR paths. Therefore, the improved faster R-CNN model has fast calculation speed, high recognition accuracy, good robustness, and generalization ability of NITR path recognition. (shrink)