The rise of the phenomenon of virtue ethics in recent years has increased at a rapid pace. Such an explosion carries with it a number of great possibilities, as well as risks. This volume has been written to contribute a multi-faceted perspective to the current conversation about virtue. Among many other thought-provoking questions, the collection addresses the following: What are the virtues, and how are they enumerated? What are the internal problems among ethicists, and what are the objections and replies (...) to contemporary virtue ethics? Additionally, the practical implications following from the answers to these questions are discussed in new and fascinating research. Fundamental concepts such as teleology and eudaimonism are addressed from both a historical and dialectical approach. This tome will contribute not only to providing further clarity to the current horizons in virtue ethics, but also to the practical conclusion following from the study: to challenge the reader toward a greater pursuit of the virtuous life. (shrink)

Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 1 Abrol Fairweather Part I Epistemic Virtue, Cognitive Science and Situationism The Function of Perception 13 Peter J Graham Metacognition and Intellectual Virtue 33 Christopher Lepock Daring to Believe: Metacognition, Epistemic Agency and Reflective Knowledge 49 Fernando Broncano Success, Minimal Agency and Epistemic Virtue 67 Carlos Montemayor Towards a Eudaimonistic Virtue Epistemology 83 Berit Brogaard Expanding the Situationist Challenge to Reliabilism About Inference 103 Mark Alfano Inferential Abilities and Common Epistemic Goods (...) 123 Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor Part II Epistemic Virtue and Formal Epistemology Curiosity, Belief and Acquaintance 143 Ilhan Inan Epistemic Values and Disinformation 159 Don Fallis Defeasibility Without Inductivism 181 Juan Comesaña Part III Virtues of Theories and Virtues of Theorists Acting to Know: A Virtue of Experimentation 195 Adam Morton Is There a Place for Epistemic Virtues in Theory Choice? 207 Milena Ivanova Bridging a Fault Line: On Underdetermination and the Ampliative Adequacy of Competing Theories 227 Guy Axtell Epistemic Virtues and the Success of Science 247 D Tulodziecki Experimental Virtue: Perceptual Responsiveness and the Praxis of Scientific Observation 269 Shannon Vallor A Matter of Phronesis: Experiment and Virtue in Physics, A Case Study 291 Marilena Di Bucchianico Part IV Understanding, Explanation and Epistemic Virtue Knowledge and Understanding 315 Duncan Pritchard Understanding as Knowledge of Causes 329 Stephen R Grimm Knowledge, Understanding and Virtue 347 Christoph Kelp. (shrink)

Originally published in 1972, Should Trees Have Standing? was a rallying point for the then burgeoning environmental movement, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, in the 35th anniversary edition of this remarkably influential book, Christopher D. Stone updates his original thesis and explores the impact his ideas have had on the courts, the academy, and society as a whole. At the heart of the book is an eminently (...) sensible, legally sound, and compelling argument that the environment should be granted legal rights. For the new edition, Stone explores a variety of recent cases and current events--and related topics such as climate change and protecting the oceans--providing a thoughtful survey of the past and an insightful glimpse at the future of the environmental movement. This enduring work continues to serve as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights, so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations. (shrink)

Increasingly, voices in the growing neurodiversity movement are alleging that individuals who are neurologically divergent, such as those with conditions related to bipolar disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and depression, must struggle for their civil rights. This movement therefore raises questions of interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to concerned members of the general public. These questions have to do with such matters as the accessibility of knowledge about mental health; autonomy and community within the realm (...) of the mentally ill; and accommodation in civil society and its institutions. The contributors to Ethics and Neurodiversity explore these questions, and the traditional philosophical questions related to them. The authors pay special attention to the need to examine the policies and practices of institutions, such as higher education, social support, and healthcare. (shrink)

1 Boolean retrieval 1 2 The term vocabulary and postings lists 19 3 Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval 49 4 Index construction 67 5 Index compression 85 6 Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model 109 7 Computing scores in a complete search system 135 8 Evaluation in information retrieval 151 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion 177 10 XML retrieval 195 11 Probabilistic information retrieval 219 12 Language models for information retrieval 237 13 Text classification and Naive Bayes 253 (...) 14 Vector space classification 289 15 Support vector machines and machine learning on documents 319 16 Flat clustering 349 17 Hierarchical clustering 377 18 Matrix decompositions and latent semantic indexing 403 19 Web search basics 421 20 Web crawling and indexes 443 21 Link analysis 461.. (shrink)

In this book, Christopher D. Rodkey asks how the brain worships and responds by engaging ideas from neurological science, philosophy, ritual theory, and religious education. The Synaptic Gospel will prove to be a useful theoretical tool for pastors, religious educators, youth ministers, church music professionals, and seminary students.

We have only limited awareness of the system by which we control our actions and this limited awareness does not seem to be concerned with the control of action. Awareness of choosing one action rather than another comes after the choice has been made, while awareness of initiating an action occurs before the movement has begun. These temporal differences bind together in consciousness the intention to act and the consequences of the action. This creates our sense of agency. Activity in (...) the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex is associated with awareness of our own actions and also occurs when we think about the actions of others. I propose that the mechanism underlying awareness of how our own intentions lead to actions can also be used to represent the intentions that underlie the actions of others. This common system enables us to communicate mental states and thereby share our experiences. (shrink)

Christopher Frith is a research professor at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College, London. He explores, experimentally, using the techniques of functional brain imaging, the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. His research focuses on questions pertaining to perception, attention, control of action, free will, and awareness of our own mental states and those of others. As the following discussion makes clear, Frith investigates brain systems involved in the choice of (...) one action over another and in the understanding of other people. Such investigations are aimed at understanding brain basis of autism and schizophrenia. In his widely cited study of schizophrenia, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia , Frith argues that many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions of control, auditory hallucinations, and thought insertion, involve problems of self-monitoring. Patients, in effect, lose track of their own intentions and mistakenly attribute agency for their own actions to someone else. Frith employs models of motor control, involving comparator mechanisms and efference copy, not only to explain delusions that involve movement, but also to develop a neurocognitive explanation of delusional cognition. (shrink)

This book takes readers on a fascinating journey to the very heart of Tantra: its key teachings, foundational lineages, and transformative practices. Since the West's discovery of Tantra 100 years ago, there has been considerable fascination, speculation, and more than a little misinformation about this spiritual movement. Now, for the first time in the English language, Tantra Illuminated presents an accessible introduction to this sacred tradition that began 1,500 years ago, in the far north of India. The book uses translations (...) from primary Sanskrit sources, offers a profound look at spiritual practice, and reveals Tantra's rich history and powerful teachings. (shrink)

This paper presents the first use of a computational model of natural logic—a system of logical inference which operates over natural language—for textual inference. Most current approaches to the PAS- CAL RTE textual inference task achieve robustness by sacrificing semantic precision; while broadly effective, they are easily confounded by ubiquitous inferences involving monotonicity. At the other extreme, systems which rely on first-order logic and theorem proving are precise, but excessively brittle. This work aims at a middle way. Our system finds (...) a low-cost edit sequence which transforms the premise into the hypothesis; learns to classify entailment relations across atomic edits; and composes atomic entailments into a top-level entailment judgment. We provide the first reported results for any system on the FraCaS test suite. We also evaluate on RTE3 data, and show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant performance gains. (shrink)

Throughout, there are many case histories to illustrate the text.

I wish to present a codi cation of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages and argue for the correctness of one particular approach, which I will call the Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis.1 I presume familiarity with the term `ergativity', but, brie y, many languages have ergative case marking, such as Burushaski in (1), in contrast to the accusative case marking of Latin in (2). More generally, if we follow Dixon (1979) and use A to mark the agent-like argument of (...) a transitive verb, O to mark the patient-like argument of a transitive verb, and S to mark the single argument of an intransitive verb, then we can call ergative any subsystem of a language that groups S and O in contrast to A, as shown in (3). (shrink)

This paper proposes a new architecture for textual inference in which finding a good alignment is separated from evaluating entailment. Current approaches to semantic inference in question answering and textual entailment have approximated the entailment problem as that of computing the best alignment of the hypothesis to the text, using a locally decomposable matching score. While this formulation is adequate for representing local (word-level) phenomena such as synonymy, it is incapable of representing global interactions, such as that between verb negation (...) and the addition/removal of qualifiers, which are often critical for determining entailment. We propose a pipelined approach where alignment is followed by a classification step, in which we extract features representing high-level characteristics of the entailment problem, and give the resulting feature vector to a statistical classifier trained on development data. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between epistemic and metaphysical problems of arbitrariness for vagueness. It argues that epistemicism can resolve the epistemic problem of arbitrariness but not the metaphysical one.

This book argues that the othering and criminalization of Black people in times of crisis is part of the religious meaning of America that fuels the problem of mass incarceration. The author develops a religious interpretation of the significance of these images to America’s political economy the produces the very problems we punish as a society.

We propose a model of natural language inference which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We extend past work in natural logic, which has focused on semantic containment and monotonicity, by incorporating both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our model decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical semantic relation for each edit; propagates these relations upward through a semantic composition tree according to properties of (...) intermediate nodes; and joins the resulting semantic relations across the edit sequence. A computational implementation of the model achieves 70% accuracy and 89% precision on the FraCaS test suite. Moreover, including this model as a component in an existing system yields significant performance gains on the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenge. (shrink)

We propose an approach to natural language inference based on a model of natural logic, which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We greatly extend past work in natural logic, which has focused solely on semantic containment and monotonicity, to incorporate both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our system decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical entailment relation for each edit using a statistical classifier; (...) propagates these relations upward through a syntax tree according to semantic properties of intermediate nodes; and composes the resulting entailment relations across the edit sequence. We evaluate our system on the FraCaS test suite, and achieve a 27% reduction in error from previous work. We also show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant gains on the RTE3 test suite. (shrink)

Discriminative feature-based methods are widely used in natural language processing, but sentence parsing is still dominated by generative methods. While prior feature-based dynamic programming parsers have restricted training and evaluation to artificially short sentences, we present the first general, featurerich discriminative parser, based on a conditional random field model, which has been successfully scaled to the full WSJ parsing data. Our efficiency is primarily due to the use of stochastic optimization techniques, as well as parallelization and chart prefiltering. On WSJ15, (...) we attain a state-of-the-art F-score of 90.9%, a 14% relative reduction in error over previous models, while being two orders of magnitude faster. On sentences of length 40, our system achieves an F-score of 89.0%, a 36% relative reduction in error over a generative baseline. (shrink)

We present a system for deciding whether a given sentence can be inferred from text. Each sentence is represented as a directed graph (extracted from a dependency parser) in which the nodes represent words or phrases, and the links represent syntactic and semantic relationships. We develop a learned graph matching model to approximate entailment by the amount of the sentence’s semantic content which is contained in the text. We present results on the Recognizing Textual Entailment dataset (Dagan et al., 2005), (...) and show that our approach outperforms Bag- Of-Words and TF-IDF models. (shrink)

I examine what would be necessary to move part-of-speech tagging performance from its current level of about 97.3% token accuracy (56% sentence accuracy) to close to 100% accuracy. I suggest that it must still be possible to greatly increase tagging performance and examine some useful improvements that have recently been made to the Stanford Part-of-Speech Tagger. However, an error analysis of some of the remaining errors suggests that there is limited further mileage to be had either from better machine learning (...) or better features in a discriminative sequence classifier. The prospects for further gains from semisupervised learning also seem quite limited. Rather, I suggest and begin to demonstrate that the largest opportunity for further progress comes from improving the taxonomic basis of the linguistic resources from which taggers are trained. That is, from improved descriptive linguistics. However, I conclude by suggesting that there are also limits to this process. The status of some words may not be able to be adequately captured by assigning them to one of a small number of categories. While conventions can be used in such cases to improve tagging consistency, they lack a strong linguistic basis. (shrink)

An outline is given in the following memoir of some of the earlier results of an inquiry which I am still prosecuting, and a comparatively new statistical process will be used in it for the first time in dealings with psychological data. It is that which I described under the title of "Statistics by Intercomparison" in the Philosophical Magazine of Jany., 1875.

Between Sickness and Health is about illness rather than disease, and recovery rather than cure. The book argues that illness is an experience, represented by the feeling that 'I am not myself'. From the book's phenomenological point of view, feelings of illness cannot be 'unreal' or 'fake', whatever their biological basis, nor need they be categorised as 'physical', 'psychosomatic' or 'psychiatric'. The book challenges the disease-centred ethos of medicine and medical education. It demonstrates that a clearer conception of illness, as (...) distinct from disease, is therapeutic. The feeling that 'I am once again myself' can return, in some degree, whatever state the body is in. Resilience becomes more available when it is seen as a set of personal skills that can be developed, rather than as an inborn trait. Possibilities of wellness are enhanced by recognising that medical and other therapies can either support or impede recovery, as can human relationships and the socio-political environment. The book's many clinical examples are drawn from the author's broad experience as a neurologist, rehabilitation physician and systemic family therapist. Between Sickness and Health will be useful for students, practitioners and academics, and also for anyone who has been or might one day be ill. (shrink)

Linking constructions involving dሇ (DE) are ubiquitous in Chinese, and can be translated into English in many different ways. This is a major source of machine translation error, even when syntaxsensitive translation models are used. This paper explores how getting more information about the syntactic, semantic, and discourse context of uses of dሇ (DE) can facilitate producing an appropriate English translation strategy. We describe a finergrained classification of dሇ (DE) constructions in Chinese NPs, construct a corpus of annotated examples, and (...) then train a log-linear classifier, which contains linguistically inspired features. We use the DE classifier to preprocess MT data by explicitly labeling dሇ (DE) constructions, as well as reordering phrases, and show that our approach provides significant BLEU point gains on MT02 (+1.24), MT03 (+0.88) and MT05 (+1.49) on a phrasedbased system. The improvement persists when a hierarchical reordering model is applied. (shrink)

Examines the early development of psychology in ancient Greece and Rome, discussing how such individual concepts as thought, emotion, and will gradually evolved into what is now considered "the mind.".

The same categorical phenomena which are attributed to hard grammatical constraints in some languages continue to show up as statistical preferences in other languages, motivating a grammatical model that can account for soft constraints. The effects of a hierarchy of person (1st, 2nd 3rd) on grammar are categorical in some languages, most famously in languages withError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap inverse systems, but also in languages with person restrictions on passivization. In Lummi, for example, the person (...) of the subject argument cannot be lower than the person of a nonsubject argument. If this would happen in the active, passivization is obligatory; if it would happen in the passive, the active is obligatory (Jelinek and Demers 1983). These facts follow from the theory of harmonic alignment in OT: constraints favoring the harmonic association of prominent person (1st, 2nd) with prominent syntactic function (subject) are hypothesized to be present as subhierarchies of the grammars of all languages, but to vary in their effects across languages depending on their interactions with other constraints (Aissen 1999). There is a statistical reflection of these hierarchies in English. The same disharmonic person/argument associations which are avoided categorically in languages like Lummi by making passives either impossible or obligatory, are avoided in the SWITCHBOARD corpus of spoken English by either depressing or elevating the frequency of passives relative to actives. The English data can be grammatically analyzed within the stochastic OT framework (Boersma 1998, Boersma and Hayes 2001) in a way which provides a principled and unifying explanation for their relation to the crosslinguistic categorical person effects studied by Aissen (1999). (shrink)

Grammatical theory has long wrestled with the fact that causative constructions exhibit properties of both single words and complex phrases. However, as Paul Kiparsky has observed, the distribution of such properties of causatives is not arbitrary: ‘construal’ phenomena such as honorification, anaphor and pronominal binding, and quantifier ‘floating’ typically behave as they would if causatives were syntactically complex, embedding constructions; whereas case marking, agreement and word order phenomena all point to the analysis of causatives as single lexical items.1 Although an (...) analysis of causatives in terms of complex syntactic structures has frequently been adopted in an attempt to simplify the mapping to semantic structure, we believe that motivating syntactic structure based on perceived semantics is questionable because in general a syntax/semantics homomorphism cannot be maintained without vitiating syntactic theory (Miller 1991). Instead, we sketch a strictly lexical theory of Japanese causatives that deals with the evidence offered for a complex phrasal analysis. Such an analysis makes the phonology, morphology and syntax parallel, while a mismatch occurs with the semantics. The conclusions we will reach are given in (1). (shrink)

This paper presents a new method for producing a dictionary of subcategorization frames from unlabelled text corpora. It is shown that statistical filtering of the results of a finite state parser running on the output of a stochastic tagger produces high quality results, despite the error rates of the tagger and the parser. Further, it is argued that this method can be used to learn all subcategorization frames, whereas previous methods are not extensible to a general solution to the problem.

Environmental ethics has reached a certain level of maturity; further significant advances require reexamining its status within the larger realm of moral philosophy. It could aim to extend to nonhumans one of the familiar sets of principles subject to appropriate modifications; or it could seek to break away and put forward its own paradigm or paradigms. Selecting the proper course requires as the most immediate mission exploring the formal requirements of an ethical system. In general, are there constraints against bringing (...) our moral relations with different sorts of things under different mIes of govemance? In particular, how much independence can an environmental ethic (or ethics) aim to have? (shrink)