This paper is an investigation into the logic of information flow. The basic perspective is that logic flows in virtue of constraints and that constraints classify channels connecting particulars In this paper we explore some logics intended to model reasoning in the case of idealized information flow, that is, where the constraints involved are exceptionless. We look at this as a step toward the far more challenging task of understanding the logic of imperfect information flow, that is where the constraints (...) admit of exceptional connections. This paper continues and amplifies work presented by the same authors in [10]. (shrink)

Selective abduction is in contrast with creative abduction as well as Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). There are two types of selective abduction: Either hypotheses are selected among new and conjectural hypotheses without any prior knowledge ( Pierce s' selective abduction), or the selection of the best hypotheses and explanations is among a large number of possible hypotheses and explanations already known (L. Magnani's selective abduction and G. Schurz's factual abduction). According to both views, as well as an alternative (...) view, which belongs to Dov M. Gabby and John Woods, selective abduction is different from inference to the best explanation. Schurz's factual abduction depends on all three sub-processes of inference, i.e.: colligation, observation, and judgment (c, o, and j); But Pierce's selective abduction, on the other hand, has only a third sub-process, i.e. judgment process (j), and therefore it cannot be regarded as a process of abductive epistemic inference. (shrink)

Gils-Schmidt and Salloch recognise that human and climate health are inextricably linked, and that mitigating healthcare-associated climate harms is essential for protecting human health.1 They argue that physicians have a duty to consider how their own practices contribute to climate change, including during their interactions with patients. Acknowledging the potential for conflicts between this duty and the provision of individual patient care, they propose the application of Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian account of practical identities to help navigate such scenarios. In this commentary, (...) we argue that by focusing attention on this physician–patient level, the authors overlook the complexity of climate change, both within the healthcare sector and beyond. We recognise the importance of individual agency in tackling this issue, and we also recognise that the authors do briefly acknowledge the importance of considering these broader complexities; however, we emphasise the need for climate and health discussions/action to be situated in a wider framework of systemic change. Our concern is that overemphasis on patient-level interactions risks normalising the prioritisation of individual-level approaches to addressing climate change, detracting from such a broader approach. Physician training emphasises the need for trust, confidentiality and shared decision-making in the doctor–patient relationship. …. (shrink)

We introduce a methodology whereby an arbitrary logic system L can be enriched with temporal features to create a new system T(L). The new system is constructed by combining L with a pure propositional temporal logic T (such as linear temporal logic with “Since” and “Until”) in a special way. We refer to this method as “adding a temporal dimension to L” or just “temporalising L”. We show that the logic system T(L) preserves several properties of the original temporal logic (...) like soundness, completeness, decidability, conservativeness and separation over linear flows of time. We then focus on the temporalisation of first-order logic, and a comparison is make with other first-order approaches to the handling of time. (shrink)

One of our purposes here is to expose something of the elementary logical structure of abductive reasoning, and to do so in a way that helps orient theorists to the various tasks that a logic of abduction should concern itself with. We are mindful of criticisms that have been levelled against the very idea of a logic of abduction; so we think it prudent to proceed with a certain diffidence. That our own account of abduction is itself abductive is methodological (...) expression of this diffidence. A second objective is to test our conception of abduction's logical structure against some of the more promising going accounts of abductive reasoning. We offer our various suggestions in a benignly advisory way. The primary targets of our advice is ourselves, meant as guides to work we have yet to complete or, in some instances, start. It is possible that our colleagues in the abduction research communities will find our counsel to be of some interest. But we repeat that our first concern is to try to get ourselves straight about what a logic of abduction should encompass. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 39-41, November 2011.

If we arrange in chronological order the various statements Darwin made about God, creation, design, plan, law, and so forth, that I have discussed, there emerges a picture of a consistent development in Darwin's religious views from the orthodoxy of his youth to the agnosticism of his later years. Numerous sources attest that at the beginning of the Beagle voyage Darwin was more or less orthodox in religion and science alike.78 After he became a transmutationist early in 1837, he concluded (...) that the doctrine of secondary causes must be extented even to the history of life and that after the first forms of life were created, there was no further need for divine intervention, except where man was concerned. Man's body, he thought, was produced by the process of transmutation, but he believed for a time that man's soul was “superadded.” By mid-1838 he had become convinced that nothing, after the creation of life, was due to miracles. God works only through laws, which are capable of producing “every effect of evey kind which surrounds us.” The existence of man, the idea of God in man's mind, and the harmony of the whole system were in his eyes prearranged goals of deterministic laws imposed by God. Such a conception excludes the miracles on which Christianity depends; but it is not possible to say whether Darwin's loss of Christian faith, which occurred at about this same time, preceded and made possible his “materialism” or was rather caused or hastened by it.79 In the weeks after his reading of Malthus, Darwin's belief in a plan of creation gave way to the belief that God created matter and life and designed their laws, leaving the details, however, to the workings of chance. This remained his view until the 1860s.There is no exact parallel between this development of Darwin's religious views and the development of his ideas on evolution, but there is a general correspondence. When he believed in a plan of creation, Darwin's theory of transmutation did not depend on struggle or the selection of chance variations. Adaptation was, for him, an automatic response to environmental chance. From late 1838 to 1859 he believed in designed laws and chance, and this belief, too, has its parallel in his theory. The element of chance in natural selection meant that there could be no detailed plan,in which even man's idea of God would be a necessary outcome of nature's laws (man himself is not a necessary outcome of the working of natural selection).80 But Darwin still believed nature was programmed to achieve certain general ends. We might say that he believed in a general, though not a special, teleology. Natural selection was for him a law to maximize utility, creating useful organs, retaining vestiges for future use. For many years it was a law designed to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environments. Only later did Darwin come to doubt even this sort of design in nature.81 One way of describing the development of Darwin's evolutionary thought is to say that it shows a gradual abandoning of his “theistic” assumptions, so that by the late 1860s his theory was informed to a slighter extent by notions of purpose and design than it was in 1838 or 1844 or 1859. (shrink)

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE).

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page 18-20, January 2012.

Psychology, no less, than Psycho-Analysis claims to be a science. Notwithstanding that, its explanations are more probably characterized by its aesthetic nature. Moreover, the compelling dimension belongs intrinsically to the Freudian theory. This, however, doesn't argue against a systematical study of its concepts.Tanto a psicologia como a psicanálise têm a pretensão de serem ciências. Contudo, suas explicações parecem ser mais estéticas do que científicas. Em Freud, a dimensão da persuasão é parte inerente de sua teoria. O que não impede, contudo, (...) que se possam determinar com precisão os movimentos internos dos seus conceitos. (shrink)

Globalization, in its earlier stages, was expected to erode national and ethnic identities. In contrast, ethnicity and ethnic affiliations persisted, growing socially and politically. This paper examines the role of the globalizing new communications technologies on this process, focusing on Diasporas. The study of trans-state networks based on ethnic solidarity, connections and affinities in the framework of social and political science is quite recent. Following a clarification of the distinction between classical and modern Diasporas we analyse a particular case study, (...) that of the Jewish Diaspora. This diaspora was an early adopter of computer-based communications and the Internet for a wide range of purposes. Early events are described including the diffusion of the Internet to Israel, the planning of a Global Jewish Information Network, Israel 2020 macro scenarios for Israel and the Jewish People and the decision on Jewish Peoplehood through communication technologies. A survey of historical systems follows by a description of the Jewish population and the wide variety of Jewish Web based activities today. These include the Institutional landscape; Jewish media — press, radio, video and blogs; the impact on Jewish religious observance; Jewish genealogy; Online dating; Social networks; Jewish education; Online learning; Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities; Jewish memory. Judaica Europeana supports the activities previously described by aggregating and facilitating the access and the re-use of Jewish digital culture. Europeana is the leading global digital library for cultural heritage as well as a lively eco-system for relevant stakeholders. (shrink)

This essay evaluates the moral logic of ‘liberal eugenics’: the ideal of genetic control which leaves decisions about what sort of people to produce in the hands of individual parents, absent government intervention. I argue that liberal eugenics cannot be justified on the basis of the underlying liberal theory which inspires it. I introduce an alternative to Rawls's social primary goods that might be called natural primary goods: hereditable mental and physical capacities and dispositions that are valued across a range (...) of projects and pursuits. I suggest that reproductive genetic biotechnologies like embryo selection, cellular surgery, and genetic engineering, which aim to enhance ‘general purpose’ traits in offspring are less like childrearing practices a liberal government leaves to the discretion of parents than like practices the state makes compulsory. I argue that if the liberal commitment to autonomy is important enough for the state to mandate childrearing practices such as health care and basic education, that very same interest is important enough for the state to mandate safe, effective, and functionally integrated genetic practices that act on analogous all‐purpose traits such as resistance to disease and general cognitive functioning. I conclude that the liberal case for compulsory eugenics is a reductio against liberal theory. (shrink)

In 2005 the author introduced networks which allow attacks on attacks of any level. So if a → b reads a attacks 6, then this attack can itself be attacked by another node c. This attack itself can attack another node d. This situation can be iterated to any level with attacks and nodes attacking other attacks and other nodes. In this paper we provide semantics (of extensions) to such networks. We offer three different approaches to obtaining semantics. 1. The (...) translation approach This uses the methodology of ' Logic by translation'. We translate faithfully the new networks into ordinary Dung networks with more nodes and extract the semantics from the translation. 2. The labelling approach This method regards the arrows as additional entities to be attacked and to mount attacks and applies a variation of the usual machinery of Camindada like labelling to the network. The new concept we need to employ here is that of 'joint attacks'. 3. The logic programming approach We translate the higher level network into a logic program and obtain semantics for it through known semantics for logic programs. We then compare our methods with those of S. Modgil and P. M. Dung et al. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 45-47.

Intellectual property (IP) offices and courts around the world are debating whether machines are similar enough to humans in terms of their consciousness and creativity to be eligible for inventors...

Философ, который подобным образом озаглавил свою работу, тем самым утверждает, что он знает, как выглядит непротиворечивая онтология, теория познания, что такое реальность, как, скажем, решается проблема непротиворечивости математики и т.д.

Earlier investigations of the hormonal control of vitellogenin (egg‐yolk protein) synthesis in mosquitoes relied on microsurgical manipulations to identify organs that secrete the various hormones that stimulate or inhibit vitellogenesis. Advances in the last 10 years, using radioimmunoassays, HPLC, mass spectrometry and tissue‐culture incubations, have shown that the control mechanism involves a complex interaction between ecdysteroids, juvenile hormones and peptide hormones.