Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum is a known figure in philosophy of probability of the 1930s. A previously unpublished manuscript fills in the blanks in the full picture of her work on inductive reasoning by analogy, until now only accessible through a single publication. In this paper, I present Hosiasson’s work on analogical reasoning, bringing together her early publications that were never translated from Polish, and the recently discovered unpublished work. I then show how her late work relates to (...) Rudolf Carnap’s approach to “analogy by similarity” developed in the 1960s. Hosiasson turns out to be a predecessor of the line of research that models analogical influence as inductive relevance. A translation of Hosiasson’s manuscript concludes the paper. (shrink)

I.J. Good's ``On the Principle of Total Evidence" (1967) looms large in decision theory and Bayesian epistemology. Good proves that in Savage's (1954) decision theory, a coherent agent always prefers to collect, rather than ignore, free evidence. It is now well known that Good's result was prefigured in an unpublished note by Frank Ramsey (Skyrms 2006). The present paper highlights another early forerunner to Good's argument, appearing in Janina Hosiasson's ``Why do We Prefer Probabilities Relative to Many Data?" (...) (1931), that has been neglected in the literature. Section 1 reviews Good's argument and the problem it was meant to resolve; call this the \textit{value of evidence problem}. Section 2 offers a brief history of the value of evidence problem and provides biographical background to contextualize Hosiasson's contribution. Section 3 explicates the central argument of Hosiasson's paper and considers its relationship to Good's (1967). (shrink)

In the recent philosophical literature on inquiry, epistemologists point out that their subject has often begun at the point at which you already have your evidence and then focussed on identifying the beliefs for which that evidence provides justification. But we are not mere passive recipients of evidence. While some comes to us unbidden, we often actively collect it. This has long been recognised, but typically epistemologists have taken the norms that govern inquiry to be practical, not epistemic. The recent (...) literature challenges this assumption and uncovers a rich range of questions about the epistemic normativity of inquiry. In this paper, I approach these questions from the formal side of epistemology. Developing out of the philosophy of science, as it did, this branch of epistemology has long discussed inquiry. And, building on the insights of Janina Hosiasson (1931), David Blackwell (1951), and I. J. Good (1967), it has produced a reasonably well-developed framework in which to understand norms of inquiry, both epistemic and practical. In the first half of the paper, I will present the pragmatic versions of this framework due to Hosiasson, Blackwell, and Good, and the epistemic version due to Graham Oddie (1997); in the second half of the paper, I put this framework to work, turning to some of the questions from the recent debate about inquiry and asking how the framework can help us answer them. Questions will include: When should we initiate an inquiry, when should we continue it, when should we conclude it, and when should we reopen it? How should we understand Julia Staffel's distinction between transitional attitudes and terminal attitudes (Staffel 2021a,b)? How do epistemic norms of inquiry relate to epistemic norms of belief or credence, and can they conflict (Friedman 2020)? And how should we understand the epistemic error that occurs when someone is resistant to evidence (Simion 2023)? (shrink)

Probabilistic epistemology holds that probability is an essential ingredient of science and human knowledge at large, and that induction is a necessary constituent of the scientific method. Developed in some detail by a number of authors including Patrick Suppes, Richard Jeffrey and Brian Skyrms, this view has been embraced by so many, as to gradually become predominant. While probabilistic epistemology has been growing, awareness of its origins was somehow left behind. Probabilistic epistemology is usually seen as a product of the (...) encounter of logical empiricism with American pragmatism. Without denying the impact of such an encounter, it is argued that the probabilistic approach was already part of the European scenario before the dissolution of logical empiricism in the late 1930s. Notably, such an approach is not linked to a particular interpretation of probability, having been endorsed by upholders of different probability notions, including Janina Hosiasson, Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, Harold Jeffreys, and Hans Reichenbach, to mention only those authors whose contribution is addressed here. The list could extend to the French probabilists Émile Borel and Maurice Fréchet, and others not considered in this survey. The work of so many authors operating at the four corners of Europe in the first decades of the 19th century reflects a European tradition in probabilistic epistemology, somewhat overshadowed in the literature by the attention paid to logical empiricism. (shrink)

Le premier Congrès pour l’unité de la science qui s’est tenu à Paris en 1935 comprenait deux sessions, consacrées l’une à l’induction, l’autre aux probabilités. Des représentants éminents du mouvement pour une philosophie scientifique ont présenté des communications dans ces sessions: dans la première sont intervenus Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick et Rudolf Carnap, dans la seconde, Reichenbach, Bruno de Finetti, Zygmunt Zawirski, Schlick et Janina Hosiasson, — dans cet ordre. Les sujets abordés concernaient la nature des lois scientifiques, (...) le problème du sens et le principe de l’empirisme, ainsi que des questions connexes portant sur la confirmation des hypothèses scientifiques. Sur la nature des probabilités, les principales interprétations étaient représentées, à savoir le logicisme, le fréquentisme et le subjectivisme. Fut également examinée la possibilité de construire une logique probabiliste. Ce chapitre passe en revue les différentes contributions présentées dans ces deux sessions, à partir du texte publié dans les actes du Congrès. (shrink)

Le premier Congrès pour l’unité de la science (Congrès international de philosophie scientifique) qui s’est tenu à Paris en 1935 comprenait deux sessions, consacrées l’une à l’induction, l’autre aux probabilités. Des représentants éminents du mouvement pour une philosophie scientifique ont présenté des communications dans ces sessions: dans la première sont intervenus Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick et Rudolf Carnap, dans la seconde, Reichenbach, Bruno de Finetti, Zygmunt Zawirski, Schlick et Janina Hosiasson, — dans cet ordre. Les sujets abordés concernaient (...) la nature des lois scientifiques, le problème du sens et le principe de l’empirisme, ainsi que des questions connexes portant sur la confirmation des hypothèses scientifiques. Sur la nature des probabilités, les principales interprétations étaient représentées, à savoir le logicisme, le fréquentisme et le subjectivisme. Fut également examinée la possibilité de construire une logique probabiliste. Ce chapitre passe en revue les différentes contributions présentées dans ces deux sessions, à partir du texte publié dans les actes du Congrès. (shrink)

We explore ways in which purely qualitative belief change in the AGM tradition throws light on options in the treatment of conditional probability. First, by helping see why it can be useful to go beyond the ratio rule defining conditional from one-place probability. Second, by clarifying what is at stake in different ways of doing that. Third, by suggesting novel forms of conditional probability corresponding to familiar variants of qualitative belief change, and conversely. Likewise, we explain how recent work on (...) the qualitative part of probabilistic inference leads to a very broad class of 'proto-probability' functions. (shrink)

This book contributes to the analysis of film from a multimodal and textual perspective by extending formal semantics into the realm of multimodal discourse analysis. It accounts for both the inferential as well as intersemiotic meaning making processes in filmic discourse and therefore addresses one of the main questions that have been asked within film theory and multimodal analysis: How do we understand film and multimodal texts? The book offers an analytical answer to this question by providing a systematic tool (...) for the description of this comprehension process. It aims to advance knowledge of the various resources in filmic texts, the ways the resources work together in constructing meaning and the ways people understand this meaning construction. This new approach to film interpretation is thus able to remodel and improve the classical paradigm of film text analysis. (shrink)

Recent discussions on corporate citizenship highlight the new political role of corporations in society by arguing that corporations increasingly act as quasi-governmental actors and take on what hitherto had originally been governmental tasks. By examining political and sociological citizenship theories, the authors show that such a corporate engagement can be explained by a changing conception of corporate citizens from corporate bourgeois to corporate citoyen. As an intermediate actor in society, the corporate citoyen assumes co-responsibilities for social and civic affairs and (...) actively collaborates with fellow citizens beyond governmental regulation. This change raises the question of how such corporate civic engagement can be aligned with public policy regulations and how corporate activities can be integrated into the democratic regime. To clarify the mode of CC contributions to society, the authors will apply the tenet of subsidiarity as a governing principle which allows for specifying corporations’ tasks as intermediate actors in society. By referring to the renewed European Union strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility, the authors show how such a subsidiary corporate-governmental task-sharing can be organized. (shrink)

How will the Holocaust be remembered as its survivors disappear? In this article Janina Bauman reflects upon her own work on the Holocaust in the context of the Holocaust's broader reception. She offers her own views about the genre with reference to contemporary documents and testimonials, secondary work, scholarly work, fiction and film. These observations and stories all circulate around her own 1986 landmark text, Winter in the Morning.

In response to stakeholder pressure, companies increasingly make ambitious forward-looking sustainability commitments. They then draw on corporate policies with varying degrees of alignment to disseminate and enforce corresponding behavioral rules among their suppliers and business partners. This goal-based turn in private sustainability governance has important implications for its likely environmental and social outcomes. Drawing on paradox theory, this article uses a case study of zero-deforestation commitments in the Indonesian palm oil sector to argue that goal-based private sustainability governance’s characteristics set (...) the stage for two types of paradoxes to emerge: performing paradoxes between environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals, and organizing paradoxes between cooperation and competition approaches. Companies’ responses to these paradoxes, in turn, can explain the lack of full goal attainment and differential rates of progress between actors. These results draw our attention to the complexities hidden behind governance through goal setting in the corporate space, and raise important questions about the viability of similar strategies such as science-based targets and net-zero goals. (shrink)

This article suggests that the best available normative framework for guiding conduct in war rests on categories that do not echo the terms of an individual rights-based morality, but acknowledge the impossibility of rendering warfare fully morally justified. Avoiding the undue moralization of conduct in war is an imperative for a normative framework that strives to actually give behavioral guidance to combatants, most of whom will inevitably be ignorant of the moral status of the individuals they encounter on the battlefield (...) and will often be uncertain or mistaken about the justice of their own cause. We identify the requirement of military necessity, applied on the basis of what we refer to as the “St. Petersburg assumption”, as the main principle according to which a combatant should act, regardless of which side or in which battlefield encounter she finds herself. This pragmatic normative framework enjoys moral traction for three reasons: first, in the circumstances of war it protects human life to a certain extent; second, it makes no false claims about the moral justification of individual conduct in combat operations; and, third, it fulfills morally important functions of law. However, the criterion of military necessity interpreted on the basis of the St. Petersburg assumption does not directly replicate fundamental moral prescriptions about the preservation of individual rights. (shrink)

Fidelity as a moral value which may qualify persons or determinate modes of behaviour is discussed. Some examples of fidelity are given to show that fidelity may have various forms depending on whom or what it concerns and how deeply one is engaged. Fidelity is determined as a personal value consisting in a persistent approval of some chosen ensembles of values, in connection with the willingness to serve them in the way required by them in various situations. If fidelity is (...) one of moral values there are applicable to it all the statements concerning moral values in general. The difference between fidelity and other moral values lies in the qualitative specificity which may be grasped intuitively. The realization of fidelity must be accomplished consciously and the corresponding acts must spring from the centre of our „ego”. The fidelity to the ensembles of values preferred to others should not violate the objective hierarchy of values, i.e., it should appear within orderly relations to the whole system of values. (shrink)

How do civilians react to being harmed in war? Existing studies argue that civilian casualties are strategically costly because civilian populations punish a belligerent who kills civilians and support the latter's opponent. Relying on eighty-seven semi-structured interviews with victims of coalition attacks in Afghanistan, this article shows that moral principles inform civilians’ attitudes toward their own harming. Their attitudes may therefore vary with the perceived circumstances of an attack. Civilians’ perception of harm as unintended and necessary, in accordance with the (...) moral principles of distinction and necessity, was associated with narratives that cast an attack as relatively more legitimate and with a partial or full release of the coalition from blame. The principle of proportionality, which requires that civilian casualties are caused in pursuit of a legitimate war aim, informed their abstract attitudes toward civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Two rules of international law, which accord with the moral principles of distinction and necessity, were reflected in the civilians’ attitudes. The legal rule of proportionality, which diverges from the namesake moral principle, failed to resonate with the civilians. The article explores whether compliance with the legal rules of distinction and necessity can contribute to mitigating the strategic costs of civilian casualties. (shrink)

The transcription factor NF‐κB (p65/p50) plays a central role in the coordination of cellular responses by activating the transcription of numerous target genes. The precise role of the dynamics of NF‐κB signalling in regulating gene expression is still an open question. Here, we show that besides external stimulation intracellular parameters can influence the dynamics of NF‐κB. By applying mathematical modelling and bifurcation analyses, we show that NF‐κB is capable of exhibiting different types of dynamics in response to the same stimulus. (...) We identified the total NF‐κB concentration and the IκBα transcription rate constant as two critical parameters that modulate the dynamics and the fold change of NF‐κB. Both parameters might vary as a result of cell‐to‐cell variability. The regulation of the IκBα transcription rate constant, e.g. by co‐factors, provides the possibility of regulating the NF‐κB dynamics by crosstalk. (shrink)

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need (...) to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots. (shrink)

This volume of essays studies the problem of transition in economics from a historical perspective. It uses historical ideas and theories in a modern context to examine economic thought. It aims to show that social and historical context are important when considering economic transitions.