Mechanistic models are built using knowledge as the primary information source, with well-established biological and physical laws determining the causal relationships within the model. Once the causal structure of the model is determined, parameters must be defined in order to accurately reproduce relevant data. Determining parameters and their values is particularly challenging in the case of models of pathophysiology, for which data for calibration is sparse. Multiple data sources might be required, and data may not be in a uniform or (...) desirable format. We describe a calibration strategy to address the challenges of scarcity and heterogeneity of calibration data. Our strategy focuses on parameters whose initial values cannot be easily derived from the literature, and our goal is to determine the values of these parameters via calibration with constraints set by relevant data. When combined with a covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy, this step-by-step approach can be applied to a wide range of biological models. We describe a stepwise, integrative and iterative approach to multiscale mechanistic model calibration, and provide an example of calibrating a pathophysiological lung adenocarcinoma model. Using the approach described here we illustrate the successful calibration of a complex knowledge-based mechanistic model using only the limited heterogeneous datasets publicly available in the literature. (shrink)

Against the background of the Deweyan tradition of Democracy and Education, we discuss problems of complexity and reductionism in education and educational philosophy. First, we investigate some of Dewey’s own criticisms of reductionist tendencies in the educational traditions, theories, and practices of his time. Secondly, we explore some important cases of reductionism in the educational debates of our own day and argue that a similar criticism in behalf of democracy and education is appropriate and can easily be based on Deweyan (...) terms. Thirdly, we draw some more general conclusions about complexity and reductionism as challenges for democracy and education. Among other things, we argue that powerful social tendencies of capitalist competition and social Darwinism support reductionisms in education and put the democratic project at risk. The tensional relation between democracy and capitalism constitutes a major challenge for educational philosophy in our own time as much as in Dewey’s. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic theory can be regarded as a cogent extension of commonsense psychology by interpretive means internal to it.

In recent discussions of the so-called “value of truth,” it is assumed that what is valuable in the relevant way is not the things that are true, but only various states and activities associated with those things: knowing them, investigating them, etc. I consider all the arguments I know of for this assumption, and argue that none provide good reason to accept it. By examining these arguments, we gain a better appreciation of what the value of the things that are (...) true would be, and why it would matter. We also encounter three indications that what is true really is valuable, each of which provides a promising starting point for a serious argument with that conclusion. (shrink)

Mark Mason, in his ‘A Justification, After the Postmodern Turn, of Universal Ethical Principles and Educational Ideals’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37 , attempts to justify transcultural multiculturalism. In this paper I argue that he fails to refute moral relativism, and that multiculturalism as he interprets it is not morally acceptable.

Mark Mason, in his ‘A Justification, After the Postmodern Turn, of Universal Ethical Principles and Educational Ideals’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37 (2005), attempts to justify transcultural multiculturalism. In this paper I argue that he fails to refute moral relativism, and that multiculturalism as he interprets it is not morally acceptable.

Psychoanalysis provides the best explanation of a range of empirical phenomena; epistemic criics do not take this fully into account.

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

When we start with the wrong question, no matter how good an answer we get, it won’t give us the results we want. Rather than joining the throngs who are asking, When will this economic crisis be over? Jim Wallis says the right question to ask is How will this crisis change us? The worst thing we can do now, Wallis tells us, is to go back to normal. Normal is what got us into this situation. We need a new (...) normal, and this economic crisis is an invitation to discover what that means. Some of the principles Wallis unpacks for our new normal are . . . • Spending money we don’t have for things we don’t need is a bad foundation for an economy or a family. • It’s time to stop keeping up with the Joneses and start making sure the Joneses are okay. • The values of commercials and billboards are not the things we want to teach our children. • Care for the poor is not just a moral duty but is critical for the common good. • A healthy society is a balanced society in which markets, the government, and our communities all play a role. • The operating principle of God’s economy says that there is enough if we share it. • And much, much more . . . In the pages of this book, Wallis provides us with a moral compass for this new economy—one that will guide us on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street. Embracing a New Economy Getting back to "the way things were" is not an option. It is time we take our economic uncertainty and use it to find some moral clarity. Too often we have been ruled by the maxims that greed is good, it’s all about me, and I want it now. Those can be challenged only with some of our oldest and best values—enough is enough, we are in it together, and thinking not just for tomorrow but for future generations. Jim Wallis shows that the solution to our problems will be found only as individuals, families, friends, churches, mosques, synagogues, and entire communities wrestle with the question of values together. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what (...) is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. ( 2014 ) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to minimize (...) FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection. (shrink)

If an asymmetry in time does not arise from the fundamental dynamical laws of physics, it may be found in special boundary conditions. The argument normally goes that since thermodynamic entropy in the past is lower than in the future according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then tracing this back to the time around the Big Bang means the universe must have started off in a state of very low thermodynamic entropy: the Thermodynamic Past Hypothesis. In this paper, we (...) consider another boundary condition that plays a similar role, but for the decoherent arrow of time, i.e. the quantum state of the universe is more mixed in the future than in the past. According to what we call the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, the initial quantum state of the universe had very low entanglement entropy. We clarify the content of the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, compare it with the Thermodynamic Past Hypothesis, and identify some challenges and open questions for future research. (shrink)

Some public health behavioral intervention research studies involve deception. A methodological imperative to minimize bias can be in conflict with the ethical principle of informed consent. As a case study, we examine the specific forms of deception used in three online randomized controlled trials evaluating brief alcohol interventions. We elaborate our own decision making about the use of deception in these trials, and present our ongoing findings and uncertainties. We discuss the value of the approach of pragmatism for examining these (...) kinds of ethical issues that can arise in research on public health interventions. (shrink)

Scientists obtain a great deal of the evidence they use by observingnatural and experimentally generated objects and effects. Much of thestandard philosophical literature on this subject comes from20th century logical positivists and empiricists, theirfollowers, and critics who embraced their issues and accepted some oftheir assumptions even as they objected to specific views. Theirdiscussions of observational evidence tend to focus on epistemologicalquestions about its role in theory testing. This entry follows theirlead even though observational evidence also plays important andphilosophically interesting roles (...) in other areas including scientificdiscovery and the application of scientific theories to practicalproblems. (shrink)

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. (...) This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it i... (shrink)

This article argues for a task-based approach to identifying and individuating cognitive systems. The agent-based extended cognition approach faces a problem of cognitive bloat and has difficulty accommodating both sub-individual cognitive systems ("scaling down") and some supra-individual cognitive systems ("scaling up"). The standard distributed cognition approach can accommodate a wider variety of supra-individual systems but likewise has difficulties with sub-individual systems and faces the problem of cognitive bloat. We develop a task-based variant of distributed cognition designed to scale up and (...) down smoothly while providing a principled means of avoiding cognitive bloat. The advantages of the task-based approach are illustrated by means of two parallel case studies: re-representation in the human visual system and in a biomedical engineering laboratory. (shrink)

Philosophy of religion is a highly diversified field. An apt description of it is “zoo.” It conjures imagery of a species-wide cacophony of sights and sounds. While some bemoan what this description implies, contributors to this volume appreciate it. There is no reason why a zoo should intimate a den of confusion rather than an important condition of emergence and novelty. “Polyphonic” is the catchall term to capture this sentiment. It signals a way of thinking that resists the desire to (...) siphon insight into manageable packets of information in the name of historicality and finitude. A polyphonic, then, is a variegated and discontinuous study that breaks with a tradition that desires continuity and unification, without being erratic. This volume is an exercise in polyphonic thinking. Each contributing scholar develops ideas in connection with his or her research interests. Despite the fluctuation of themes, symmetry exists as each piece sounds off a core melody of religion and the divine. The book contributes to the advancement of current research in contemporary Continental philosophy of religion. By juxtaposing articles by cultural theorists and philosophers of religion, religionists and theologians, the book emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary and polyphonic conversation to the development of matters of topical interest and issues related to method and ethics in religious studies, and theology. (shrink)

Wallis draws on his experience in urban ghettos to show why traditional liberal and conservative options that emphasize either social justice or personal values fall short. He looks outside the traditional corridors of power to find solutions. Foreword by Garry Wills Preface by Cornel West.

In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments. In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.

Recent developments in ethics and postmodemist epistemology have set the stage for a reconceptualization of environmental ethics. In this paper, I sketch a path for postmodemism which makes use of certain notions current in contemporary environmentalism. At the center of my thought is the idea of place: (1) place as the context of our lives and the setting in which ethical deliberation takes place; and (2)the epistemological function of place in the construction of our understandings of self, community, and world. (...) Central to these themes, in tum, are the related notions of myth, narrative, storied residence, and ethical vernacular. (shrink)

Crispin Wright offers superassertibility as an anti-realist explication of truth. A statement is superassertible, roughly, if there is a state of information available which warrants it and it is warranted by all achievable enlargements of that state of information. However, it is argued, Wright fails to take account of the fact that many of our test procedures are not sure fire, even when applied under ideal conditions. An alternative conception of superassertibility is constructed to take this feature into account. However, (...) it is then argued that when this revised concept of superassertibility is taken as the truth predicate of probability statements, statements whose test procedures are paradigmatically not sure fire, then any anti-realist theory of the sense of such probability statements cannot be compositional, in Dummett's sense of compositional. (shrink)

l examine the degree to which the so-called “deep ecology” movement embodies a feminist sensibility. In part one I take a brief look at the ambivalent attitude of “eco-feminism” toward deep ecology. In part two I show that this ambivalence sterns largely from the fact that deep ecology assimilates feminist insights to a basically masculine ethical orientation. In part three I discuss some of the ways in which deepecology theory might change if it adopted a fundamentally feminist ethical orientation.

Nurses working in outreach capacities frequently encounter disaffiliated or ‘hard to reach’ populations, such as those experiencing homelessness, those who use substances, and those with mental health concerns. Despite best efforts, nurses regularly fail to find meaningful engagement with these populations. Mobilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will critically examine conventional outreach nursing practices as rooted in the royal science of psychiatry, which many ‘survivors’ of psychiatric interventions reject. The field of Mad Studies offers an understanding of (...) patient resistance to outreach nursing interventions. Delueze and Guattari's concepts of packs and sorcerers provide a framework to envision alternative nursing practices as a form of resistance and creativity, where new alliances may be formed outside the coercive confines of traditional practices. In response to patient resistance, outreach nurses themselves must assemble packs and engage in acts of sorcery. (shrink)

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

Throughout philosophical history, there has been a recurring argument to the effect that determinism, naturalism, or both are self-referentially incoherent. By accepting determinism or naturalism, one allegedly acquires a reason to reject determinism or naturalism. _The Epistemological Skyhook_ brings together, for the first time, the principal expressions of this argument, focusing primarily on the last 150 years. This book addresses the versions of this argument as presented by Arthur Lovejoy, A.E. Taylor, Kurt Gödel, C.S. Lewis, Norman Malcolm, Karl Popper, J.R. (...) Lucas, William Hasker, Thomas Nagel, Alvin Plantinga, and others, along with the objections presented by their many detractors. It concludes by presenting a new version of the argument that synthesizes the best aspects of the others while also rendering the argument immune to some of the most significant objections made to it. (shrink)

This collection of papers derives from a conference on the reception of Aristotle in the Middle Ages held at the University of Alberta in September, 1990, and organized by the editors. They conceived of the conference in the light of a general view of Aristotle and medieval thought, a statement of which may serve as an introduction to the papers which follow.Within the Greek philosophical tradition Aristotle's works became the focus of commentary and discussion; they became, furthermore, the texts of (...) instruction, particularly in logic. Some scholars, of a Neo-Platonist orientation, sought to harmonize the teachings of Plato and Aristotle and to deliver those teachings as a single science or body of knowledge. (shrink)

Recovery is a model of care in (forensic) mental health settings across Western nations that aims to move past the paternalistic and punitive models of institutional care of the 20th century and toward more patient‐centered approaches. But as we argue in this paper, the recovery‐oriented services that evolved out of the early stages of this liberating movement signaled a shift in nursing practices that cannot be viewed only as improvements. In effect, as “recovery” nursing practices became more established, more codified, (...) and more institutional(ized), a stasis developed. Recovery had been reterritorialized. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the threads of recovery, from its early days of antipsychiatry activism to its codification into mental health—including forensic mental health—institutions through the lens of poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. We believe that Deleuze and Guattari's scholarship provides the necessary, albeit uncomfortable, framework for this critical examination. From a conceptualization of recovery as an assemblage, we critically examine how we can go about creating something new, caught in a tension between stasis and change. (shrink)

Through an unusual blend of biography, philosophy, and history, James Miller shows how a solitary dreamer came to inspire a generation of radicals, profoundly ...

The paper describes four dialogue systems, developed in the tradition of Charles Hamblin. The first system provides an answer for Achilles in Lewis Carroll's parable, the second an analysis of the fallacy of begging the question, the third a non-psychologistic account of conversational implicature, and the fourth an analysis of equivocation and of objections to it. Each avoids combinatorial explosions, and is intended for real-time operation.