Eric Barnes’ The Paradox of Predictivism is concerned primarily with two facts: predictivism (the fact that novel predictions play an important part in scientificconfirmation) and pluralism (the fact that scientific development is not just a matter of isolated individuals judging the truth, but at least partly a matter of trusting legitimate experts). In the middle part of the book, he peers through these two lenses at the tired realist scarecrow of the no-miracles argument. He attempts to reanimate this weatherworn realist (...) argument, contra suggestions by people like me that it should be abandoned. In this paper, I want to get clear on Barnes’ contribution to the debate. He focuses on what he calls the miraculous endorsement argument, which explains not the success of a specific theory but instead the history of successes for an entire research program. The history of successes is explained by reliable and improving methods, which are the flipside of approximately true background theories. Yet, as Barnes notes, the whole story must begin with methods that are at least minimally reliable. Barnes demands that the realist explain the origin of the minimally reliable take-off point, and he suggests a way that the realist might do so. I contend that his explanation still relies on contingent developments and so fails to completely explain the development of take-off theories. However, this line of argument digs into familiar details of the no-miracles argument and overlooks what’s new in Barnes’ approach. By calling attention to pluralism, he reminds us that we need an account of scientific expertise. This is important, I suggest, because expertise is not indefinite. We do not trust specific experts for everything, but only for things within the bounds of their expertise. Drawing these boundaries relies on our own background theories and is only likely to be reliable if our background theories are approximately true. I argue, then, that pluralism gives us reason to be realists (about some things). (shrink)

Defect detection is a major concern in quality control of various products in industries. This paper presents two different machine-vision based methods for detecting defects on periodically patterned textures. In the first method, input defective image is split into several blocks of size same as the size of the periodic unit of the image and chi-square histogram distances of each periodic block with respect to itself and all other periodic blocks are calculated to get a dissimilarity matrix. This dissimilarity matrix (...) is subjected to Ward's hierarchical clustering to automatically identify defective and defect-free blocks. The second method of defect detection is based on Universal Quality Index which is a measure of loss of correlation, luminance distortion and contrast distortion between any two signals. Quality indices of a periodic block with respect to itself and all other periodic blocks are calculated to get a similarity matrix containing quality indices. Specific variances of the periodic blocks are derived from the quality index matrix through orthogonal factor model based on eigen decomposition. These variances are subjected to Ward's hierarchical clustering to automatically identify defective and defect-free blocks. Results of experiments on real fabric images with defects show that the defect detection methods based on chi-square histogram distance and universal quality index yield a success rate of 98.6% and 97.8% respectively. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prufrock's Question and Roquentin's AnswerWilliam IrwinThere could not be two more different literary figures than the right-wing, religious T. S. Eliot and the left-wing, atheistic Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet there are striking connections between their first major publications, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and Nausea (1938). Eliot was aware of and critical of Sartre, especially in the commentary on No Exit in The Cocktail Party, and, no (...) doubt, Sartre became aware of Eliot.1 But as far as can be gleaned, Sartre did not read Eliot's Prufrock, prior to the publication of Nausea, despite his connection to Adrienne Monnier, the French translator of the poem. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir documents the couple's reading habits in some detail in The Prime of Life, including their admiration for Hemingway and Faulkner during that time, but there is no mention of Eliot or Prufrock.2Both the poem and the novel present us with subjective, mood-laden impressions of the internal melancholic lives of their protagonists. Like Prufrock, Roquentin admits "My passion was dead."3Nausea is presented as a diary intended to be read by no one, and Prufrock is presented as a self-confession that no one is to hear. As Guido da Montefeltro in the poem's epigram is willing to speak to Dante because he believes Dante will never return to share what he has heard with the living, so Prufrock is solipsistically introspecting. The "you" of "Let us go then, you and I" is likely Prufrock addressing himself. But if it is addressed to another person, it can only be a reader who is as hopeless as he is, with no chance of return or redemption—only such a reader would really understand what is said. The final line of the poem "Till human voices wake us, and we drown" takes us back to the "patient etherized upon a table." Like Roquentin, Prufrock has taken himself and the reader [End Page 184] by proxy on an inner journey, a dream-like state in which the real and surreal come together.In the opening stanza of the poem, Prufrock describes his internal cityscape as including "Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question... / Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'" The question is mentioned twice more, but it is never articulated. Obviously it is an issue of great existential import concerning the meaning of life. Though Prufrock does not verbalize it, the question must be essentially Roquentin's question to himself: "Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?" (p. 177).As we shall see, even though Sartre's philosophy as developed in Nausea and crystallized in Being and Nothingness comes later and likely with no knowledge of Prufrock, the philosophy can still shed light on the poem—and in a way that in turn elucidates the philosophy.4IMeaning for Sartre is found in existence itself, emerging through the coloring and conceptualization of consciousness.5 While this does not necessarily imply the stereotypical existential view that life is bleak, meaningless, and possibly not worth living, this does nevertheless seem to be the conclusion that Roquentin draws early in Nausea. Consider this dark concern: "My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?" (p. 86). Early in the novel Roquentin concludes "Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition" (p. 39). This life as Roquentin describes it sounds eerily like the humdrum pointless existence of Prufrock, who has measured out his life with coffee spoons and spit out the butt-ends of his days and ways amidst the monotony of women who come and go talking of Michelangelo—a great man he resembles not at all.Later in the novel Roquentin admits "And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of (...) the deepest problems facing modern industrial man. He could not believe that they could be solved, either by "demagogic plutocracy" or by orthodox Marxism. Hence he sought to synthesize Vico, Proudhon, Marx, and Bergson in a new movement that should be both liberal and revolutionary and heroically virtuous. The strongest influence upon his thinking, says Goriely, came from Vico, from whom he borrowed "the fundamental idea of his whole work: "Man does not know what he does' " (105). History can therefore be rational only after it has happened: "The future is the field in which we use our imaginations, not our understandings" (109). That Sorel anticipated many twentieth-century developments in philosophy and politics, there can be no doubt. The author says that he was "the first philosopher in France who sought not only to locate man in history and society, but also to locate history and society in man, to give them a significance which may be called existential" (148). Before William James's pragmatism reached European shores, Sorel had made such statements as "Science is a means of verifying the possibility of acting in a certain manner." 1Even some of his pessimistic fears anticipated such developments as Burnham's "managerial revolution," at the same time that he welcomed the growth of industrial techniques in other hands (155). Professor Goriely's careful tracing of Sorel's profusion of suggestions for the ethical redemption of mankind in a machine age reveals the unreconciled contradictions in his pluralism. In the R~[lexions he could resolve the conflicts of myth versus utopia, force versus violence, liberalism versus absolutism, says Goriely, only "'by a conceptual jugglery.., which sets the mind's teeth on edge rather than stimulates it" (200). Caught between the poles of an attachment to historical tradition and to liberty, Sorel celebrated the constant tension between the two. Man lives only to create; he "has no other end than the creative ~lan itself. Born of liberty, history can never block its course.., it is always a point of departure toward the future.... Human institutions, the products of an infinity of obscure causes, never realize any universal moral principle. They live in the relative, which man ought to accept with moderation and a sense of the limits of the possible, without ever losing the sense of the unlimited" (222). HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College 1Georges Sorel, "Storia e scienza sociale," Rivista itallana di sociologia, March-June, 1902,p. 224. Storia Della Filosofia: La Filosofia del Novecento. By E. Paolo Lamanna. Intuizionismo, filosofia dell'azione e modernismo--Prammatismo--La problematica della scienza--La problematica della storla. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963. 671 pp. 3800 L.) This first of three volumes describing the philosophies of the twentieth century, and the fifth volume in Lamanna's History of Philosophy, is truly a monumental and encyclopedic work. In this volume alone there are concise, clear, scholarly expositions of the important ideas of more than fifty philosophers, including biographical information and bibliographical references. The style is exceptionally intelligible and the organization of even complicated materials is well defined with good headings and with definitions that are intelligible 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY even to a layman. The work is not only very informative but amazingly objective and dispassionate. And despite its disinterestedness it is highly interesting, for it succeeds in presenting each philosopher's ideas as one imagines he would like to present them himself, sympathetically and persuasively. One leaves the book after reading about the achievements of our own little century marvelling at the variety and range of recent achievements. For over and above our follies and horrors, these thinkers emerge as men trying hard and ably to be sane and tell the truth. Lamanna himself emerges as a mind with an extraordinary critical ability to... (shrink)

Scientific realists have suggested that changes in our scientific communities over the course of their history have rendered those communities progressively less vulnerable to the problem of unconcieved alternatives over time. I argue in response not only that the most fundamental historical transformations of the scientific enterprise have generated steadily mounting obstacles to revolutionary, transformative, or unorthodox scientific theorizing, but also that we have substantial independent evidence that the institutional apparatus of contemporary scientific inquiry fosters an exceedingly and increasingly theoretically (...) conservative form of that inquiry. I conclude that contemporary scientific communities are actually more vulnerable to the problem of unconceived alternatives than their historical predecessors, and I briefly suggest how we might seek to pursue scientific inquiry in a less theoretically conservative way. (shrink)

A range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between (...) the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place. (shrink)

The scientist’s decision of accepting a given proposition is assumed to be dependent on two factors: the scientist’s ‘private’ information about the value of that statement and the proportion of colleagues who also accept it. This interdependence is modelled in an economic fashion, and it is shown that it may lead to multiple equilibria. The main conclusions are that the evolution of scientific knowledge can be path-dependent, that scientific revolutions can be due to very small changes in the empirical evidence, (...) and that not all possible equilibria are necessarily efficient, neither in the economic nor in the epistemic sense. These inefficiencies, however, can be eliminated if scientists can form coalitions. (shrink)

Cajetan's treatment of analogy in De Nominum Analogia is well known as the most influential and sophisticated theory of a central issue in Thomistic philosophy. The late twentieth century saw that theory subject to a family of criticisms. If the critics are correct, Cajetan's analogy theory is also significant historically for exposing weaknesses latent in medieval semantic assumptions. According to the critics, the Aristotelian assumptions that words signify by means of discrete “concepts,” and that the meaning of propositions depends on (...) the significations of its component terms, cannot do justice to the complexity, variety, and flexibility of actual human discourse; in De Nominum Analogia they see the elegant structure of classical semantics collapsing under the pressure of analogical language. In this article, I examine these criticisms of Cajetan's analogy theory, and argue that, in light of both Cajetan's semantic principles and his hermeneutic practice, they fall short. The conclusion not only implies a defense of Cajetan's project, but clarifies the general philosophical alternatives available within the traditional Aristotelian semantic framework. (shrink)

Social Ontology encompasses a wide variety of inquiries into the nature, structure and perhaps essence of social phenomena, and their role and place in our world. Topics of research in Social Ontology range from small-scale interactions to large-scale institutions, from spontaneous teamwork to the functioning of formal organizations, and from unintended consequences to institutional design. Social Ontology brings together theoretical work from a large number of disciplines. This rapidly evolving field of research has attracted increasing attention over the last couple (...) of decades, and the conceptual tools recent research in Social Ontology has provided have proved to be useful in a large number of domains, such as the study of the evolution of communication, the structure of social norms, social structure, and social change, the nature of collective responsibility, and the status of corporate agents. The Journal of Social Ontology aims to further this research. It provides a forum of exchange between scholars of diverse disciplinary, scholarly, and methodological backgrounds, and invites submissions from all branches of Social Ontology. The Journal of Social Ontology adopts strict standards of selection and relies heavily on its carefully selected referees. In a world in which publication strategies and outlets are changing at a tremendous pace, it is difficult to say what the future of scholarly publication will look like. With a generous grant from the University of Vienna for the start-up phase, the Journal of Social Ontology now appears as an Open Access Journal with De Gruyter, thus combining professional support by an established publisher with unlimited accessibility. In addition, the Journal of Social Ontology has been founded together with the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS) that supports the work of this journal. We wish to express our thanks to our supporters, contributors, and referees; we hope that our joint effort will grant the work published in this journal the impact it deserves. (shrink)

This paper attempts a reexamination of classical natural law theory and argues that such theory is properly understood as a meta-ethic rather than as a body of norms. As a meta-ethic, it speaks to topics such as ethical reasoning, the movement from descriptive to normative assertions, the use of science in ethics, the extra-legal grounds for judicial decision, judicial activism and the societal basis of law.

Hegel’s early essay called “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” contains his longest analysis of the resurrection of Jesus, which he attributes to the spirit of the early Christian communit y. To represent its practice of the love he taught, the community made him into a god. Furthermore, because it withdrew from life in the world, the communit y knew its love as deficient, and portrayed this defect by adding the separate human individuality of its teacher to his divinity. (...) The risen Christ (both human and divine) lives only in the subjective mind of the communit y, as an expression of its feeling. However, Hegel does recognize divine objectivity in the “one” source of theuniverse, the Father of Jesus. (shrink)

The process of scientific investigation is reconstructed as a process of empirical approximation to the truth. This last concept is explicated as a combination of “degree of simmilarity between theory A and the strongest accepted empirical law at moment t” and the “degree of depth of this empirical law”. A number of methodological theorems are proved, and avision of science closer to sophisticated falsificationism is mathematically deduced from our definitions.

Most commonly, the scientific realism debate is seen as dividing those who do and do not think that the striking empirical and practical successes of at least our best scientific theories indicate with high probability that those theories are ‘approximately true’. But I want to suggest that this characterization of the debate has far outlived its usefulness. Not only does it obscure the central differences between two profoundly different types of contemporary scientific realist, but even more importantly it serves to (...) disguise the most substantial points of actual disagreement between these two kinds of realists and those who instead think the historical record of scientific inquiry itself reveals that such realism is untenable in either form. (shrink)

Originally published in 1936, this book presents the ancient Greek text of the paraphrases and quotations of Zeno's philosophical arguments, together with a facing-page English translation and editorial commentary. Detailed notes are incorporated throughout and a bibliography is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Zeno and ancient philosophy.

J. L. Mackie's famous claim that Locke ‘anticipates’ Kripke's Causal Theory of Reference (CTR) rests, I suggest, upon a pair of important misunderstandings. Contra Mackie, as well as the more recent accounts of Paul Guyer and Michael Ayers, Lockean Real Essences consist of those features of an entity from which all of its experienceable properties can be logically deduced; thus a substantival Real Essence consists of features of a Real Constitution plus logically necessary objective connections between them and features of (...) some particular Nominal Essence. Furthermore, what Locke actually anticipates is the most significant contemporary challenge to the CTR: the qua‐problem. (shrink)

Engineering is 'the people-serving profession'. The work of engineers involves interaction with clients, other engineers, and the public at large. More than any other profession, their work also directly involves and affects the environment. This book makes the case that engineers have special professional obligations to protect and enhance the environment, and the authors - one, an engineer and the other, a philosopher - seek to provide an ethical basis for these obligations. In exploring these ethical issues, the authors aim (...) to show that engineers make a difference. The text opens with a series of case studies in which engineers face complex and challenging decisions about the environment. Succeeding chapters examine different ideas about environmental ethics for engineers, including professional codes and both modern and historical discussions of environmental responsibility. The book concludes with a collection of readings that complement the text. Students, as well as practising engineers, will find much of interest in this well-argued and thought-provoking book. (shrink)

The language of Greek Tragedy can be considered as a whole by virtue of the characteristics which distinguish it from that of other branches of Greek literature, and the resemblance between the three tragedians in this respect is more noticeable than the differences. Still, if we compare Aeschylus and Euripides it is impossible not to feel a marked change of tone, in λ⋯ξις as in δι⋯νοια and ἤθη. As in E. the familiar legends are frequently set in a more everyday (...) atmosphere and the characters cast in a less heroic mould, it is natural that the tone of the language should be lowered, partly by the frequent use of distinctively prosaic expressions and partly by the introduction of what appear to be colloquialisms. This change of tone in language was at once noted by Aristophanes and is referred to by Aristotle as an innovation of E. On the other hand E.'s style presents a certain anomaly, since while deliberately securing a closer approximation to the language of prose and ordinary conversation he also shows a poetic and archaizing tendency in the use of Aeschylean and Homeric words and forms not found in Sophocles. This may be due to a reluctance to depart too far from the poetic tradition of Greek tragedy, and possibly to a scholar's interest in the language of Aeschylus and Homer, in a minor degree a foreshadowing of the learned archaism of the Alexandrian poets. (shrink)

The federal government is funding a sea change in health care by investing in interventions targeting social determinants of health, which are significant contributors to illness and health inequity. This funding power has encouraged states, professional and accreditation organizations, health care entities, and providers to focus heavily on social determinants. We examine how this shift in focus affects clinical practice in the fields of oncology and emergency medicine, and highlight potential areas of reform.

Suppose COVID-19 is the runaway tram in the famous moral thought experiment, known as the “Bystander at the Switch.” Consider the two differentiated responses of governments around the world to this new threat, namely the option of quarantine/lockdown and herd immunity. Can we contrast the hypothetical with the real scenario? What do the institutional decisions and strategies for dealing with the virus, in the beginning of 2020, signify in a normative moral framework? This paper investigates these possibilities in order to (...) highlight the similarities and, more importantly, the differences that exist between utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Analysis shows that the hypothetical scenario can never be fully compared to the complex multifactorial nature of the real world. But if a comparison is attempted, the most obvious difference between the two governmental strategies is the concept of duty within the Kantian perspective. Ultimately, it is a matter of comparing freedom and life. Attributing a moral “priority ticket” to one or the other can be analysed through interpersonal aggregation. (shrink)

I respond to the many thoughtful suggestions and concerns of my commentators on a wide variety of questions. These include whether moral norms form a unified category, whether they have a distinctive phenomenology, and/or whether moral normativity is a cultural construct; whether moral externalization is necessary for correlated interaction or human prosociality; precisely how such externalization generates correlated interactions among prosocial agents; and whether there are any convincing alternative explanations for it.

Wilfrid Sellars famously argued that we find ourselves simultaneously presented with the scientific and manifest images and that the primary aim of philosophy is to reconcile the competing conceptions of ourselves and our place in the world they offer. I first argue that Sellars’ own attempts at such a reconciliation must be judged a failure. I then go on to point out that Sellars has invited us to join him in idealizing and constructing the manifest and scientific images by conflating (...) a number of importantly distinct contrasts between heterogeneous forms of representation we employ and to argue that we are better off declining this invitation. Recognizing the important differences between these contrasts does not simply obviate the problems of integrating, connecting, and reconciling the various sorts of representations we have of various parts of the world and our own place within it, but it reveals as misguided the notion that there is just a single, fundamental problem of such reconciliation to be solved. It also suggests a potentially far more promising starting point for trying to satisfy the fundamental ambition Sellars attributes to philosophical inquiry itself. (shrink)

Davidson’s explanation of first‐person authority in utterance of sentences of the form ‘I V that p’ derives first‐person authority from the requirements of interpretation of speech. His account is committed to the view that utterance sentences are truth‐bearers, that believing that p is a matter of holding true an utterance sentence, and that a speaker’s knowledge of what he means gives him knowledge of what belief he expresses by his utterance. These claims are here faulted. His explanation of first‐person authority (...) by reference to the requirements of interpretability is committed to the view that all understanding involves interpretation. This is argued to be a misconception of understanding and of speaker’s meaning. Davidson’s account involves acceptance of the cognitive assumption that normally when a person Vs that p, he knows that he does. This assumption is challenged. Throughout, Davidson’s conception is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein’s. (shrink)

We analyse the extent of possible computations following Hogarth ([2004]) conducted in Malament–Hogarth (MH) spacetimes, and Etesi and Németi ([2002]) in the special subclass containing rotating Kerr black holes. Hogarth ([1994]) had shown that any arithmetic statement could be resolved in a suitable MH spacetime. Etesi and Németi ([2002]) had shown that some relations on natural numbers that are neither universal nor co-universal, can be decided in Kerr spacetimes, and had asked specifically as to the extent of computational limits there. (...) The purpose of this note is to address this question, and further show that MH spacetimes can compute far beyond the arithmetic: effectively Borel statements (so hyperarithmetic in second-order number theory, or the structure of analysis) can likewise be resolved: Theorem A. If H is any hyperarithmetic predicate on integers, then there is an MH spacetime in which any query ? n H ? can be computed. In one sense this is best possible, as there is an upper bound to computational ability in any spacetime, which is thus a universal constant of that spacetime. Theorem C. Assuming the (modest and standard) requirement that spacetime manifolds be paracompact and Hausdorff, for any spacetime there will be a countable ordinal upper bound, , on the complexity of questions in the Borel hierarchy computable in it. Introduction 1.1 History and preliminaries Hyperarithmetic Computations in MH Spacetimes 2.1 Generalising SADn regions 2.2 The complexity of questions decidable in Kerr spacetimes An Upper Bound on Computational Complexity for Each Spacetime CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)