As artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances, we increasingly delegate mental tasks to machines. However, today’s AI systems usually do these tasks with an unusual imbalance of insight and understanding: new, deeper insights are present, yet many important qualities that a human mind would have previously brought to the activity are utterly absent. Therefore, it is crucial to ask which features of minds have we replicated, which are missing, and if that matters. One core feature that humans bring to tasks, when (...) dealing with the ambiguity, emergent knowledge, and social context presented by the world, is reflection. Yet this capability is completely missing from current mainstream AI. In this paper we ask what reflective AI might look like. Then, drawing on notions of reflection in complex systems, cognitive science, and agents, we sketch an architecture for reflective AI agents, and highlight ways forward. (shrink)

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research (...) agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Interpersonal understanding is rooted in social engagement. The question is: How? What features of intersubjective coordination are essential for the growth of concepts about the mind, and how does development proceed on this basis? Carpendale & Lewis (C&L) offer many telling insights, but their account begs questions about the earliest forms of self-other linkage and differentiation, especially as mediated by processes of identification.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

The essays in Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy all trace different aspects of the mutually supporting histories of philosophical thought and colonial politics in order to suggest ways that we might decolonize our thinking. From psychology to education, to economic and legal structures, the contributors interrogate the interrelation of colonization and philosophy in order to articulate a Fanon-inspired vision of social justice. This project is endorsed by his daughter, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, in the book's preface.

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

A generalized inclusion frame consists of a set of points W and an assignment of a binary relation $R\sb{w}$ on W to each point w in W. Generalized inclusion frames whose $R\sb{w}$ are partial orders are called comparison frames. Conditional logics of various comparative notions, for example, Lewis's V-logic of comparative possibility and utilitarian accounts of conditional obligation, model the dyadic modal operator $>$ on comparison frames according to the following truth condition: $\alpha > \beta$ "holds at w" iff (...) every point in the truth set of $\alpha$ bears $R\sb{w}$ to some point where $\beta$ holds. ;In this essay I provide a relational frame theory which embraces both accessibility semantics and g.i. semantics as special cases. This goal is achieved via a philosophically significant generalization of universal strict implication which does not assume accessibility as a primitive. Within this very general setting, I provide the first axiomatization of the dyadic modal logic corresponding to the class of all g.i. frames. Various correspondences between dyadic logics and first order definable subclasses of the class of g.i. frames are established. Finally, some general model constructions are developed which allow uniform completeness proofs for important sublogics of Lewis' V. (shrink)

In this short, clear and engaging book, Neil Feit defends the unorthodox view that the contents of beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are properties, and not, as is usually held, propositions. The core of his argument has to do with de se beliefs, beliefs about the self. Based on examples and arguments due to Perry , Lewis and Chisholm , along with considerations about internalism and physicalism, Feit offers a battery of arguments for the conclusion that the contents of (...) de se beliefs cannot be propositions and therefore must be properties. For reasons of uniformity and simplicity Feit then extends this conclusion to all beliefs. So, according to Feit, the content of the de se belief that I am a philosopher is the property of being a philosopher, and my having this belief consists in my self-ascribing this property. For de dicto beliefs, believing that p is self-ascribing the property of being such that p, and for de re beliefs, believing that x is F is self-ascribing the property of bearing some relation of acquaintance R to something that is F. For example, to have the de dicto belief that …. (shrink)

David Lewis is typically interpreted as a class nominalist. One consequence of class nominalism, which he embraced, is that the reduction of ordered pairs, triples, etc to unordered sets of sets is conventional. The reaction by his Australian counterparts D.M. Armstrong and Peter Forrest was that Lewis was not being ontologically serious. This chapter evaluates this debate over serious ontology. It is argued that in one sense Lewis is ontologically serious, but that his additional commitment to (...) structuralism about classes should push him to adopt a trope-theoretic account of naturalness, which opens up another way to respond to the charge of not doing serious ontology. This conclusion is supported by certain remarks he makes in his correspondence, thus revealing how his thinking about properties appears to have evolved from property-egalitarianism to a sparse theory of tropes. (shrink)

Designed to fill a large gap in American philosophy scholarship, this bibliography covers the first four decades of the pragmatic movement. It references most of the philosophical works by the twelve major figures of pragmatism: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George H. Mead, F.C.S. Schiller, Giovanni Papini, Giovanni Vailati, Guiseppe Prezzolini, Mario Calderoni, A.W. Moore, John E. Boodin, and C.I. Lewis. It also includes writings of dozens of minor pragmatic writers, along with those by commentators and critics (...) of pragmatism. It encompasses literature not only concerning pragmatism as an alliance of philosophical theories of meaning, inquiry, belief, knowledge, logic, truth, ontology, value, and morality, but also as an intellectual and cultural force impacting art, literature, education, the social and natural sciences, religion, and politics. This bibliography contains 2,794 main entries and more than 2,000 additional references, organized by year of publication. 2,101 of the references include annotation. Its international scope is focused on writings in English, French, German, and Italian, though many other languages are also represented. Peter H. Hare contributed the Guest Preface. The introduction contains an historical orientation to pragmatism and guides to recent studies of pragmatic figures. This work is extensively cross-referenced, and it has exhaustive and lengthy author and subject indexes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music, Myth, and EducationThe Case of The Lord of the Rings Film TrilogyEstelle R. Jorgensen (bio)In probing the interrelationship of myth, meaning, and education, I offer a case in point, notably, Peter Jackson's film adaptations and Howard Shore's musical scores for J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King.1 Intersecting literature, film, and (...) music allows me to explore various perspectives or ways of meaning making associated with this myth. I then trace some of the implications of the analysis for musical and general education.I am particularly interested in the musical connections with myth evident in societies around the world and well established in the anthropological, ethnomusicological, and philosophical literatures. For example, Steven Feld finds the myth of the muni bird to be foundational to a New Guinea society in shaping musical expression and communal beliefs and practices.2 Likewise, as Lewis Rowell argues, Western music is rooted in and acquires its own mythos of person, power, and musical instruments; Dionysius, Apollo, Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos, Orpheus, Guido of Arezzo, St. Cecilia, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus are among those whose impact on music are legendary, formative, and figurative.3 Associations of particular myths with operatic, orchestral, and choral repertoire in the Western classical tradition also abound, such as Wagner's operatic setting of the Lay of the Nibelung and Sibelius's evocation of the Finnish Vālhālla. Music and myth are interconnected especially in the film music of our time, for example, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Titanic, and the Star Trek and Star Wars series.In The Lord of the Rings, my present focus, Shore's musical scores help to highlight the mythic character of Tolkien's narrative, bridge the externally perceived phenomenal world and the internal and subjective "inner world," interrelate the experience of time—especially past and present—and evoke a sense of wonder and awe that otherwise may be forgotten in pervasively [End Page 44] materialistic societies. Music's role in kindling reverence goes to the heart of what these films share that make them mythic—transcendence, profundity, ambiguity, narrativity, and an aesthetic and didactic character that arouse awe, mystery, and a heightened sense of the human condition. Here, music is primarily representational,4 serving functional as well as aesthetic/artistic roles in expressing such mythic themes as the contest between good and evil (in which good is often more fragile and the odds sometimes insurmountable) and the inevitability of death, in which human beings are often at the whim of capricious gods, natural forces, and their own weakness. It adds emotional and intellectual feeling to the visual images, pointing particular attention to specific scenes and representing the tensions built or released as the narrative and visual images unfold.Music's role in blurring past and present is particularly interesting since it is an art of time. The Lord of the Rings evokes an earlier time of crisis in Middle-earth, when the survival of humanity was in jeopardy. The soundtrack assists the moviegoer to make connections between times and travel imaginatively through time, thereby bringing alive the past and imagined future in the present moment. Boundaries between past and present become fuzzier, and one is helped in moving from one time to another. Leitmotifs are of particular interest in helping to make the ambiguity of the narrative more easily accessible and comprehensible, even at risk of oversimplifying matters—a quality evocative of music's use in the speech-song performances of the Iliad, among other ancient stories.Tolkien's fairytale is not couched for children, as is his earlier The Hobbit, but written unabashedly for adults.5 The Fellowship of the Ring can be seen as an epic fairytale with "a kind of religious significance."6 In her analysis of "life symbols"—or artistic, ritualistic, and mythic systems that are read "non-discursively," having no assigned connotation and therefore felt and grasped imaginatively and intuitively—Susanne Langer suggests that fairytales are a genre below that of myth in the continuum between dream and myth. For her, "myth has … a... (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is set (...) to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

R. S. Peters on Education and Ethics reissues seven titles from Peters' life's work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the books are concerned with the philosophy of education and ethics. Topics include moral education and learning, authority and responsibility, psychology and ethical development and ideas on motivation amongst others. The books discuss more traditional theories and philosophical thinkers as well as exploring later ideas in a way which makes the subjects they discuss still relevant today.

First published in 1966, this book was written to serve as an introductory textbook in the philosophy of education, focusing on ethics and social philosophy. It presents a distinctive point of view both about education and ethical theory and arrived at a time when education was a matter of great public concern. It looks at questions such as 'What do we actually mean by education?' and provides a proper ethical foundation for education in a democratic society. The book will appeal (...) to both teachers and students of philosophy as well as education. (shrink)

R S Peters; Education and Justification, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 28–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

In this article I examine Skinner's objections to mentalism. I conclude that his only valid objections concern the "specious explanations" that mentalism might afford ? explanations that are incomplete, circular, or faulty in other ways. Unfortunately, the mere adoption of behavioristic terminology does not solve that problem. It camouflages the nature of "private events," while providing no protection from specious explanations. I argue that covert states and events are causally effective, and may be sufficiently different in their nature to deserve (...) a name other than "behavior."To call such events"mental"does not force a dualistic metaphysics: Such a distinction can be easily assimilated by an "emergent behaviorism." Emergent behaviorism would make explicit use of theories. It would be inductive and pragmatic, and would evaluate hypothetical constructs in terms of their utility in clarifying and solving the outstanding problems of the discipline. (shrink)

First published in 1981, this collection of essays was taken from Peters' larger work, Psychology and Ethical Development in order to provide a more focused volume on moral education for students. Peters' background in both psychology and philosophy makes the work distinctive, which is evident from the first two essays alone: 'Freud's theory of Moral Development in Relation to that of Piaget' and 'Moral Education and the Psychology of Character'. He also displays balance in his acceptance that reason and feeling (...) are both of great importance where the subject of moral education is concerned. Although written some time ago, the book discusses issues which are still of considerable interest and importance today. (shrink)

R. S. Peters, C. A. Mace; VII—Emotions and the Category of Passivity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 117–142, h.

R S Peters; Education and Justification, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 28–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

Peter Anstey presents a thorough and innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy. Focusing on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also drawing extensively from his other writings and manuscript remains, Anstey argues that Locke was an advocate of the Experimental Philosophy: the new approach to natural philosophy championed by Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society who were opposed to speculative philosophy. On the question of method, Anstey shows how Locke's pessimism (...) about the prospects for a demonstrative science of nature led him, in the Essay, to promote Francis Bacon's method of natural history, and to downplay the value of hypotheses and analogical reasoning in science. But, according to Anstey, Locke never abandoned the ideal of a demonstrative natural philosophy, for he believed that if we could discover the primary qualities of the tiny corpuscles that constitute material bodies, we could then establish a kind of corpuscular metric that would allow us a genuine science of nature. It was only after the publication of the Essay, however, that Locke came to realize that Newton's Principia provided a model for the role of demonstrative reasoning in science based on principles established upon observation, and this led him to make significant revisions to his views in the 1690s. On the content of Locke's natural philosophy, it is argued that even though Locke adhered to the Experimental Philosophy, he was not averse to speculation about the corpuscular nature of matter. Anstey takes us into new terrain and new interpretations of Locke's thought in his explorations of his mercurialist transmutational chymistry, his theory of generation by seminal principles, and his conventionalism about species. (shrink)

R S Peters; Education and the Educated Man, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 4, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–20, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

Layers in Husserl's Phenomenology situates Husserl firmly within the trajectory of later Continental thought and contributes to the recent reconsideration of Husserl as a legitimate precursor to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida.

In the mid-seventeenth century a movement of self-styled experimental philosophers emerged in Britain. Originating in the discipline of natural philosophy amongst Fellows of the fledgling Royal Society of London, it soon spread to medicine and by the eighteenth century had impacted moral and political philosophy and even aesthetics. Early modern experimental philosophers gave epistemic priority to observation and experiment over theorising and speculation. They decried the use of hypotheses and system-building without recourse to experiment and, in some quarters, developed a (...) philosophy of experiment. The movement spread to the Netherlands and France in the early eighteenth century and later impacted Germany. Its important role in early modern philosophy was subsequently eclipsed by the widespread adoption of the Kantian historiography of modern philosophy, which emphasised the distinction between rationalism and empiricism and had no place for the historical phenomenon of early modern experimental philosophy. The re-emergence of interest in early modern experimental philosophy roughly coincided with the development of contemporary x-phi and there are some important similarities between the two. (shrink)

The emergence of experimental philosophy was one of the most significant developments in the early modern period. However, it is often overlooked in modern scholarship, despite being associated with leading figures such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, David Hume and Christian Wolff. Ranging from the early Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century to the uptake of experimental philosophy in Paris and Berlin in the eighteenth, this book provides new terms of reference for (...) understanding early modern philosophy and science, and its eventual eclipse in the shadow of post-Kantian notions of empiricism and rationalism. Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism is an integrated history of early modern experimental philosophy which challenges the rationalism and empiricism historiography that has dominated Anglophone history of philosophy for more than a century. (shrink)

R. S. Peters, C. A. Mace; VII—Emotions and the Category of Passivity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 117–142, h.

It would be interesting to speculate why particular lines of enquiry flourish and fade. The study of ‘character’ is a case in point. In the '20s and early '30s the study of ‘character’ was quite a flourishing branch of psychology. It then came to an abrupt halt and, until recent times, there has been almost nothing in the literature on the subject. Perhaps it was the notorious Hartshorne and May Character Education Enquiry, and the inferences that were mistakenly drawn from (...) it, that killed it; perhaps it was the pre-occupation with something more general and amorphous called ‘personality’; perhaps it was the mixture of metaphysics and methodological neurosis centred around the rat. Who knows? Anyway, the study of character is very much with us again as is revealed not merely by Riesman's Lonely Crowd but also by the recent study by Peck and Havighurst called The Psychology of Character Development . The British Journal of Educational Psychology has also, for some time, been running a symposium on The Development of Moral Values in Children. (shrink)

PREFACE The first three of these lectures, or rather an abbreviated version of them, were first given as the Lindsay Memorial Lectures at the University of ...

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith's wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith's conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative (...) sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society's ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. (shrink)

This book presents the first integrated treatment of the philosophy of Robert Boyle, one of the leading English natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution.

Wright holds that the following two theses are jointly incoherent: Rules determine correct language use. These rules are discoverable via internal reflection on language use. I argue that incoherence is derivable from alone and examine two types of probabilistic accounts that model a modification of, one in terms of inexact knowledge, the other in terms of viewing semantic rules as reasons for linguistic actions. Both accommodate tolerance by breaking the link between justified assertion and truth, but incoherence threatens their conception (...) of justified assertion. I argue that the rules-as-reasons approach can relocate sharp boundaries to a place where they are not only more tolerable, but to be expected. (shrink)