Summary The analysis of cultural artefacts, such as cartoons and films, provides the potential to gain insights into both the professional identities of teachers and the behaviour and self-concepts of students. This paper suggests that the ostensibly banal animated cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head offer some utility in this respect. The paper explores aspects of the stereotypes and behaviour represented in the Beavis and Butt-head series and briefly discusses some possible interpretations of these images.

Researchers have iterated that the future of synthetic biology and biotechnology lies in novel consumer applications of crossing biology with engineering. However, if the new biology’s future is to be sustainable, early and serious efforts must be made towards social sustainability. Therefore, the crux of new applications of synthetic biology and biotechnology is public understanding and acceptance. The RASVaccine is a novel recombinant design not found in nature that re-engineers a common bacteria to produce a strong immune response in humans. (...) Synthesis of the RASVaccine has the potential to improve public health as an inexpensive, non-injectable product. But how can scientists move forward to create a dialogue of creating a ‘common sense’ of this new technology in order to promote social sustainability? This paper delves into public issues raised around these novel technologies and uses the RASVaccine as an example of meeting the public with a common sense of its possibilities and limitations. (shrink)

Researchers have iterated that the future of synthetic biology and biotechnology lies in novel consumer applications of crossing biology with engineering. However, if the new biology’s future is to be sustainable, early and serious efforts must be made towards social sustainability. Therefore, the crux of new applications of synthetic biology and biotechnology is public understanding and acceptance. The RASVaccine is a novel recombinant design not found in nature that re-engineers a common bacteria to produce a strong immune response in humans. (...) Synthesis of the RASVaccine has the potential to improve public health as an inexpensive, non-injectable product. But how can scientists move forward to create a dialogue of creating a ‘common sense’ of this new technology in order to promote social sustainability? This paper delves into public issues raised around these novel technologies and uses the RASVaccine as an example of meeting the public with a common sense of its possibilities and limitations. (shrink)

We show that the minimum Fisher information (MFI) approach to estimating the probability law p(x) on particle position x, over the class of all two-component laws p(x), yields the complex Schrödinger wave equation. Complexity, in particular, traces from an “efficiency scenario” (demanded by MFI) where the two components of p(x) are so separated that their informations add.

A new information matrix [F] with elements F mn = 〈 (y m - a m )(y n - a n) (∂ ln p(y | a)/∂a m ) (∂ ln p(y | a)/∂a n ) 〉 is analyzed. The PDF p(y | a) is the usual likelihood law. [F] differs from the Fisher information matrix by the presence of the first two factors in the given expectation. These factors make F mn unitless, in contrast with the Fisher information. (...) This lack of units allows F mn values from entirely different phenomena to be compared as, for example, Shannon information values can be compared. Each element F mn defines an error inequality analogous to the Cramer-Rao inequality. In the scalar case F mn ≡ F, for a normal p(y|a) law F = 3, while for an exponential law F = 9. A variational principle F = min (called FMIN) allows an unknown PDF p(x) to be estimated in the presence of weak information. Under certain conditions F obeys a “Boltzmann F-theorem” ∂F/∂t ⩽ 0, indicating that F is a physical entropy. Finally, the trace ℱ of [F] may be used as the scalar information quantity in an information-based principle for deriving distribution laws p of physics. (shrink)

An information-theoretic approach is shown to derive both the classical weak-field equations and the quantum phenomenon of metric fluctuation within the Planck length. A key result is that the weak-field metric $\bar h_{\mu \nu } $ is proportional to a probability amplitude φuv, on quantum fluctuations in four-position. Also derived is the correct form for the Planck quantum length, and the prediction that the cosmological constant is zero. The overall approach utilizes the concept of the Fisher information I acquired (...) in a measurement of the weak-field metric. An associated physical information K is defined as K=I−J, where J is the information that is intrinsic to the physics (stress-energy tensor Tμv) of the measurement scenario. A posited conservation of information change δI=ΔJ implies a variational principle δK=0. The solution is the weak-field equations in the metric $\bar h_{\mu \nu } $ and associated equations in the probability amplitudes φuv. The gauge condition φ v uv =0 (Lorentz condition) and conservation of energy and momentum Tv μv=0 are used. A well-known “bootstrapping” argument allows the weak-field assumption to be lifted, resulting in the usual Einstein field equations. A special solution of these is well known to be the geodesic equations of motion of a particle. Thus, the information approach derives the classical field equations and equations of motion, as well as the quantum nature of the probability amplitudes φuv. (shrink)

The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration is not the first occasion of thought—Freud's wish-fulfilling hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something told by an analysand and the analysand's response to that (...) narrative transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue. Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis, Language and Insight, and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis: Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how thought experiments help us learn about laws. After providing examples of this kind of nomic illumination in the first section, I canvass explanations of our modal knowledge and opt for an evolutionary account. The basic application is that the laws of nature have led us to develop rough and ready intuitions of physical possibility which are then exploited by thought experimenters to reveal some of the very laws responsible for those intuitions. (...) The good news is that natural selection ensures a degree of reliability for the intuitions. The bad news is that the evolutionary account seems to limit the range of reliable thought experiment to highly practical and concrete contexts. In the fifth section, I provide reasons for thinking that we are not as slavishly limited as a pessimistic construal of natural selection suggests. Nevertheless, I promote the idea that biology is a promising source of predictions and diagnoses of thought experiment failures. (shrink)

Written for undergraduates, the educated layperson, and scholars in fields other than philosophy, _The Myth of Religious Neutrality _offers a radical reinterpretation of the general relations between religion, science, and philosophy. This new edition has been completely revised and updated by the author.

Questions about the meaning of life have traditionally been regarded as being of particular concern to philosophers. It is sometimes complained that contemporary analytic philosophy fails to address such questions, but there do exist illuminating recent discussions of these questions by analytic philosophers.1Perhaps what lurks behind the complaint is a feeling that these discussions are insufficiently close to actual living situations and hence often seem rather thin and bland compared with the vivid portrayals of such situations in autobiography or fiction. (...) I therefore want to focus on two works by Tolstoy—one autobiographical, one fictional—and try to see what philosophical lessons can be learned from them, particularly with regard to questions about the relation of death to the meaning of life. (shrink)

In ‘Epistemic Modals’ (2007), Seth Yalcin proposes Stalnaker-style semantics for epistemic possibility. He is inspired by John MacFarlane’s ingenious defence of relativism, in which claims of epistemic possibility are made rigidly from the perspective of the assessor’s actual stock of information (rather than from the speaker’s knowledge base or that of his audience or community). The innovations of MacFarlane and Yalcin independently reinforce the modal collapse espoused by Jaakko Hintikka in his 1962 epistemic logic (which relied on the implausible KK (...) principle and heavy idealizations). I respond to this new challenge with fresh objections to the underlying S4 equivalence: p p . I also propose counter-analyses of the intriguing data which Yalcin cites in support of his new semantics. A key collateral motivation for this defence of irredundant iterations is to ward off a threat to higher order vagueness. (shrink)

(1984). Conditional blindspots and the knowledge squeeze: A solution to the prediction paradox. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 126-135.

The emerging discipline of complexity science, applied to the social sciences, seeks to study the rise of human civilization as a part of a natural, evolving biological system that exploits energy resources to fuel its growth into a complex social system. In order to understand the whole system, the reductionist approach, typical to Western science, must be supplanted. The atomistic study of various scientific fields as separate mechanical parts of the system must be broadened, creating a more holistic view of (...) human culture as an integral part of larger universal process of evolution and creation. In this article I wish to integrate the various scientific fields, including physics, chronobiology, biology, evolutionary psychology, and the social sciences, to achieve a unified understanding of our cultural evolution. (shrink)

Suppose you have an infinite past. If you had banked the spare dollar you have always had, then the interest would have made you rich by now. Your procrastination is inexcusable. But what should you have done? At any time at which you invest the dollar you would regret not investing it earlier. Satisficers can solve prospective puzzles involving infinite choice but cannot solve this retrospective puzzle about regret. A moral version of the puzzle suggests that there can be inevitable (...) moral failure. It does so without appeal to moral luck, moral dilemmas or original sin. (shrink)

Islamic building codes require mosques to face Mecca. The further Islam spreads, the more apt are believers to fall into a quandary. X faces Y only when the front of X is closer to Y than any other side of X. So the front of the mosque should be oriented along a shortest path to Mecca. Which way is that? Does the path to Mecca tunnel through the earth? Or does the path follow the surface of the earth?

Over the last few decades Mark Siderits has established himself as a leading philosophical interpreter of Indian Buddhist philosophy. He has published widely in this field, but three of his books are particularly well known: his Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy, a self-styled "essay in fusion philosophy"; his introductory textbook Buddhism as Philosophy ; and–with Shōryū Katsura–his translation and commentary, Nāgārjuna's Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Taken together, these three books offer a fuller sense of Siderits' philosophical concerns with Buddhism. The concern (...) with "fusion philosophy" is focused primarily on philosophical problem-solving and energetically quarries Buddhist... (shrink)

In 1982 Posner and Schmidt surveyed the values of 1400 managers. The survey revealed that honesty was one of the qualities that these managers admired most in themselves. An earlier study by Brennan and Molander indicated that managers believed that honesty in communication was their greatest ethical challenge. If honesty is a prevalent value among managers then why is honesty in communication their greatest ethical challenge? This paper presents an insight into the answer to this question and into the beliefs (...) and norms of behavior that foster either a candid corporate culture or a culture that lacks candor. (shrink)

Positive thinkers love Watty Piper's The little engine that could. The story features a train laden with toys for deserving children on the other side of the mountain. After the locomotive breaks down, a sequence of snooty locomotives come up the track. Each engine refuses to pull the train up the mountain. They are followed by a weary old locomotive that declines, saying "I cannot. I cannot. I cannot." But then a bright blue engine comes up the track. He manages (...) to chug over the mountain by averring "I think I can. I think I can. I think can.". (shrink)

Sorensen provides a panoramic view of paradoxes of theoretical and practical rationality. These puzzles are organized as apparent counterexamples to attractive principles such as the principle of charity, the transitivity of preferences, and the principle that we should maximize expected utility. The following paradoxes are discussed: fearing fictions, the surprise test paradox, Pascal’s Wager, Pollock’s Ever Better wine, Newcomb’s problem, the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, Kavka’s paradoxes of deterrence, backward inductions, the bottle imp, the preface paradox, Moore’s problem, Buridan’s ass, Condorcet’s (...) paradox of cyclical majorities, the St. Petersburg paradox, weakness of will, the Ellsberg paradox, Allais’s paradox, and Peter Cave’s puzzle of self-fulfilling beliefs. (shrink)

Stepping into the other guy's shoes works best when you resemble him. After all, the procedure is to use yourself as a model: in goes hypothetical beliefs and desires, out comes hypothetical actions and revised beliefs and desires. If you are structurally analogous to the empathee, then accurate inputs generate accurate outputs-just as with any other simulation. The greater the degree of isomorphism, the more dependable and precise the results. This sensitivity to degrees of resemblance suggests that the method of (...) empathy works best for average people. The advantage of being a small but representative sample of the population will create a bootstrap effect. For as average people prosper, there will be more average descendants and so the degree of resemblance in subsequent generations will snowball. Each increment in like-mindedness further enhances the reliability and validity of mental simulation. With each circuit along the spiral, there is tighter and tighter bunching and hence further empowerment of empathy. The method is self-strengthening and eventually molds a population of hyper-similar individuals-which partly solves the problem of other minds. (shrink)

Dooyeweerd’s account of abstraction is examined and found to be faulty. He holds that abstract thinking isolates aspects which must then be synthesized, whereas I argue that we cannot isolate any aspect from the others however so hard we try. But our very inability to isolate aspects is then turned into an alternative version of a transcendental critique of theory making. Instead of asking for a basis for synthesizing aspects we have isolated, the new version asks: what is the nature (...) of the aspectual connectedness which is so strong that it cannot be interrupted even by abstraction? I argue that it is impossible for anyone to understand the meaning of a concept fully without taking a position on this issue, whether that is done implicitly or explicitly. Moreover, every answer to this question presupposes a divinity belief. Hence, this recasting of the critique yields a demonstration of the religious regulation of all concepts and every theory. In this way the goal of Dooyeweerd’s critique is achieved, even if not in the way he envisioned. (shrink)