Hydractinia echinata is a marine colonial hydroid, a relative of the more widely known Hydra. In contrast to Hydra, embryogenesis, metamorphosis and colony growth in Hydractinia are experimentally accessible and therefore, provide an ideal model system for investigating the biochemical basis of pattern formation. In particular, the processes involved in the transformation of the drop‐shaped freely swimming larva into a sessile tube‐shaped polyp are easily monitored, because this transfomation can be induced by application of various substances. Our results indicate that (...) the internal level of S‐adenosylmethionine (SAM), potentially the most important methyl donor in transmethylation processes, plays a key role in the onset of metamorphosis. It is also proposed that the internal level of SAM plays a pivotal role in the proportioning and spacing of polyps within the colony. (shrink)

Stefan Collini challenges the common claim that universities need to show that they help to make money in order to justify getting more money.

It is usually the case that scientists examine either ecological systems or social systems, yet the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of environmental management and sustainable development is becoming increasingly obvious. Developed under the auspices of the Beijer Institute in Stockholm, this new book analyses social and ecological linkages in selected ecosystems using an international and interdisciplinary case study approach. The chapters provide detailed information on a variety of management practices for dealing with environmental change. Taken as (...) a whole, the book will contribute to the greater understanding of essential social responses to changes in ecosystems, including the generation, accumulation and transmission of ecological knowledge, structure and dynamics of institutions, and the cultural values underlying these responses. A set of new (or rediscovered) principles for sustainable ecosystem management is also presented. Linking Social and Ecological Systems will be of value to natural and social scientists interested in sustainability. (shrink)

In the following paper we provide a personal definition of the existential philosophy and the existential subject. Before that we explore other historical definitions of existentialism. We were mainly interested in the relation between existentialism and nihilism, the focus of existential philosophy on the individual and the situation of the studied philosophical trend on the 1950's zeitgeist. The definition of existentialism as a form of trans-rationalism and its capacity to become a practical alternative to contemporary academic philosophy were also emphasized.

The desideratum of semantic interoperability has been intensively discussed in medical informatics circles in recent years. Originally, experts assumed that this issue could be sufficiently addressed by insisting simply on the application of shared clinical terminologies or clinical information models. However, the use of the term ‘ontology’ has been steadily increasing more recently. We discuss criteria for distinguishing clinical ontologies from clinical terminologies and information models. Then, we briefly present the role clinical ontologies play in two multicentric research projects. Finally, (...) we discuss the interactions between these different kinds of knowledge representation artifacts and the stakeholders involved in developing interoperational real-world clinical applications. We provide ontology engineering examples from two EU-funded projects. (shrink)

In this paper, we empirically explore some manifestations of norms for the conduct of science. We focus on scientific research ethics and report survey results from 606 scientists who received funding in 1993 and 1994 from the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Biology Directorate of the National Science Foundation. We also report results for 91 administrators charged with overseeing research integrity at the scientists’ research institutions. Both groups of respondents were presented with a set of scenarios, designed (...) by fractional factorial methods, describing different kinds of scientific conduct that in the eyes of some would likely be unethical. Respondents then were asked to evaluate each of these scenarios for how unethical the behavior might be and what kinds of sanctions might be appropriate. We use the responses to consider the nature of consensus around norms related to the practice of science and in particular, similarities and differences between scientists and science administrators. Implications for policy are also discussed. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to help people understand black box algorithms, particularly of their outputs. But what are these explanations and when is one explanation better than another? The manipulationist definition of explanation from the philosophy of science offers good answers to these questions, holding that an explanation consists of a generalization that shows what happens in counterfactual cases. Furthermore, when it comes to explanatory depth this account holds that a generalization that has more abstract variables, is broader in (...) scope and/or more accurate is better. By applying these definitions and contrasting them with alternative definitions in the XAI literature I hope to help clarify what a good explanation is for AI. (shrink)

Educators are conflicted about whether school provides an appropriate space to teach ethics. Still, they want to develop the moral character of their students, and most of these efforts have used various citizenship values to address our frustration with students’ ‘lack of character’. Recently, a wave of work in the philosophy of education has rejuvenated discussion of Aristotelian virtue ethics, which forms the backbone for programmes that many schools are now adopting. Mark Jonas and Yoshiaki Nakazawa, however, argue that schools (...) should revisit Plato’s pedagogical methods, as well. If educators want to develop virtue in students, they need to understand the mechanism behind moral development. Guided by Plato, they argue that expert teachers use psychological, pedagogical, and philosophical reasoning to induce epiphanies in students, then guide them through virtue-oriented rehabituation. The goal of this article is to explore the legitimacy of Jonas and Nakazawa’s Platonic theory. I begin by describing the state of modern democratic education and its relationship to teaching ethics. I argue that character development is the appropriate route educators should take but that Jonas and Nakazawa’s theory only gives educators a partial understanding of how to do so. They give a plausible model for how our best educators are effective, but we are left wanting a much more robust, instructive picture. I suggest that we need a broader overhaul of the way we view education in a modern democratic society; character development must proceed from a different normative picture of the individual’s place in society. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted in society, creating numerous opportunities but at the same time posing ethical challenges. Many of these are familiar, such as issues of fairness, responsibility and privacy, but are presented in a new and challenging guise due to our limited ability to steer and predict the outputs of AI systems. This chapter first introduces these ethical challenges, stressing that overviews of values are a good starting point but frequently fail to suffice due to the context (...) sensitivity of ethical challenges. Frequently, additional (ethical) values emerge for specific applications, as e.g. challenges with fraud detection are very different from those around language technologies. Second, methods to tackle these challenges are discussed. Main ethical theories (virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) are shown to provide a starting point, but often lack the details needed for actionable AI Ethics. Instead, mid-level philosophical theories coupled to design-approaches such as Design for Values, together with interdisciplinary working methods, offer the best way forwards. The chapter aims to show how these approaches can lead to an ethics of AI that is actionable and that can be proactively integrated in the design of AI systems. (shrink)

This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs (...) the sense of identity and of relation to an audience exhibited by social critics from John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to J.M. Keynes and F.R. Leavis. (shrink)

This paper examines the ontological commitments of the second-order language of arithmetic and argues that they do not extend beyond the first-order language. Then, building on an argument by George Boolos, we develop a Tarski-style definition of a truth predicate for the second-order language of arithmetic that does not involve the assignment of sets to second-order variables but rather uses the same class of assignments standardly used in a definition for the first-order language.

This article analyzes the influence that violence holds over a subject’s ability to remember and recall, specifically within the confines of Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders. Timm attempts to understand the silence and erroneous remembrances of the perpetrator generation and their aversion to the acknowledgement of collective guilt. The discrepancies between intergenerational conceptions of the past are marked through the intertextual nature of Timm’s text; the sharp contrasts between the self-censored narratives of the narrator’s parents and the unexpurgated accounts (...) of the holocaust found in survivor testimonials force a reevaluation of the family’s private history. The war journal of the narrator’s deceased brother provides the crux for Timm’s conflation of private and public communications, and it underscores the text’s programmatic acknowledgement of violence and the institutionalization of this recognition as the fundamental basis for remembrance. The intertextual composition of Timm’s text is read as an affirmation of Habermas’s theory of communicative reason. (shrink)

How veridical is perception? Rather than representing objects as they actually exist in the world, might perception instead represent objects only in terms of the utility they offer to an observer? Previous work employed evolutionary modeling to show that under certain assumptions, natural selection favors such “strict‐interface” perceptual systems. This view has fueled considerable debate, but we think that discussions so far have failed to consider the implications of two critical aspects of perception. First, while existing models have explored single (...) utility functions, perception will often serve multiple largely independent goals. (Sometimes when looking at a stick you want to know how appropriate it would be as kindling for a campfire, and other times you want to know how appropriate it would be as a weapon for self‐defense.) Second, perception often operates in an inflexible, automatic manner—proving “impenetrable” to shifting higher‐level goals. (When your goal shifts from “burning” to “fighting,” your visual experience does not dramatically transform.) These two points have important implications for the veridicality of perception. In particular, as the need for flexible goals increases, inflexible perceptual systems must become more veridical. We support this position by providing evidence from evolutionary simulations that as the number of independent utility functions increases, the distinction between “interface” and “veridical” perceptual systems dissolves. Although natural selection evaluates perceptual systems only on their fitness, the most fit perceptual systems may nevertheless represent the world as it is. (shrink)

Between 1900 and 1925, the American economy witnessed a remarkably successful effort to upgrade competition through associations. Unlike the prevailing interpretation of American industrialization, in which associations fell prey to antitrust and collective action problems, we find many associations that reinvented themselves from cartels to developmental associations. This transition marked two previously unrecognized varieties in economic institutions. In the first, associations joined markets and corporate hierarchies to create variety in American capitalism. In the second, associations used deliberation, cost accounting, and (...) benchmarking to enhance productivity and create varieties of collective governance. This article explains the origins of developmental associations, outlines their principles, traces their implementation in the commercial printing industry, and surveys their distribution and performance effects across 344 industries. Based on these findings, we revise conventional institutionalist assumptions about order and agency to make room for institutional diversity and actors’ capacities for reflexivity and learning. (shrink)

Why is John Dewey still such an important philosopher today? Writing from the perspective of the Cologne Program of Interactive Constructivism, Stefan Neubert tries in what follows to give one possible answer to this question. Neubert notes that Cologne constructivism considers Dewey in many respects as one of the most important predecessors of present-day constructivism and regards Deweyan pragmatism as one of its most important dialogue partners in contemporary discussions about pragmatism and constructivism in philosophy and education. Among the (...) many aspects in which Dewey's works still speak powerfully to us today, Neubert highlights in this essay one theme that is at the heart of Dewey's philosophical approach: the relation between democracy and education. (shrink)

How do we get out knowledge of the natural numbers? Various philosophical accounts exist, but there has been comparatively little attention to psychological data on how the learning process actually takes place. I work through the psychological literature on number acquisition with the aim of characterising the acquisition stages in formal terms. In doing so, I argue that we need a combination of current neologicist accounts and accounts such as that of Parsons. In particular, I argue that we learn the (...) initial segment of the natural numbers on the basis of the Fregean definitions, but do not learn the natural number structure as a whole on the basis of Hume's principle. Therefore, we need to account for some of the consistency of our number concepts with the Dedekind-Peano axioms in other terms. (shrink)

Sur la décomposition des ensembles de points en parties respectivement congruentes.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 532-580.

Can concepts be acquired by testing hypotheses about these concepts? Fodor famously argued that this is not possible. Testing the correct hypothesis would require already possessing the concept. I argue that this does not generally hold for mathematical concepts. I discuss specific, empirically motivated, hypotheses for number concepts that can be tested without needing to possess the relevant number concepts. I also argue that one can test hypotheses about the identity conditions of other mathematical concepts, and then fix the application (...) conditions based on those hypotheses—under the assumption that the neo‐logicist view on abstraction principles is correct. (shrink)

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a system that allows us to distinguish between collections based on the number of items, though only if the ratio between numbers is high enough. One of the questions that has been raised is what the representations involved in this system represent. I point to two important constraints for any account: (a) it doesn’t involve numbers, and (b) it can account for the approximate nature of the ANS. Furthermore, I argue that representations of pure (...) magnitude with vehicles that have an imprecision in the value of the unit of measurement (further clarified through a formal model from measurement theory) fit both these requirements. (shrink)

This essay attempts to give substance to the claim that the liar''sparadox shows the truth predicate to be context sensitive. The aim ismodest: to provide an account of the truth predicate''s contextsensitivity (1) that derives from a more general understanding ofcontext sensitivity, (2) that does not depend upon a hierarchy ofpredicates and (3) that is able to address the liar''s paradox. Theconsequences of achieving this goal are not modest, though. Perhapssurprisingly, for reasons that will be discussed in the last section (...) ofthis essay, a natural account of the truth predicate''s contextsensitivity appears to lead naturally to a version of the correspondencetheory of truth according to which the truth predicate can be understoodas a relation holding between a sentence and a salient set of contexts.The plan of this essay is as follows. Section 1 contains a generalaccount of context sensitivity. The purpose of this section is toisolate certain features of context sensitivity and formal methods oftreating them, which we will then apply to the truth predicate. Section 2then outlines two minimal conditions to be satisfied by a truthpredicate. In Section 3, I present a version of the liar paradoxthat results from these conditions and the assumption that the truthpredicate is not context sensitive in the sense described in sectionone. Finally, in section four, I provide what appear to be naturalconsequences of a truth predicate''s context sensitivity. Section 4 isadmittedly speculative and points in the direction for future research. (shrink)

Process reliabilist accounts claim that a belief is justified when it is the result of a reliable belief-forming process. Yet over what range of possible token processes is this reliability calculated? I argue against the idea that _all_ possible token processes (in the actual world, or some other subset of possible worlds) are to be considered using the case of a user acquiring beliefs based on the output of an AI system, which is typically reliable for a substantial local range (...) but unreliable when all possible inputs are considered. I show that existing solutions to the generality problem imply that these cases cannot be solved by a more fine-grained typing of the belief-forming process. Instead, I suggest that reliability is evaluated over a range restricted by the content of the actual belief and by the similarity of the input to the actual input. (shrink)

• Aggregates of previously isolated cells of Hydra are capable, under suitable solvant conditions, of regeneration forming complete animals. In a first stage, ecto- and endodermal cells sort out, producing the bilayered hollow structure characteristic of Hydra tissue; thereafter, heads are formed (even if the original cell preparation contained no head cells), eventually leading to the separation of normal animals with head, body column and foot. Hydra appears to be the highest type of organism that allows for regeneration of the (...) entire structure from random cell aggregates. The system is particularly useful for studying cell interactions, tissue polarity, pattern formation, and cell differentiation. (shrink)

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We provide a number of simplified and improved separations between pairs of Resolution-with-bounded-conjunction refutation systems, Res, as well as their tree-like versions, Res⁎. The contradictions we use are natural combinatorial principles: the Least number principle, LNPn and an ordered variant thereof, the Induction principle, IPn.LNPn is known to be easy for Resolution. We prove that its relativization is hard for Resolution, and more generally, the relativization of LNPn iterated d times provides a separation between Res and Res. We prove the (...) same result for the iterated relativization of IPn, where the tree-like variant Res⁎ is considered instead of Res.We go on to provide separations between the parameterized versions of Res and Res. Here we are able again to use the relativization of the LNPn, but the classical proof breaks down and we are forced to use an alternative. Finally, we separate the parameterized versions of Res⁎ and Res⁎. Here, the relativization of IPn will not work as it is, and so we make a vectorizing amendment to it in order to address this shortcoming. (shrink)

This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open source are identified: First, by regarding (...) data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How do non-experts single out numbers for reference? Linnebo has argued that they do so using a criterion of identity based on the ordinal properties of numerals. Neo-logicists, on the other hand, claim that cardinal properties are the basis of individuation, when they invoke Hume’s Principle. I discuss empirical data from cognitive science and linguistics to answer how non-experts individuate numbers better in practice. I use those findings to develop an alternative account that mixes ordinal and cardinal properties to (...) provide a detailed answer to the question: how do we in fact semantically individuate numbers? (shrink)