As an adolescent and young adult who defined herself as a bookworm and aspiring scholar, I was hardly interested in sports growing up. Though outgoing and extroverted, I enjoyed creative pursuits such as writing fiction, playing the piano, and performing on stage in school theatricals and shied away from sports. As a child, I enjoyed riding my bike, roller skating, climbing trees, or sprinting short distances over the playground, but, at school, I was not adept at team sports. I was (...) usually chosen last for teams, teams often captained by boys. Team sports on the playground and in gym class were dominated and controlled by boys, and they were usually the same boys who taunted and bullied me for running, throwing... (shrink)

Unlike the overall framework of Ernest Nagel's work on reduction, his theory of intertheoretic connection still has life in it. It handles aptly cases where reduction requires complex representation of a target domain. Abandoning his formulation as too liberal was a mistake. Arguments that it is too liberal at best touch only Nagel's deductivist theory of explanation, not his condition of connectability. Taking this condition seriously gives a powerful view of reduction, but one which requires us to index explanatory power (...) to sciences as they are formulated at particular times. While we may thereby reduce more than philosophers have supposed, we must abandon hope (as Nagel did) of saying anything useful about reductionism. (shrink)

The clinical relationship has been underexplored in dementia care. This is in part due to the way that the clinical relationship has been articulated and understood in bioethics. Robert Veatch’s social contract model is representative of a standard view of the clinical relationship in bioethics. But dementia presents formidable challenges to the standard clinical relationship, including ambiguity about when the clinical relationship begins, how it weathers changes in narrative identity of patients with dementia, and how the intimate involvement of family (...) fits alongside a paradigmatically dyadic relationship. Drawing on work in recent feminist theory, a critique is offered of the standard clinical relationship in bioethics as underwritten by an individualistic conception of autonomy. An alternative view of the clinical relationship in dementia, one that embraces a relational account of autonomy, is put forward. (shrink)

Belnap-Dunn logic, sometimes also known as First Degree Entailment, is a four-valued propositional logic that complements the classical truth values of True and False with two non-classical truth values Neither and Both. The latter two are to account for the possibility of the available information being incomplete or providing contradictory evidence. In this paper, we present a probabilistic extension of BD that permits agents to have probabilistic beliefs about the truth and falsity of a proposition. We provide a sound and (...) complete axiomatization for the framework defined and also identify policies for conditionalization and aggregation. Concretely, we introduce four-valued equivalents of Bayes’ and Jeffrey updating and also suggest mechanisms for aggregating information from different sources. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPreviously depressed individuals experience disturbances in affect. Affective disturbances may be related to visual mental imagery, given that imagery-based processing of emotional stimuli causes stronger affective responses than verbal processing in experimental laboratory studies. However, the role of imagery-based processing in everyday life is unknown. This study assessed mental imagery in the daily life of previously and never depressed individuals. Higher levels of visual mental imagery was hypothesised to be associated with more affective reactivity to both negatively and positively valenced (...) mental representations.This study was the first to explore mental imagery in daily life using experience sampling methodology. Previously depressed and matched never depressed individuals participated in this study. Momentary affect and imagery-based processing were assessed using the “Imagine your mood” smartphone application. Participants recorded on average 136 momentary reports ove... (shrink)

After the Seven Years War, the Prussian administration launched a campaign for useful knowledge and scientific education of state officials. This essay scrutinizes efforts undertaken around 1770 by the Central Prussian Administration for Mining and Smelting Works to establish the “mining sciences” and a mining school in the city of Berlin. As a result, from October 1770 on this Administration supported the public teaching in Berlin of mathematics, mechanics, mineralogy, metallurgy, chemistry and other areas of knowledge that constituted the “mining (...) sciences.” In so doing, it promoted the interconnection of scientific and technological knowledge. Contrary to common belief, however, a mining school or academy was not established in eighteenth-century Berlin. (shrink)

: In this paper, I shall defend the thesis that the idea of a universal history in Kant’s third Critique is not legitimated from a theoretical and systematic point of view but instead from a practical point of view. In order to sustain this interpretation, I shall reconstruct parts of arguments from the entire Critique of Teleological Judgment. First, I shall argue that in the Analytic as in the Dialectic, the external purposiveness can legitimize only a teleological history of nature (...) but not a universal history. Second, I defend that in the Methodology, the idea of a universal history is grounded in an interest of pure practical reason. (shrink)

I assume that voters mark ballots exclusively to express their true preferences among parties, leaving aside any considerations about an election’s possible outcome. The paper then analyzes the resulting voting behavior. In particular, it studies how effective different voting systems such as plurality rule, approval voting, and range voting are in fostering high turnout rates of such expressive voters.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 2, Page 26-27, February 2012.

One challenge in explaining neural evolution is the formal equivalence of different computational architectures. If a simple architecture suffices, why should more complex neural architectures evolve? The answer must involve the intense competition for resources under which brains operate. I show how recurrent neural networks can be favored when increased complexity allows for more efficient use of existing resources. Although resource constraints alone can drive a change, recurrence shifts the landscape of what is later evolvable. Hence organisms on either side (...) of a transition boundary may have similar cognitive capacities but very different potential for evolving new capacities. (shrink)

Reasonable individuals can disagree about philosophical questions. This disagreement sometimes takes the form of conflicting intuitions; the seminar room provides many examples. Experimental philosophers, who have devoted themselves to the systematic study of intuitions, have found empirical support for what anecdotes suggest. Their data often reveals that a significant minority of subjects have intuitions counter to those of the majority.1 A recent replication of [Knobe, 2003a] discovered three distinct subgroups of subjects with three distinct patterns of response. Only about one-third (...) of subjects gave the expected asymmetric responses to Knobestyle probes. The other two-thirds gave symmetric responses to harm and help probes, with about half judging side-effects were intentional in both harm and help cases and half judging that they were intentional in neither [Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007]. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 18-20, July 2011.

We present an improved method for clustering in the presence of very limited supervisory information, given as pairwise instance constraints. By allowing instance-level constraints to have spacelevel inductive implications, we are able to successfully incorporate constraints for a wide range of data set types. Our method greatly improves on the previously studied constrained -means algorithm, generally requiring less than half as many constraints to achieve a given accuracy on a range of real-world data, while also being more robust when over-constrained. (...) We additionally discuss an active learning algorithm which increases the value of constraints even further. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 653-682.