It is shown that (a) both the dispersion relations between the mean frequency θ0 and the mean wave number k 0 are invariant under the Lorentz transformation; and (b) the relativistic Doppler effects on θ 0 and k 0 differ. In the suboptic packet there is anomalous red shift in the mean wave number k' 0 received from a source receding with speed v: k′ 0 changes sign through zero as v goes through the value vg, the mean group velocity (...) in the packet. In the superoptic packet the anomalous red shift is in the mean frequency θ′ 0 which reverses sign through zero as v goes through the value vp, the mean phase velocity in the packet. This last finding indicates a blackout of the superoptic signal when propagated toward a receiver moving away from the source at a speed greater than vp. There is no violation of causality involved, and the final conclusion of the paper is that it is not a fundamental axiom of “special relativity,” as usually believed, to deny that information can be transmitted at speeds greater than c. (shrink)

This paper shows that species are individuals with respect to evolutionary theory in the sense that the laws of the theory deal with species as irreducible wholes rather than as sets of organisms. 'Species X' is an instantiation of a primitive term of the theory. I present a sketch of a proof that it cannot be defined within the theory as a set of organisms; the proof relies not on details of my axiomatization but rather on a generally accepted property (...) of speciation; hence the same argument should work for any axiomatization which captures this generally accepted property of speciation. (shrink)

With closer interactions between academic and commercial entities the role of the university is expanding to also include knowledge transferIn the biomedical and health sciences , close interactions between academic and commercial entities are now common place. Funds from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have helped finance major bioscience projects and research centres, graduate students are receiving training in commercial laboratories, and university scientists are translating their ‘intellectual property’ by patenting their research and launching start-up companies. And this is happening with (...) the blessing of universities, who see the commercialisation of research – and the royalties brought in from ‘technology transfer’ – as part of their new mission.The result is that no longer are universities simply places of higher learning, where academics are dedicated to teaching and research, traditionally the ‘first’ and ‘second’ missions of universities; universities now have a ‘third’ mission, to engage in knowledge transfer. Governments and research-intensive industries , are keen to translate university research into marketable products. Facilitated by policies and laws to protect intellectual property rights and aid commercialisation, universities are transforming into ‘entrepreneurial’ institutions.1 University administrators seek to generate new funding streams, while governments see universities as drivers of technology development and economic growth. In such a climate, it should not be surprising that researchers in many disciplines are facing pressure to collaborate …. (shrink)

Many philosophers have asserted that evolutionary theory is unfalsifiable. In this paper I refute these assertions by detailing some falsifiable predictions of the theory and the evidence used to test them. I then analyze both these predictions and evidence cited to support assertions of unfalsifiability in order to show both what type of predictions are possible and why it has been so difficult to spot them. The conclusion is that the apparent logical peculiarity of evolutionary theory is not a property (...) of evolutionary theory; it is a property of our human-sized perspective on evolutionary theory. (shrink)

An apparently peculiar form of explanation is found in evolutionary biology (and other historical fields); it is called a genetic explanation by Beckner (1959) (and, in a more general discussion, by Hempel (1965)), a narrative explanation by Goudge (1961), and a Darwinian history by Kitcher (1985). Kitcher, assuming that the Darwinian history has some kind of logically respectable structure, is primarily concerned with arguing that it is the cornerstone of Darwin’s historical methodology; Beckner and Goudge, on the other hand, assuming (...) that the genetic (or narrative) explanation is an important part of evolutionary biology, are primarily concerned with the difficulty of fitting this form of explanation into a logically respectable structure. Adopting the narrative explanation terminology, and assuming that the narrative explanation is central to Darwin’s historical methodology and to the methodology of contemporary evolutionary biology, I will in this paper delineate its logically respectable structure. (shrink)

Seventeen television journalistsfrom Indianapolis and Terre Haute, Indiana encountered a computer simulation of newsgathering, based on Potter's Box. The situation involved showing identijable faces in a story about AIDS testing. Additional information was the most accessed resource. Organizational codes of ethics were accessed the least. Journalism organization members sought more advice from all resources than others. More experienced respondents accessed more advicefrom professional peers. Females were less interested in peer advice than their male counterparts.

Seventeen television journalists from Indianapolis and Terre Haute responded to a computer simulation of a situation involving privacy of an AIDS testing site. Seven different forms of reasoning were used to deal with elements of the situation. It was found, using a 3D scale for analysis, that consequentialist forms of reasoning were dominant for respondents in this sample. Noncosequentialist thinking was also demonstrated and the nature of ethical reasoning was highly individualized.

Many philosophers have claimed that the structure of evolutionary theory is intrinsically different from the structure of physical theories. These claims were based on the appearance of the immature structure of the theory. Refutations of these claims have been based on newly available glimpses of the mature structure of the theory. These claims and their refutations show that the relationship between the immature and mature structures of evolutionary theory is dramatically different from this relationship for Newtonian physics. Analysis of the (...) cause of this difference provides insight into significant features of the process of maturation of scientific theories. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

This paper: (1) gives a schema of the logical structure of functional explanation in biology; (2) shows that it falls under the covering law model of explanation by proving that the explanandum follows from the explanans; and (3) supports the claim that it captures the logical structure underlying the biological usage by analyzing in detail two cases from biology.

Based on a review of the literature and historical evidence, I argue that the use of the methodological principle known as the priority principle in Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship is inconsistent and irreconcilable with historical evidence. It attempts to demarcate between the published works and the Nachlass. However, there are no agreed upon necessary and sufficient conditions of a particular textual object being considered “Nachlass.” This absence leads to implicit and often tacit value demarcation criteria that can be broadly grouped into (...) four types of consideration: publication, authorization, publicness, and audience. Each of these criteria pick out a different set of texts as “Nachlass.” Thus, despite the veneer of agreement, the most broadly accepted methodological approach in the Anglo-American tradition of Nietzsche scholarship is applied inconsistently. I argue that we must either offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a piece of text being Nachlass, or we ought to abandon such abstract criteria altogether and embrace a contextual and historical approach. I then argue that the first option is impossible given historical evidence. I conclude this article by explicating several recent German approaches to the Nachlass which I think can offer a new possible approach. (shrink)

The Hermopolis letters showcase the personal concerns of those writing Aramaic letters in the era of Persian Egypt. One individual named Nabuša is particularly interesting because of his familial correspondence and emotional tone. This study will examine what can be known about this writer and his complaints about an unwanted tunic and a snakebite. There have been several notable disagreements about the Aramaic translation of Nabuša’s concerns, whose discussion will help heighten our understanding of his passion.

White Fire challenges the critical tradition that for nearly half a century has celebrated the power of blackness in American literature. This tradition presents Herman Melville as investigating, then rejecting the optimistic vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson because he lacked a viable sense of evil. Williams digs beneath the obvious contrasts between these two great contemporaries, asking three questions about their relationship: What was Emerson actually saying at the time Melville was serving his literary apprenticeship? How much did Melville know (...) of Emerson's provocative thought? What use did Melville make of ideas and images that Emerson, more than any other contemporary, espoused? In his findings, Williams views Melville as far less the independent critic of Emerson that modern critics have described and far more the responsive artist and opportunist, absorbing images and ideas from the most readily available sources and transforming them into art. (shrink)

Narrative explanations in evolutionary biology have seemed fundamentally different from other scientific explanations, and similar to historical explanations. This investigation of the structure of narrative explanations in evolutionary biology reveals that narrative explanations do have a deductive-nomological base, but that their structure contains two significant additional elements as well. The additional elements are: the multidimensional recursive connection between the different sub-explanations in a narrative explanation; and a set of generic explanations which make possible the integration of multiple co-existing processes.

Most people do not think to observe geology from the sidewalks of a major city, but all David B. Williams has to do is look at building stone in any urban center to find a range of rocks equal to any assembled by plate tectonics. In Stories in Stone, he takes you on explorations to find 3.5-billion-year-old rock that looks like swirled pink-and-black taffy, a gas station made of petrified wood, and a Florida fort that has withstood three hundred years (...) of attacks and hurricanes, despite being made of a stone that has the consistency of a granola bar. Williams also weaves in the cultural history of stone, explaining why a white fossil-rich limestone from Indiana became the only building stone used in all fifty states; how in 1825, the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument led to America’s first commercial railroad; and why when the same kind of marble used by Michelangelo clad a Chicago skyscraper it warped so much after nineteen years that all 44,000 panels of it had to be replaced. This love letter to building stone brings to life the geology you can see in the structures of every city. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1925 edition.

The past few decades of moral psychology research have yielded empirical anomalies for rationalist theories of moral judgments. An increasing number of psychologists and philosophers argue that these anomalies are explained well by sentimentalism, the thesis that the presence of an emotion is necessary for the formation of a sincere moral judgment. The present review reveals that while emotions and moral judgments indeed often co-occur, there is scant evidence that emotions directly cause or constitute moral judgments. Research on disgust, anger, (...) sympathy, and guilt indicates that people only reliably experience emotions when judging conduct that is relevant to the welfare of the self and valued others. Moreover, many recent studies have either failed to replicate or exposed crucial confounds in the most cited evidence in support of sentimentalism. Moral psychologists should jettison sentimentalism, and focus instead on how considerations of harm and welfare—the core concepts of rationalist theories— interact with empirical beliefs to shape moral judgments. (shrink)

A book chapter for the volume Eco-Anxiety and Planetary Hope: Experiencing the Twin Disasters of COVID-19 and Climate Change using Nietzsche's philosophy and primarily based on archival research done by William A. B. Parkhurst.

I argue that Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence is merely a kind of thought experiment that has two forms of engagement. The first form of engagement is destructive and results in the principles of classical logic being reduced to epistemic nihilism. In this first form, Nietzsche is thinking eternal recurrence, as it is presented in previous philosophers, to its end. The second form of engagement does not require the presuppositions of classical logic and is made through the affect of disgust. (...) This second mode of engagement can result in two outcomes; suicidal pessimism or life affirmation. The work on eternal recurrence that scholars typically think of as published has very little positive commitment to the ontological or metaphysical status of eternal recurrence. However, if eternal recurrence does represent the physical nature of the universe, as Nietzsche sometimes speculates about in his notebooks, this would not hurt either his destructive or his affective argument. The affective form of engagement allows us to think about the emergence of this affirmative ideal without strong positive commitment to any particular metaphysics or epistemology. The appearance of such an ideal may be multiply realizable over various physical organizations of the universe. The new life affirming ideal which emerges is not a form of humanism. Rather, Nietzsche thinks that the thought of eternal recurrence will produce "the 'humanity' of the future." The thought of eternal recurrence selects out, via suicidal pessimism, those who cannot affirm life. This fosters the development of a new humanity that can affirm life and create a new kind of happiness unknown to humans previously. This new ideal, amor fati [love of fate], is not simply a reconciliation with suffering and hardship of the past. Rather, one must want and hope that such a thing is the case. This ideal, held by the most powerful people of the future, is an expression of will to power. This ideal understands hardship and challenges on the sea of life as part of what makes us truly great and our lives intrinsically valuable. (shrink)

We offer a friendly criticism of May's fantastic book on moral reasoning: It is overly charitable to the argument that moral disagreement undermines moral knowledge. To highlight the role that reasoning quality plays in moral judgments, we review literature that he did not mention showing that individual differences in intelligence and cognitive reflection explain much of moral disagreement. The burden is on skeptics of moral knowledge to show that moral disagreement arises from non-rational origins.

PurposeGiven the seeming lack of research on the influence of stakeholder activities on organisations such as political parties in the online environment, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how political parties use their web sites to serve and manage their relationships with stakeholders.Design/methodology/approachThis is a qualitative paper, in which a cross‐national comparative analysis has been conducted on four illustrative cases. Personal interviews and web site observations were used as the main data collection methods. Three concurrent flows of (...) activities, i.e. data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing, have been applied in the data analysis.FindingsThe paper indicate that the stakeholders served by political parties on the web sites studied can be grouped into two categories: internal and external. This paper also revealed that another very important internal stakeholder group overlooked by previous studies is that of core party members.Originality/valueThe paper provides insights and new interesting empirical material which may help to strengthen the theoretical understanding stakeholder management in cyber politics. (shrink)

We prove that Hensel minimal expansions of finitely ramified Henselian valued fields admit spherically complete immediate elementary extensions. More precisely, the version of Hensel minimality we use is 0‐hmix‐minimality (which, in equi‐characteristic 0, amounts to 0‐h‐minimality).

This study’s objective was to understand Colombian adolescents’ experiences and preferences regarding access to sexual and reproductive health services (SRHS), either alone or accompanied. A mixed-method approach was used, involving a survey of 812 participants aged eleven to twenty-four years old and forty-five semi-structured interviews with participants aged fourteen to twenty-three. Previous research shows that adolescents prefer privacy when accessing SRHS and often do not want their parents involved. Such findings align with the longstanding tendency to frame the ethical principle (...) of autonomy as based on independence in decision-making. However, the present study shows that such a conceptualization and application of autonomy does not adequately explain Colombian adolescent participants’ preferences regarding access to SRHS. Participants shared a variety of preferences to access SRHS, with the majority of participants attaching great importance to having their parents involved, to varying degrees. What emerges is a more complex and non-homogenous conceptualization of autonomy that is not inherently grounded in independence from parental involvement in access to care. We thus argue that when developing policies involving adolescents, policymakers and health professionals should adopt a nuanced “relational autonomy” approach to better respect the myriad of preferences that Colombian (and other) adolescents may have regarding their access to SRHS. (shrink)

Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive languages like higher-order logic are ideally suited for representing and reasoning about structured knowledge. Uncertain knowledge can be modeled by using graded probabilities rather than binary truth-values. The main technical problem studied in this paper is the following: Given a set of sentences, each having some probability of being (...) true, what probability should be ascribed to other (query) sentences? A natural wish-list, among others, is that the probability distribution (i) is consistent with the knowledge base, (ii) allows for a consistent inference procedure and in particular (iii) reduces to deductive logic in the limit of probabilities being 0 and 1, (iv) allows (Bayesian) inductive reasoning and (v) learning in the limit and in particular (vi) allows confirmation of universally quantified hypotheses/sentences. We translate this wish-list into technical requirements for a prior probability and show that probabilities satisfying all our criteria exist. We also give explicit constructions and several general characterizations of probabilities that satisfy some or all of the criteria and various (counter) examples. We also derive necessary and sufficient conditions for extending beliefs about finitely many sentences to suitable probabilities over all sentences, and in particular least dogmatic or least biased ones. We conclude with a brief outlook on how the developed theory might be used and approximated in autonomous reasoning agents. Our theory is a step towards a globally consistent and empirically satisfactory unification of probability and logic. (shrink)

PurposeTo use the power of knowledge acquisition and machine learning in the development of a collaborative computer classification system based on the features of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).MethodsA vocabulary was acquired from four AMD experts who examined 100 ophthalmoscopic images. The vocabulary was analyzed, hierarchically structured, and incorporated into a collaborative computer classification system called IDOCS. Using this system, three of the experts examined images from a second set of digital images compiled from more than 1000 patients with AMD. Images (...) were annotated, and features were identified and defined. Decision trees, a machine learning method, were trained on the data collected and used to extract patterns. Interrelationships between the data from the different clinicians were investigated.ResultsSix drusen classes in the structured vocabulary were largely sufficient to describe all the identified features. The decision trees classified the data with 76.86% to 88.5% accuracy and distilled patterns in the form of hierarchical trees composed of 5 to 15 nodes. Experts were largely consistent in their characterization of soft, and to a lesser extent, hard drusen, but diverge in definition of other drusen. Size and crystalline morphology were the main determinants of drusen type across all experts.ConclusionsMachine learning is a powerful tool for the characterization of disease phenotypes. The creation of a defined feature set for AMD will facilitate the development of an IDOCS-based classification system. (shrink)

A common approach to quantum physics is enshrouded in a jargon which treats state vectors as attributes of physical systems and the concept of state preparation as a filtration scheme wherein a process involving measurement selects from a primordial assembly of systems those bearing some prescribed vector of interest. By contrast, the empirical experiences with which quantum theory is actually concerned relate measurement and preparation in quite an opposite manner. Reproducible preparation schemes are logically and temporally anterior to measurement acts. (...) Measurement extracts numbers from systems prepared in a specified manner; these data are then regularized by the theory by means of a state concept which is in turn used to characterize succinctly the given mode of preparation. The present paper offers, in a simple spin model, a method for determining the quantum state that represents any reproducible preparation. (shrink)

Imperative sentences like Dance! do not seem to represent the world. Recent modal analyses challenge this idea, but its intuitive and historical appeal remain strong. This paper presents three new challenges for a non-representational analysis, showing that the obstacles facing it are even steeper than previously appreciated. I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics. Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives. This (...) characterization of meaning focuses on what function a sentence serves in discourse, rather than what that sentence refers to (e.g., a state of the world). By representing the meaning of imperatives, connectives and declaratives in a common dynamic format, the challenges posed for non-representationalism are met. (shrink)

When quantum scattering theory is applied strictly from the point of view that the state of a system is completely described by the density matrix, whether pure or mixed, it is not possible to assume that colliding particles are at all times individually in pure states. Exact results are significantly different from conventionally accepted approximations. In particular, it turns out that the cross section as ordinarily defined in theS-matrix formalism is an adequate parameter for deciding the outcome of interactions only (...) when the particles are carefully prepared in matching pure states. In general the use of the cross section in studying pair collisions in a real gas is shown to be analogous to a repeated “collapse of the wave function” after each collision, and involves arbitrary removal of nondiagonal elements of the density matrix, thus violating the basic laws of quantum dynamical evolution. (shrink)

A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...) of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent’s mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol’s content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information. (shrink)