In a simple model of conflict, two agents fight over a fixed prize, and how hard they fight depends on what they believe about their abilities. To this model I add “preagents,” representing parents, leaders, or natural selection, who choose each agent’s confidence in his ability. Depending on the reason for such confidence, I find five different patterns in how confidence varies with ability. Agents who estimate their ability with error have under-confidence when ability is high and over-confidence when (...) ability is low, while strategic commitment incentives induce the opposite pattern. Agents who misjudge their value for the prize, relative to their cost of effort, induce an overor under-confidence that is independent of ability, while cooperating pre-agents choose extreme under-confidence. Agents who use confidence to signal ability have a relatively uniform over-confidence. (shrink)

About twenty-five years ago, Charles Parsons published a paper that began by asking why we still discuss the Liar Paradox. Today, the question seems all the more apt. In the ensuing years we have seen not only Parsons’ work (1974), but seminal work of Saul Kripke (1975), and a huge number of other important papers. Too many to list. Surely, one of them must have solved it! In a way, most of them have. Most papers on the Liar Paradox offer (...) some explanation of the behavior of paradoxical sentences, and most also offer some extension for the predicate ‘true’ that they think is adequate, at least in some restricted setting. But if this is a solution, then the problem we face is far from a lack of solutions; rather, we have an overabundance of conflicting ones. Kripke’s work alone provides us with uncountably many different extensions for the truth predicate. Even if it so happens that one of these is a conclusive solution, we do not seem to know which one, or why. We should also ask, given that we are faced with many technically elegant but contradictory views, if they are really all addressing the same problem. What we lack is not solutions, but a way to compare and evaluate the many ones we have. (shrink)

Let us say that a normative conflict is a situation in which an agent ought to perform an action A, and also ought to perform an action B, but in which it is impossible for the agent to perform both A and B. Not all normative conflicts are moral conflicts, of course. It may be that the agent ought to perform the action A for reasons of personal generosity, but ought to perform the action B for reasons of prudence: (...) perhaps A involves buying a lavish gift for a friend, while B involves depositing a certain amount of money in the bank. In general, our practical deliberation is shaped by a concern with a variety of morally neutral goods—not just generosity and prudence, but any number of others, such as etiquette, aesthetics, fun—many of which are capable of providing conflicting reasons for action. I mention these ancillary values in the present setting, however, only to put them aside. We will be concerned here, not with normative conflicts more generally, but precisely with moral conflicts—situations in which, even when our attention is restricted entirely to moral reasons for action, it is nevertheless true that an agent ought to do A and ought to do B, where it is impossible to do both. (shrink)

i The 2005 decision by Judge John E. Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was celebrated by all red-blooded American liberals as a victory over the forces of darkness. The result was probably inevitable, in view of the reckless expression by some members of the Dover School Board of their desire to put religion into the classroom, and the clumsiness of their prescribed statement in trying to dissimulate that aim.1 But the conflicts aired in this trial—over the status (...) of evolutionary theory, the arguments for intelligent design, and the nature of science—reveal an intellectually unhealthy situation. The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it is, has resulted in a counterorthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory. Skeptics about the theory are seen as so dangerous, and so disreputably motivated, that they must be denied any shred of.. (shrink)

This paper separates conditional parameter estima- tion, which consistently raises test set accuracy on statistical NLP tasks, from conditional model struc- tures, such as the conditional Markov model used for maximum-entropy tagging, which tend to lower accuracy. Error analysis on part-of-speech tagging shows that the actual tagging errors made by the conditionally structured model derive not only from label bias, but also from other ways in which the independence assumptions of the conditional model structure are unsuited to linguistic sequences. The (...) paper presents new word-sense disambiguation and POS tagging experiments, and integrates apparently conflicting reports from other recent work. (shrink)

Authenticity has recently emerged as an important issue in discussions of mental disorder. We show, on the basis of personal accounts and empirical studies, that many people with psychological disorders are preoccupied with questions of authenticity. Most of the data considered in this paper are from studies of people with bipolar disorder and anorexia nervosa. We distinguish the various ways in which these people view the relationship between the disorder and their sense of their authentic self. We discuss the principal (...) modern ac-counts of authenticity within the analytic philosophical tradition. We argue that accounts based on autonomous, or wholehearted, endorsement of personal characteris-tics fail to provide an adequate analysis of authenticity in the context of mental disorder. Significant elements of true self accounts of authenticity are required. The concept of authenticity is a basic one that can be of particular value, in the context of self-development, to people with mental disorder and to others experiencing substantial inner conflict. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show that a certain law of nature, namely that common salt (sodium chloride) dissolves in water, is metaphysically necessary. The importance of this result is that it conflicts with a widely shared intuition that the laws of nature (most if not all) are contingent. There have been debates over whether some laws, such as Newton’s second law, might be definitional of their key terms and hence necessary. But the law that salt dissolves in water (...) is not that kind of law. The law statement ‘salt dissolves in water’ is clearly synthetic. It appears a classic case of a contingent law. We like to believe that there are possible worlds in which the laws of nature are different and in which salt does not dissolve in water. (shrink)

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispo- sitions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke (...) these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups. (shrink)

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is central to modern biology, but is resisted by many people. This paper discusses the major psychological obstacles to accepting Darwin’s theory. Cognitive obstacles to adopting evolution by natural selection include conceptual difficulties, methodological issues, and coherence problems that derive from the intuitiveness of alternative theories. The main emotional obstacles to accepting evolution are its apparent conflict with valued beliefs about God, souls, and morality. We draw on the philosophy of science and (...) on a psychological theory of cognitive and emotional belief revision to make suggestions about what can be done to improve acceptance of Darwinian ideas. (shrink)

Some say that presentism precludes time travel into the past since it implies that the past does not exist, but this is a bad argument. Presentism says that only currently existing entities exist, and that the only properties and relations those entities instantiate are those that they currently instantiate. This does in a sense imply that the past does not exist. But if that precluded time travel into the past, it would also preclude the one-second-per-second “time travel” into the future (...) that is ordinary persistence, for presentism accords the future the same ontological status as the past. Instead of quantifying over past and future objects and events, presentists speak a tensed language, regimented with primitive sentential tense operators. For a presentist, a persisting person is one who did exist, and who will exist. Regimented, these claims become: it was the case that she exists, and it will be the case that she exists. The presentist may then apply the same strategy to time travel proper. Suppose Katy travels back to the time of the dinosaurs. The presentist can say that it was the case two hundred million years ago that Katy exists. This claim, which consists of a present-tense statement “Katy exists” embedded within the past tense operator it was the case two hundred million years ago that, is exactly the sort of statement about time that a presentist is free to accept. This has all been made clear by Simon Keller and Michael Nelson ( ). In addition to rebutting the bad argument against the consistency of presentism and time travel, Keller and Nelson argue positively in favor of consistency by showing how to translate David Lewis’s ( ) account of time travel into the presentist’s tensed language. The appearance of con ict between presentism and time travel, they argue, is due only to the fact that most defenders of time travel (for example Lewis) have tended to phrase their defenses in nonpresentist terms. As much as I applaud their rebuttal of the bad argument, I wish to sound a note of caution.. (shrink)

A number of scholars have claimed that, on the assumption of incompati- bilism, there is a con ict between God's freedom and God's essential moral perfection. Jesse Couenhoven is one such example; Couenhoven, a com- patibilist, thinks that libertarian views of divine freedom are problematic given God's essential moral perfection. He writes, \libertarian accounts of God's freedom quickly run into a conceptual problem: their focus on con- tingent choices undermines their ability to celebrate divine freedom with regard to the essential (...) divine nature. For an Augustinian [i.e., a compat- ibilist], by contrast, God's freedom is not at odds with the necessities of perfect love but ful lled by it."1 Others who argue for similar conclusions include William Rowe and Wes Morriston. Michael Bergmann and Jan Cover have recently argued that divine responsibility and moral perfection are compatible with the absence of divine freedom. In this paper, I argue that the arguments which hold that divine freedom con icts with essen- tial divine moral perfection fail. I develop an account of divine freedom which not only doesn't con ict with God's essential moral goodness but shows that such goodness is a necessary part of perfected freedom. I then show how this understanding of free will takes away a major motivation for Bergmann and Cover's apparent willingness to reject divine freedom. (shrink)

It is a characteristically Fregean thesis that the sense expressed by an expression is the linguistic meaning of that expression. Sense can play this role for Frege since it meets fundamental desiderata for meaning, that it be universal and invariantly expressed and objectively the same for everyone who knows the language. It has been argued,1 however, that, as a general thesis about natural languages, the identi cation of sense and meaning cannot be sustained since it is in con ict with (...) another characteristically Fregean thesis, that sense uniquely determines reference. The argument is quite simple and can be outlined as follows. Assume the two theses we have just stated. (shrink)

For more than a century, physics has known of a puzzling conflict between the T- asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomena and the T-symmetry of the underlying microphysics on which these phenomena depend. This paper provides a guide to the current status of this puzzle, distinguishing the central issue from various issues with which it may be confused. It is shown that there are two competing conceptions of what is needed to resolve the puzzle of the thermodynamic asymmetry, which differ with (...) respect to the number of distinct T-asymmetries they take to be manifest in the physical world. On the preferable one-asymmetry conception, the remaining puzzle concerns the ordered distribution of matter in the early universe. The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow thus becomes a puzzle for cosmology. (shrink)

I aim to reconcile two apparently conflicting theses: (a) Everything that can be explained, can be explained in purely physical terms, that is, using the machinery of fundamental physics, and (b) some properties that play an explanatory role in the higher level sciences are irreducible in the strong sense that they are physically undefinable: their nature cannot be described using the vocabulary of physics. I investigate the contribution that physically undefinable properties typically make to explanations in the high-level sciences, and (...) I show that when they are explanatorily relevant, it is in virtue of their extension (or something close) alone. They are irreducible because physics cannot capture their nature; this is no obstacle, however, to physics' more or less capturing their extension, which is all that it need do to duplicate their explanatory power. In the course of the argument, I sketch the outlines of an account of the explanation of physically contingent regularities, such as the regularities found in most branches of biological inquiry, at the center of which is an account of the nature of contingent, empirical bridge principles. (shrink)

Bilattices, due to M. Ginsberg, are a family of truth value spaces that allow elegantly for missing or conflicting information. The simplest example is Belnap’s four-valued logic, based on classical two-valued logic. Among other examples are those based on finite many-valued logics, and on probabilistic valued logic. A fixed point semantics is developed for logic programming, allowing any bilattice as the space of truth values. The mathematics is little more complex than in the classical two-valued setting, but the result provides (...) a natural semantics for distributed logic programs, including those involving confidence factors. The classical two-valued and the Kripke/Kleene three-valued semantics become special cases, since the logics involved are natural sublogics of Belnap’s logic, the logic given by the simplest bilattice. (shrink)

The paper aims to clarify the interpretation of Kantian morality and Hegelian ethical life given by Honneth and Habermas; it try in particularly to explain the several meanings and forms of Honneth’s relaunch of Hegel’s conception of Sitt- lichkeit. The Author aims at the same time to show some structural limits of this neo-Hegelian ethical perspective from a political point of view, also in relation to the concept of «immanent critique» adopted by Honneth, and differentiated by him from the concept (...) of «internal criticism» developed by Michael Walzer. The Author observes that the immanent approach of Honneth’s normative reconstruction and social critique seems to have some problems to take in account the plurality of different and con icting ethical-political orientations. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza have constructed a theory of moral responsibility according to which agents are responsible only if they take responsibility in a particular way. Crucial to taking responsibility is coming to adopt a certain set of beliefs about oneself, such as the belief that one is a legitimate target of attitudes like gratitude and resentment, praise and blame. Moreover, agents must come to adopt this belief in a way that is ‘appropriately based’ upon their evidence, if (...) they are to be genuinely responsible for what they do. In this paper I argue that agents need not meet these conditions in order to be morally responsible. I offer a case in which the agent thinks of himself as responsible, appears to be responsible, but fails to take responsibility in Fischer and Ravizza’s sense. I then argue that Fischer and Ravizza’s account of responsibility for consequences is in conflict with their contention that individuals who reject the justifiability of responsibility ascriptions fail, thereby, to be morally responsible agents. (shrink)

Some apparent differences: (i) Denials are essentially a dialogue phenomenon as is obvious from the fact that (ii) denials taken out of their dialogue context are often plain contradictions (Horn, 1989), and for this reason (iii) their analysis necessarily involves nonmonotonic operations. Contrast on the other hand is (i’) a discourse relation frequently occuring in monologue, (ii’) never involving overt contradictions (*I am hungry but I am not hungry)1 and therefore (iii’) often treated as an essentially monotonic phenomenon: what licenses (...) a contrastive conjunction is not overt contradiction, but rather a conflict between what’s defeasibly implied by the first and second conjuncts. (shrink)

We describe a novel Internet-based method for building consensus and clarifying con icts in large stakeholder groups facing complex issues, and we use the method to survey and map the scienti c and organizational perspectives of the arti cial life community during the Seventh International Conference on Arti cial Life (summer 2000). The issues addressed in this survey included arti cial life’s main successes, main failures, main open scienti c questions, and main strategies for the future, as well as the (...) bene ts and pitfalls of creating a professional society for arti cial life. By illuminating the arti cial life community’s collective perspective on these issues, this survey illustrates the value of such methods of harnessing the collective intelligence of large stakeholder groups. (shrink)

The association of women with caring dispositions and thinking has become a persistent theme in recent feminist writing. There are a number of reasons for this. One reason is the impetus that has been provided by the empirical work of Carol Gilligan on women’s moral development. The fact that this association is not merely an ideologically or philosophically postulated one, but is argued for on empirical grounds, tends to add to its credibility. Another reason for the resilience of the association (...) is the existence of an increasingly prominent theme in feminist thought and action that focuses on the importance of women’s difference from men, both as a fact and as a goal. Within this theme, there are various views on what the relevant differences are between women and men, and why the differences ought to be emphasized and properly respected. Women’s caring, as will be seen, turns out to have a firm presence in all of these views, and as a result, many women argue that caring should form the basis of a distinctive feminist ethic. On these views, women’s approaches to understanding moral situations, defining selfconceptions, choosing goals and roles, and guiding behaviour, should all be informed by and based upon dispositions of caring. However, if this idea of a feminist ethic of care is to be plausible, it will need to be reconciled with another strong theme in feminism, according to which in fundamental moral respects women ought not be considered or treated differently from men. We will examine the standing of a feminist ethic of care in the context of this tension between the difference theme and the sameness theme in feminism. The discussion begins by re-characterizing the justice and care debate in terms of impartialist and partialist ethical perspectives, and it then goes on to indicate the various ways in which women’s presumed disposition to caring and partialism finds prominence within the difference theme. The central focus of the discussion, however, will be the question of how to reconcile the conflict that exists between impartialist, justice-based moral thinking, and a partialist, caring approach to morality.. (shrink)

The paper discusses ten philosophical problems in deontic logic: how to formally represent norms, when a set of norms may be termed ‘coherent’, how to deal with normative conflicts, how contraryto-duty obligations can be appropriately modeled, how dyadic deontic operators may be redefined to relate to sets of norms instead of preference relations between possible worlds, how various concepts of permission can be accommodated, how meaning postulates and counts-as conditionals can be taken into account, and how sets of norms may (...) be revised and merged. The problems are discussed from the viewpoint of input/output logic as developed by van der Torre & Makinson. We argue that norms, not ideality, should take the central position in deontic semantics, and that a semantics that represents norms, as input/output logic does, provides helpful tools for analyzing, clarifying and solving the problems of deontic logic. (shrink)

In this chapter, first we will provide a brief discussion of part of the larger debates concerning metaphysics and attempt to place Masham alongside her friend John Locke in holding that the subject matter of metaphysics is usually either strictly the providence of revelation or is beyond human understanding. Next, we will explore Masham’s criticisms of Norris, Malebranche, and Leibniz to see how these views inform her objections. Here, it will become clear that Masham eschews metaphysics as an a priori (...) investigation into supernatural causes and spirits. She argues that not only do we lack positive evidence for the truth of these metaphysical hypotheses, but we have good reason – from experience and revelation – to believe them false. Finally, we will turn briefly to some of Masham’s positive views concerning the existence and nature of God, the nature of substances, and human freedom. Here, we will see that while Masham does not approve of metaphysical theses that seemingly conflict with our experience of the world, we can know some things about the nature of God and ourselves through experience and reason. This leaves room for Masham to engage in a fair amount of what we would currently consider metaphysical discourse. (shrink)

Science studies have long been concerned with the complex interrelationship between scienti?c research and popular culture’s interpretations and reconstructions of scienti?c ?ndings (Kember 2003; Lancaster 2003; Penley 1997, among others). Disparities between the two are often presented as popular culture’s misinterpretation or misrepresentation of scienti?c facts; however, in this essay I argue that a more theoretically lucrative approach understands these con?icts as complex social and cultural negotiations over epistemological boundaries between scienti?c and popular cultures. Understanding such differences is tremendously important (...) in mediated societies where scienti?c research is mostly understood through its representation in the popular culture. In this paper, I examine what is at stake in popular representations of scienti?c research and how the popular culture is often seen as threatening to the epistemic boundaries of scienti?c culture. Using the recent controversy over The Oprah Winfrey Show’ s presentation of controversial medical practices as a case study, this essay examines how distinctions between scienti?c and popular ways of knowing are constructed, represented and managed. I argue that scienti?c knowledge should be viewed as a complex and often con?icted cultural discursive practice that signi?es boundary negotiations between scienti?c and popular cultures. (shrink)

By combining a flanker task and a cuing task into a single paradigm, the authors assessed the effects of orienting and alerting on conflict resolution and explored how normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) modulate these attentional functions. Orienting failed to enhance conflict resolution; alerting was most beneficial for trials without conflict, as if acting on response criterion rather than on information processing. Alerting cues were most effective in the older groups— healthy aging and AD. Conflict (...) resolution was impaired only in AD. Orienting remained unchanged across groups. These findings provide evidence of different life span developmental and clinical trajectories for each attentional network. (shrink)

Various debates in bioethics have been focused on whether non-persons, such as marginal humans or non-human animals, deserve respectful treatment. It has been argued that, where we cannot agree on whether these individuals have moral status, we might agree that they have symbolic value and ascribe to them moral value in virtue of their symbolic significance. In the paper I resist the suggestion that symbolic value is relevant to ethical disputes in which the respect for individuals with no intrinsic moral (...) value is in conflict with the interests of individuals with intrinsic moral value. I then turn to moral status and discuss the suitability of personhood as a criterion. There some desiderata for a criterion for moral status: it should be applicable on the basis of our current scientific knowledge; it should have a solid ethical justification; and it should be in line with some of our moral intuitions and social practices. Although it highlights an important connection between the possession of some psychological properties and eligibility for moral status, the criterion of personhood does not meet the desiderata above. I suggest that all intentional systems should be credited with moral status in virtue of having preferences and interests that are relevant to their well-being. (shrink)

Striking experimental results by Benjamin Libet and colleagues have had an impor- tant impact on much recent discussion of consciousness. Some investigators have sought to replicate or extend Libet’s results (Haggard, 1999; Haggard & Eimer, 1999; Haggard, Newman, & Magno, 1999; Trevena & Miller, 2002), while others have focused on how to interpret those findings (e.g., Gomes, 1998, 1999, 2002; Pockett, 2002), which many have seen as conflicting with our commonsense picture of mental functioning.

This paper argues that we need to look beyond Bayesian decision theory for an answer to the general problem of making rational decisions under uncertainty. The view that Bayesian decision theory is only genuinely valid in a small world was asserted very firmly by Leonard Savage [18] when laying down the principles of the theory in his path-breaking Foundations of Statistics. He makes the distinction between small and large worlds in a folksy way by quoting the proverbs ”Look before you (...) leap” and ”Cross that bridge when you come to it”. You are in a small world if it is feasible always to look before you leap. You are in a large world if there are some bridges that you cannot cross before you come to them. As Savage comments, when proverbs conflict, it is proverbially true that there is some truth in both—that they apply in different contexts. He then argues that some decision situations are best modeled in terms of a small world, but others are not. He explicitly rejects the idea that all worlds can be treated as small as both ”ridiculous” and ”preposterous”. The first half of his book is then devoted to a very successful development of the set of ideas now known as Bayesian decision theory for use in small worlds. The second half of the book is an attempt to develop a quite different set of ideas for use in large worlds, but this part of the book is usually said to be a failure by those who are aware of its existence.2 Frank Knight [15] draws a similar distinction between making decision under risk or uncertainty.3 The pioneering work of Gilboa and Schmeidler [7] on making.. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to a conflict between two popular views about time: Arthur Prior’s proposal for treating tense on the model of modal logic, and the ‘Platonic’ thesis that some objects (God, forms, universals, or numbers) exist eternally.1 I will argue that anyone who accepts the former ought to reject the latter.

Las tragedias clásicas griegas narran conflictos y confrontaciones entre tradiciones transmitidas y moldeadas por los poetas trágicos tipificadas en los antiguos mitos que ellos han recibido. Las nacientes ciudades griegas, con su nuevo orden y sus nuevas instituciones, se enfrentan a través de las obras trágicas a las viejas tradiciones e instituciones que son ahora cuestionadas y discutidas, y con ellas las nociones de responsabilidad y voluntad humanas son reclamadas ante el imperio de los dioses y su corolario acerca del (...) destino del hombre. Nociones que a su vez son exigidas por la creación del derecho y el gobierno de las leyes, ya no de los dioses ni de los hombres. El ensayo indaga, por el estatuto de estas tesis en dos obras trágicas de la literatura griega: “Prometeo Encadenado” de Esquilo y las “Bacantes” de Eurípides. (shrink)

At a time when social and ethical responsibilities of companies and CEOs are being increasingly emphasised, this paper examines conduct of social business in a different age and culture to discern features of enduring relevance for ethical business practices today.The personal correspondence of three fourth‐century saints gives insights into their relationships and decision‐making.Community expectations were those of sharing rather than of outright giving, with ‘fusion of interest’ prevailing over concerns for ‘con?ict of interest’. Selected incidents show two entrepreneurial bishops, Basil (...) and Gregory of Nyssa, struggling to balance tensions between ’liberality’ and ‘fairness’.They compromised, competed robustly for revenues and were vexed over limited budgets and resources for projects while their disapproving cousin, the academic Gregory of Nazianzus, criticised their worldliness. Their historical experiences suggest four pragmatic and possibly normative ways of blending altruism and self‐interest for the overall advancement of bene?cial change. (shrink)

Excerpt from Cultures and Institutions of Natural History: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science This volume consists mainly of papers delivered at two meetings cosponsored by the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Milan and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The first, on the Culture of Natural History, was held in Milan, November l4-l 6, I996. The second, on Institutions of Natural History, was held in San Francisco, October 5 - 7, 1998. They followed two (...) earlier conferences on Biology as History (pinna and Ghiselin I996; Ghiselin and Pinna I996) likewise held in Milan and San Francisco. We intend to continue the series of meetings and have publications based on them in commemoration of the Academy's sesquicentennial in 2003. The emphasis here is mainly upon natural history museums and the kind of science that goes on in them. Although the essays were originally written to stand by themselves, when arranged in chronological order they suggest a common theme. To paraphrase Darwin, the culture and institutions of natural history have been, and are being, evolved. They have adapted to local circumstances, diversified, and sometimes even progressed. We may hope that the future holds more than just retrogression and extinction in store. Read as case studies the essays provide valuable insights into not just how, but why, the institutions have come into being and subsequently been transformed. Previous generations had quite different ideas than we do about how a collection of naturalia is supposed to function and how it should be organized. And there were con icting goals and serious disputes about policy, much as there are today. Often, though not always, the institutions turn out to be very different from what had been envisioned by their founders. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Most Christian scientists currently appear to favor a "realist" view of scientific theories. Apparent conflicts between science and Scripture are then generally resolved by modifying either our reading of Scripture or the offending scientific theories. In this paper we examine a third possibility: the adoption of an instrumentalist approach to scientific theories. This alternative enables one to make use of the practical results of scientific theories while at the same time withholding any commitment as to the validity of their epistemological (...) content. (shrink)

How do we know ourselves? When it comes to our states of mind, it might seem that self-knowledge enjoys a privilege: I know what I'm thinking because I have immediate access to my mind. Inspired by Sartre, two American philosophers, Richard Moran and Charles Larmore, have argued that this idea fails to account for our singular relationship with our own minds. In addition to knowing ourselves through theoretical reflection, we are also capable of practical reflection. We can answer the question (...) of what we think in a practical way: through a decision or a commitment, rather than a self-interpretation. But what is the relationship between these two types of self-reflection? What should we do when they conflict? This book seeks to answer these questions. In so doing, it shows the importance of another path to self-knowledge hitherto left aside by analytic authors: phenomenological reflection on our experience of the world. -/- Comment se connaît-on soi-même ? Concernant nos états d’esprit, il peut sembler que la connaissance de soi jouisse d’un privilège : je sais ce que je pense parce que j’ai un accès immédiat à mon esprit. S’inspirant de Sartre, deux philosophes américains, Richard Moran et Charles Larmore, ont soutenu que cette idée ne rend pas compte de notre rapport singulier à notre propre esprit. En plus de se connaître par une réflexion théorique, on est aussi capable d’une réflexion pratique. On peut répondre de façon pratique à la question de savoir ce qu’on pense : par une décision ou un engagement, plutôt qu’une interprétation de soi. Mais quel est le rapport entre ces deux types de réflexion sur soi ? Que faire lorsqu’elles entrent en conflit ? Ce livre cherche à répondre à ces questions. Ce faisant, il montre l’importance d’une autre voie vers la connaissance de soi jusqu’à présent laissée de côté par les auteurs analytiques : la réflexion phénoménologique sur notre expérience du monde. (shrink)

Newcomb problems turn on a tension between two principles of choice: roughly, a principle sensitive to the causal features of the relevant situation, and a principle sensitive only to evidential factors. Two-boxers give priority to causal beliefs, and one-boxers to evidential beliefs. A similar issue can arise when the modality in question is chance, rather than causation. In this case, the conflict is between decision rules based on credences guided solely by chances, and rules based on credences guided by (...) other sorts of probabilistic evidence. Far from excluding cases of the latter kind, Lewis’s Principal Principle explicitly allows for them, in the form of the caveat that credences should only follow beliefs about chances in the absence of "inadmissible evidence". In this paper I exhibit a tension in Lewis’s views on these two matters. I present a class of decision problems –- actually, I argue, a species of Newcomb problem –- in which Lewis’s view of the relevance of inadmissible evidence seems to recommend one-boxing, while his causal decision theory recommends two-boxing. I propose a diagnosis for this dilemma, and suggest a remedy, based on an extension of a proposal due to Ned Hall and others from the case of chance to that of causation. The remedy dissolves many apparent Newcomb problems, and makes one-boxing non-controversial in those that remain. (shrink)

According to one antitheist argument, the necessarily omniscient, necessarily omnipotent, and necessarily omnibenevolent Anselmian God does not exist, because if God is necessarily omnipotent it is impossible for Him to comprehend fully certain concepts, such as fear, frustration and despair, that an omniscient being needs to possess. Torin Alter examines this argument and provides three elaborate objections to it. I argue that theists would not accept any of them because they con ict with traditional Judaeo-Christian doctrines concerning divine attributes.

What is the relation between colors and our experience of them? A na?ve thought is this?the phenomenal character of color experience is determined by the qualitative character of the perceived color. When Norm perceives a red tomato, the qualitative character of his color experience is determined by the qualitative character of the color manifest in his experience of the tomato. If however, colors are mind- independent qualities of material objects, as they seem, pre-philosophically to be, then this can seem to (...) con?ict with the possibility, if it is one, of veridical perceptual variation. Indeed, it is largely on this basis that Shoemaker ?????? criticizes the version of representationalism defended by Hilbert and Kalderon ?????? (shrink)

This paper introduces a generalization of Reiter’s notion of “extension” for default logic. The main difference from the original version mainly lies in the way conflicts among defaults are handled: in particular, this notion of “general extension” allows defaults not explicitly triggered to pre-empt other defaults. A consequence of the adoption of such a notion of extension is that the collection of all the general extensions of a default theory turns out to have a nontrivial algebraic structure. This fact has (...) two major technical fall-outs: first, it turns out that every default theory has a general extension; second, general extensions allow one to define a well-behaved, skeptical relation of defeasible consequence for default theories, satisfying the principles of Reflexivity, Cut, and Cautious Monotonicity formulated by D. Gabbay. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between discourses of motherhood and discourses of employment for contemporary middle-class women. Drawing on data from a study of the transition to motherhood conducted in Bristol, UK, it is suggested that there are important continuities as well as con icts between the discursive construction of these two spheres. In consequence, a variety of relationships may be established between mothering and employment identities. The concept of `inter-spatiality' is suggested to conceptualize how the women negotiated the relationship (...) between the two. The findings suggest both that women do not necessarily experience con ict between these two sources of identity, and that they may have a degree of agency in negotiating the relationship between these interlocking parts of their lives. (shrink)

Scott Sehon argues for a complex view about the relation between commonsense psychology and the physical sciences.1 He rejects any sort of Cartesian dualism and believes that the common-sense psychological facts supervene on the physical facts. Nevertheless he asserts that there is an important respect in which common-sense psychology is independent of the physical sciences. Despite supervenience, we are not to expect any sort of reduction of common-sense psychology to physical science, nor are we to expect the physical sciences to (...) conflict with common-sense psychology. (shrink)

In The Evolution-Creation Struggle, Michael Ruse seeks to answer, ‘Why is there so much controversy surrounding evolutionary theory?’ He does so by tracing the historical development of the theory and the two major reactions to it. These major reactions, for and against, are not just views about science, but full blooded ‘rival religions.’ They each have a system of origins, morality, and eschatology. So the conflict over evolutionary theory persists because it is a clash between incompatible worldviews. This review (...) praises Ruse’s analysis on a number of points but also argues that he stumbles in three ways. First, he fails to explain that a key aspect of the origins debate concerns disagreement about the definition of science. Second, Ruse improperly uses his own definition of science, with little argument, in order to rule competing views out of science. Third, Ruse misrepresents the epistemology of non-Darwinians as relying on faith, emotion, and mystery instead of evidence and reason. (shrink)

This study explored possible deficits in selective attention brought about by Dementia of Alzheimer Type (DAT). In three experiments, we tested patients with early DAT, healthy elderly, and young adults under low memory demands to assess perceptual filtering, conflict resolution, and set switching abilities. We found no evidence of impaired perceptual filtering nor evidence of impaired conflict resolution in early DAT. In contrast, early DAT patients did exhibit a global cost in set switching consistent with an inability to (...) maintain the goals of the task (mental set). We discuss these findings in relation to the DAT literature on executive attention, dual-tasking, and working memory. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

At Discorsi II.20, Machiavelli defines auxiliary arms as those, “whom a prince or a republic send captained and already paid for, for your aid.” My contention is that Machiavelli’s treatment of auxiliary arms is much more nuanced than it may seem at first glance. Throughout his works, Machiavelli articulates this type of force from the standpoint of the prince but also, surprisingly, from the standpoint of the people. In their princely employment, auxiliary arms act instrumentally as means for the projection (...) of power. However, analyzed from the standpoint of the people, auxiliary force exposes the projects of the state to the radically aleatory. Acknowledging the aspectival function played by the definition of auxiliaries in Machiavelli’s texts offers a new vantage point for re-reading Machiavelli on the nature of authority, power and the conflict of the umori. (shrink)

Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about women’s rights and religious feminism. The context for analysis of women’s experiences is the “Women of the Wall” who have been struggling for the past 30 years for their right to practice their spiritual rituals (praying at the Western Wall) in a hegemonic and masculine arena. We suggest that the “Women of the Wall” and their battle for spiritual equality threaten the hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, this feminist battle expands the feminist revolution and (...) the fights for women’s equality to the religious arena which is dominated by the hegemonic masculinity. The implementation of the Listening Guide, a feminist methodology, assists us in uncovering various voices, representing different aspects of the experiences of the “Women of the Wall” in a conflict zone. These narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence, determination and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender equality in a hegemonic masculine domain. (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of scientific controversies usually focus on theory, excluding important practice related aspects. However, scientists in conflict often appeal to extra-theoretical and extra-empirical elements. To understand better the role that non-empirical elements play in scientific controversies, we introduce the notion of borrowed epistemic credibility, illustrating our proposal with a recent controversy in a field of evolutionary biology known as phylogeography. Our analysis shows how scientific controversies that spring from disagreements about methodological issues potentially involve deeper debates regarding what (...) constitutes good science, prompting the re-examination of more general issues, such as the nature of inference, rationality, and objectivity. (shrink)

This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some (...) theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well. (shrink)

Problem Statement. In modern conditions the reconstruction of self-developing socio-technological- ecological systems, which include man as its element, is actualized. The result of such a construction will be the management of the value of technogenic risk in its biological, social and civilizational forms. And the obvious consequence will be the transition of the development of biopolitical problems to a new, no longer international, but global-evolutionary level. The theory and practice of such a reconstruction can be designated by the category of (...) “Transbiolitics,” which implies the political institutionalization of “ecological re整ection. The article is a logical continuation of our previous publication devoted to the analysis of the transformation of the political process into the main factor of global evolution and the biopolitical transformation of the geopolitical landscape. The purpose of this paper is to create a general sketch of the con散guration of the main trends of the coevolutionary interaction of biological, sociocultural and techno-rationalist modules of the stable evolutionary strategy of the technogenic civilization in the space of bio- and geopolitical connotations of international relations. Based on a combination of methods of conceptual, discursive and political-anthropological analysis (in the context of transbiolitical paradigm) the content of the category “Transbiolitical Chronotope” is revealed: a geopolitically di䍕erentiated set of socio-cultural vectors of modern civilization evolution. In other words, the trans-biopolitical chronotope determines the direction of inclusive technological transformation of both cultural and ecological niche and the biosocial nature of man. The general conclusion/prognosis can be reduced to two theses. Firstly, transbiolitics, formed in a di䍕erentiated cultural-civilizational context, is currently being integrated into the general political process, partially replacing and partially intertwining with geopolitical doctrines in the sphere of international relations. Secondly, the growing con整ict of technological civilization with the cultural and ecological niche constructed by it through the turbulence of the geopolitical sphere of social life can bring the level of technological and civilizational risk to the existential boundary. (shrink)

McLaughlin’s case for the theoretical relevance of either "Escape" or of Freudian social theory generally proves counter-productive. He offers very weak criteria for theory acceptance and often takes mere labels to be explanatory theories. He does so particularly in his promotion of the con- cept of ambivalence. I will engage the proposed case study and explain why the use of “ambivalence” in psychoanalysis (especially by Bleuler or Freud) and sociology (by Smelser and his followers) is untenable. I point to a (...) notable conflict between McLaughlin’s rationalist and other inten- tions, and will show how he shares the approach to social theories that makes for the state of affairs in the humanities which he deplores. (shrink)