In this dissertation I put forth a defense of liberalism understood in terms of the principle of state neutrality. In the first half of the dissertation, I attempt to show that a commitment to state neutrality is a central element running through the liberal tradition. I argue for this by examining closely the liberal theories offered by Locke, Mill, Hobhouse, and Rawls. In the second part, I defend liberal neutrality against two prominent criticisms: first, that it is flawed because it (...) cannot acknowledge the importance of certain distinctive virtues needed for a flourishing human life; second, that it fails to account for the importance of civic virtues in citizens and so leads to serious sustainability problems for liberal societies. I conclude that liberal neutrality, properly understood, can withstand both of these criticisms and offers a viable and attractive model of political association. (shrink)

This study consists of a series of steps toward the development of a general theory of differences in ontological kind. The first part defines the notion of a "logical individual" and argues for its role as the basic ontological unit. I also take issue with those who hold that 'exist' is equivocal, as well as with those who claim that category-mistakes lack a truth-value. This part concludes with the "existence criterion", according to which a thing exists just in case it (...) is a logical individual; examples of things which satisfy and things which fail to satisfy this criterion are discussed. ;The second part covers a number of topics related to the classification of things into kinds. Problems involved in such classification are considered, including a discussion of whether, and on what grounds, certain attributes may be better qualified to define kinds than are others. The idea of ontological kinds is also adumbrated in an intuitive fashion, and a "formalist" strategy for ontological kinds, under which no attribute is treated as more ontologically puissant than any other, is considered and discarded. ;In the last part the ideal of substance is employed as a way of mediating between individuals, on the one hand, and privileged kinds, on the other. Following an examination of substance in Aristotle, six senses of substance are distinguished, of which two are found to hold particular promise for the development of a theory of ontological kinds. Discussion of these two notions of substance includes critiques of "stuff" metaphysics as well as "Aristotelian essentialism". The latter is found to depend on an unwarranted assumption that certain individuals are not only referentially, pragmatically, or psychologically prior to others, but also ontologically privileged. Refutation of this assumption leads to a rehabilitation of Aristotle's notion of "prime matter", but also to a picture of substance closer to Descartes' than to Aristotle's. The arguments against Aristotelian substance finally suggest an account of ontological kinds in terms of the possibility or impossibility of "fusion"--the coinstantiation by two individuals of a single individual concept. (shrink)

The remember–know paradigm is one of the most widely used procedures to examine the subjective experience associated with memory retrieval. We examined how the terminology and instructions used to describe the experiences of remembering and knowing affected remember–know judgments. In Experiment 1 we found that using neutral terms, i.e., Type A memory and Type B memory, to describe the experiences of remembering and knowing reduced remember false alarms for younger and older adults as compared to using the terms Remember and (...) Know, thereby increasing overall memory accuracy in the neutral terminology condition. In Experiment 2 we found that using what we call source-specific remember–know instructions, which were intended to constrain remember judgments to recollective experiences arising only from the study context, reduced remember hits and false alarms, and increased know hits and false alarms. Based on these data and other considerations, we conclude that researchers should use neutral terminology and source-specific instructions to collect the most accurate reports of the experiences of remembering and knowing arising from the study context. (shrink)

Task shifting is increasingly used to address human resource shortages impacting HIV service delivery in low- and middle-income countries. By shifting basic tasks from higher- to lower-trained cadres, such as Community Health Workers, task shifting can reduce overhead costs, improve community outreach, and provide efficient scale-up of essential treatments like antiretroviral therapies. Although there is rich evidence outlining positive outcomes that CHWs bring into HIV programs, important questions remain over their place in service delivery. These challenges often reflect concerns over (...) whether CHWs can mitigate HIV through a means that does not overlook the ethical and practical constraints that undergird their work. Ethical and practical guidance thus needs to become the cornerstone of CHW deployment. This paper analyzes such challenges through the lens of Ethical Principlism. We examined papers identifying substantive and ethical challenges impacting CHWs as they provide HIV services in low- and middle-income contexts. To do this, we analyzed papers written in English and published from year 2000 or later. These articles were identified using MEDLINE, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Google Scholar databases. In total, 465 articles were identified, 78 of which met our inclusion criteria. Article reference lists and grey literature were also examined. CHWs experience specific challenges while carrying out their duties, such as conducting emotionally- and physically-demanding tasks with often inadequate training, supervision and compensation. CHWs have also been poorly integrated into health systems, which not only impacts quality of care, but can hinder their prospects for promotion and lead to CHW disempowerment. As we argue, these challenges can be addressed if a set of ethical principles is prioritized, which specifically entail the principles of respect for persons, justice, beneficence, proportionality and cultural humility. CHWs play a crucial role in HIV service delivery, yet the ethical challenges that can accompany their work cannot be overlooked. By prioritizing ethical principles, policymakers and program implementers can better ensure that CHWs are combatting HIV through a means that does not exploit or take their critical role within service delivery for granted. (shrink)

Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience (...) is therefore no motive for resisting the natural, Galilean response to a scientific understanding of light and vision. The best interpretation of colour experience ends up convicting it of widespread and systematic error. (shrink)

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that an increase (...) in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects--their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on--amount to their having colors. The disagreement is thus about which properties colors are and, in particular, whether colors are any of the (...) properties in a particular set that is acknowledged on both sides to exhaust the properties of material objects. In a previous paper we discussed at length one attempt to identify colors with particular properties of material objects--namely, with their dispositions to cause visual experiences. Here we shall discuss a different and perhaps more influential version of realism, which says that the colors of material objects are microphysical properties of their surfaces. We shall call this theory physicalism about color (physicalism, for short). In order to evaluate this theory, however, we shall first have to clarify some methodological issues. Our hope is that we can bring some further clarity to the question of color realism, whether or not we succeed in our critique of the physicalists' answer. (shrink)

A central task in contemporary political philosophy is to identify principles governing political life where citizens disagree deeply on important questions of value and, more generally, about the proper ends of life. The distinctively liberal response to this challenge insists that the state should as far as possible avoid relying on such contested issues in its basic structure and deliberations. David McCabe critically surveys influential defenses of the liberal solution and advocates modus vivendi liberalism as an alternative defense (...) of the liberal state. Acknowledging that the modus vivendi approach does not provide the deep moral consensus that many liberals demand, he defends the liberal state as an acceptable compromise among citizens who will continue to see it as less than ideal. His book will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy and political theory. (shrink)

We present data and argument to show that in Tetris - a real-time interactive video game - certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as using the world to improve cognition. These actions are not used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction; they are used to (...) change the world in order to simplify the problem-solving task. Thus, we distinguish pragmatic actions ñ actions performed to bring one physically closer to a goal - from epistemic actions - actions performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally. To illustrate the need for epistemic actions, we first develop a standard information-processing model of Tetris-cognition, and show that it cannot explain performance data from human players of the game - even when we relax the assumption of fully sequential processing. Standard models disregard many actions taken by players because they appear unmotivated or superfluous. However, we describe many such actions that are actually taken by players that are far from superfluous, and that play valuable roles in improving human performance. We argue that traditional accounts are limited because they regard action as having a single function: to change the world. By recognizing a second function of action - an epistemic function - we can explain many of the actions that a traditional model cannot. Although, our argument is supported by numerous examples specifically from Tetris, we outline how the one category of epistemic action can be incorporated into theories of action more generally. (shrink)

Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the nature of the remember–know instructions given to participants influences whether these responses reflect different memory states or different degrees of memory confidence. Participants studied words and nonwords, a variable that has been shown to dissociate confidence from remember–know judgments and were given a set of published remember–know instructions that either emphasized know judgments as highly confident or as less confident states of recognition. Experiment 1 replicated the standard finding showing that (...) remembering and knowing were differently influenced by the word–nonword variable, whereas confidence responses were not. By contrast, Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of data for remember–know and sure–unsure responses, thus demonstrating the importance of the instructions for interpreting the relationship between remembering and knowing and confidence. (shrink)

We say that a sentence A is a permissive consequence of a set X of premises whenever, if all the premises of X hold up to some standard, then A holds to some weaker standard. In this paper, we focus on a three-valued version of this notion, which we call strict-to-tolerant consequence, and discuss its fruitfulness toward a unified treatment of the paradoxes of vagueness and self-referential truth. For vagueness, st-consequence supports the principle of tolerance; for truth, it supports the (...) requisite of transparency. Permissive consequence is non-transitive, however, but this feature is argued to be an essential component to the understanding of paradoxical reasoning in cases involving vagueness or self-reference. (shrink)

The use of remember–know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember–know and confidence judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study , but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments . Instead, high-confidence judgments were more likely (...) than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection , but still included recollection from the study context . Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.

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Die Leitgedanken meiner Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, die ich - anknüpfend an frühere Ansätze - seit 1917 in Besprechungen mit P. BERNAYS wieder aufgenommen habe, sind von mir an verschiedenen Stellen eingehend dargelegt worden. Diesen Untersuchungen, an denen auch W. ACKERMANN beteiligt ist, haben sich seither noch verschiedene Mathematiker angeschlossen. Der hier in seinem ersten Teil vorliegende, von BERNAYS abgefaßte und noch fortzusetzende Lehrgang bezweckt eine Darstellung der Theorie nach ihren heutigen Ergebnissen. Dieser Ergebnisstand weist zugleich die Richtung (...) für die weitere Forschung in der Beweistheorie auf das Endziel hin, unsere üblichen Methoden der Mathematik samt und sonders als widerspruchsfrei zu erkennen. Im Hinblick auf dieses Ziel möchte ich hervorheben, daß die zeit weilig aufgekommene Meinung, aus gewissen neueren Ergebnissen von GÖDEL folge die Undurchführbarkeit meiner Beweistheorie, als irrtüm lich erwiesen ist. Jenes Ergebnis zeigt in der Tat auch nur, daß man für die weitergehenden Widerspruchsfreiheitsbeweise den finiten Stand punkt in einer schärferen Weise ausnutzen muß, als dieses bei der Be trachtung der elementaren Formallsmen erforderlich ist. Göttingen, im März 1934 HILBERT Vorwort zur ersten Auflage Eine Darstellung der Beweistheorie, welche aus dem HILBERTschen Ansatz zur Behandlung der mathematisch-logischen Grundlagenpro bleme erwachsen ist, wurde schon seit längerem von HILBERT ange kündigt. (shrink)

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

This paper describes DIVA (Dynamic Imagery for Visual Analogy), a computational model of visual imagery based on the scene graph, a powerful representational structure widely used in computer graphics. Scene graphs make possible the visual display of complex objects, including the motions of individual objects. Our model combines a semantic-network memory system with computational procedures based on scene graphs. The model can account for people’s ability to produce visual images of moving objects, in particular the ability to use dynamic visual (...) analogies that compare two systems of objects in motion. (shrink)

Ever since Immanuel Kant suggested that ‘the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils’ so long as citizens’ selfish tendencies worked to counterbalance one another, critics have complained that liberalism is indifferent to individual character and, worse still, is predicated on the notion that citizens ought to be concerned primarily with their private interests and little, if at all, with the public weal. Lately, this line of criticism has been pressed with renewed (...) force by theorists who argue that liberal states can flourish only if citizens develop the distinctive virtues that, ‘taken together … constitute a disposition to foster, support, and participate in liberal political institutions,’ but that liberal states committed to neutrality with respect to the good cannot realistically expect their citizens to develop these virtues. (shrink)

Edited by Thomas A. Shannon, this series provides anthologies of critical essays and reflections by leading ethicists in four pivotal areas: reproductive technologies, genetic technologies, death and dying, and health care policy. The goal of this series is twofold: first, to provide a set of readers on thematic topics for introductory or survey courses in bioethics or for courses with a particular theme or time limitation. Second, each of the readers in this series is designed to help students focus more (...) thoroughly and effectively on specific topics that flesh out the ethical issues at the core of bioethics. The series is also highly accessible to general readers interested in bioethics. (shrink)