In this paper, we propose an extension of the Minimal Generation Gap (MGG) to reduce the number of fitness evaluation for the real-coded GAs (RCGA). When MGG is applied to actual engineering problems, for example applied to optimization of design parameters, the fitness calculating time is usually huge because MGG generates many children from one pair of parents and the fitness is calculated by repetitive simulation or analysis. The proposed method called Saving MGG reduces the number of fitness evaluation by (...) estimating the promising degrees of children using individual distribution and fitness information of population, and selecting children based on the promising degree before evaluating the fitness. Experimental results show that RCGA with Saving MGG can provide large reducing effects on 20 or 30 dimensional Sphere functions, Rosenbrock functions, ill-scaled Rosenbrock functions, and Rastrigin function. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 107-114 [Access article in PDF] A Comparative Study of Artistic Play and Zoukei-Asobi[Tables] "Artistic Play" and "Zoukei-Asobi" Recently, I found an article in Art Education which led me to believe that "artistic play" is not as popular among North America art educators as it is in Japan. 1 For Japanese art educators, especially at the elementary level, this word is well-known as (...) a key term. In Japanese we say "zoukei-asobi." "Zoukei" means "plastic arts activities" and "Asobi" means "playing." I recognized that the basic concept of "artistic play" has something in common with that of "zoukei-asobi." In this article I will identify this as "J-artistic play." The aim of this essay is to compare the meaning of "J-artistic play" by studying its use in Japan and the United States. The Curriculum Guidelines for Art Education in Japan Before considering J-artistic play, I should explain the national guideline for art education in Japan, since the objectives and contents of J-artistic play are prescribed by this guideline. We have had a national guideline since 1872 though this has changed drastically to resemble the American model after World War II. The subject corresponding to "Visual Art" in the elementary school is "Art and Handicraft (Zuga-Kousaku)." "Zuga" means drawing and painting, "Kousaku" means design and craft. The current guideline is divided into three parts (I-III) as shown in Table 1.The first shows a general goal of art education in the elementary school. The second describes the objectives and contents of each grade. The third indicates some key points of teaching for teachers. In the elementary school the curriculum sequence falls into three steps. The content is divided into the two areas ("Hyougen" and appreciation), and Hyougen is divided further into "artistic play" and "art-making." [End Page 107] [Begin Page 110]I should make some comments on Hyougen. In this guideline, Hyougen is used both as expression and representation. In traditional Japanese aesthetic consciousness, "expression, representation, and decoration" constitute a kind of trinity. The concept of J-artistic play was introduced into the national guidelines for art education in1977. 2 At first, this was available only for grades 1 and 2 in the elementary school, but since 1998 the concept has been extended to grades 1 and 6, as shown in Table 1. About the Property of J-artistic Play The activities in J-artistic play do not refer to any traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, or handicraft, nor are they derived from any specific art forms. In fact, the purpose for the introduction of this concept into the national guideline is to protect children from falling into conventional ways of representation as found in the traditional art forms. The promoters of J-artistic play thought that the preconceived ideas found in such existing art forms, such as painting might depress children's spontaneous and free expression. Some concepts from contemporary art, such as performance art, have also influenced J-artistic play.As Eliza Pitri said, "Play is spontaneous and voluntary. It is not obligatory but is freely chosen by the player." Though schooling is compulsory and a student cannot choose it independently, advocates of J-artistic insist that the character of "play" in the school curriculum should be an original and undifferentiated form of learning. One of the advocates of J-artistic play explains the significance of artistic play as an operation of integrated intelligence. 3 Artistic play is different in function from ordinary expressing activities. Ordinary expressing activity works with a blank drawing paper as sterile space, conditioned, virtual...laboratory. Contrarily artistic play works with raw materials, living places, and real environments, and is composed of organized and integrated formative activity by working on the subjects that make conditions for human, objective, and phenomenal interaction. Reorganization of intelligence and the opportunity for acquiring new intelligence are embedded in the activities that work interactively. Here we note that children will learn a reality from the interaction between the person and his... (shrink)

This paper investigates the stabilization and trajectory tracking problem of wheeled mobile robot with a ceiling-mounted camera in complex environment. First, an adaptive visual servoing controller is proposed based on the uncalibrated kinematic model due to the complex operation environment. Then, an adaptive controller is derived to provide a solution of uncertain dynamic control for a wheeled mobile robot subject to parametric uncertainties. Furthermore, the proposed controllers can be applied to a more general situation where the parallelism requirement between the (...) image plane and operation plane is no more needed. The overparameterization of regressor matrices is avoided by exploring the structure of the camera-robot system, and thus, the computational complexity of the controller can be simplified. The Lyapunov method is employed to testify the stability of a closed-loop system. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the suggested control. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a paradigm of experiment which, we believe, is of interest both in psychology and philosophy. There the subject wears an HMD (head-mount display), and a camera is set up at the upper corner of the room, in which the subject is. As a result, the subject observes his own body through the HMD. We will mainly focus on the philosophical relevance of this experiment, especially to the thesis of so-called 'immunity to error through misidentification relative (...) to the first-person pronoun'. We will argue that one experiment conducted in this setting, which we call the bodily illusion experiment, provides a counterexample to that thesis. (shrink)

In this paper, we present results of cross-linguistic studies of Japanese and English knowing how constructions that show radical differences in knowledge-how attributions with large effect sizes. The results suggest that the relevant ability is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge-how captured by Japanese constructions. We shall argue that such data will open up a gap between otherwise indistinguishable two conceptions of the very topic of knowledge-how, or the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, namely a debate about the nature of (...) knowledge-how and a debate about the state captured by “know how”, which we call the knowledge-how interpretation and the state interpretation, respectively. Consequently, the results have not only various possible philosophical implications that have not been considered or discussed in the literature but also provide new topics in the theory of knowledge-how, including the question of which interpretation of the topic is correct itself. (shrink)

In this paper, we present what we call the argument from accidental truth, according to which some instances of deflationist schemata, even those carefully reformulated and adjusted by Field and Horwich to accommodate the truth of utterances, are falsified due to accidental truths. Since the folk concept of truth allows for accidental truths, the deflationary theory of truth will face a serious problem. In particular, it follows that the deflationist schema fails to capture the proper extension of truth by precluding (...) accidental truths of utterances. Even though the argument uses the contextualist cases, this conclusion does not require so much as the truth of contextualism, but only two assumptions, the existence of context-relative non-literal contents of utterances (or speech acts), and the existence of accidental truths, both of which are widely accepted by folks and theorists. We will also consider various responses to the argument, including the revisionary deflationist position, all of which we argue are unsatisfactory or committed to a highly implausible view. (shrink)

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge (...) verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"--which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages--from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions. (shrink)

This volume features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. The first group of chapters provide evidence of cross-linguistic or cultural diversity relevant to epistemology and discuss its possible implications. These essays defend epistemic pluralism based on Sanskrit data as a commitment to pluralism about epistemic stances, analyze the use of two Japanese knowledge (...) verbs in relation to knowledge how, explore the Confucian notion of justification, and surveys cultural differences about the testimonial knowledge. The second group of chapters defends "core monism"-which claims that despite the cross-linguistic diversity of knowledge verbs, there is certain core epistemological meaning shared by all languages-from both a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and skeptical perspective. The third cluster of essays considers the implications of cultural diversity for epistemology based on anthropological studies. These chapters explore real disparities in folk epistemology across cultures. Finally, the last two chapters discuss methods or perspectives to unify epistemology despite and based on the diversity of folk intuitions and epistemological concepts. Ethno-Epistemology is an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose and justify the cross‐linguistic study of the concept of truth through empirical studies of truth predicates, with results of such studies. We first conceptually explore the possibility of cross‐linguistic disagreement about truth purely due to linguistic norms governing truth predicates, which may imply a kind of pluralism about the concept of truth. We then consider the conditions under which we would be justified in inferring this sort of pluralism from the fact of such cross‐linguistic disagreement. (...) Next, we report results of three studies on the use of English “is true” and Japanese two truth predicates, as well as “is correct” and its Japanese counterpart. We then report another set of studies using a different vignette, where the radical cross‐linguistic difference observed in earlier studies disappeared. These data together suggest that the moral‐political factor in the truth‐bearer (utterance) strongly affects the uses of Japanese truth predicates but not those of English. Finally, we will discuss the implications of the studies and results reported here, and the empirical possibility of what we call lexical alethic pluralism, for debates over relativism, theories of meaning, and the deflationary and inflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 107-114 [Access article in PDF] A Comparative Study of Artistic Play and Zoukei-Asobi[Tables] "Artistic Play" and "Zoukei-Asobi" Recently, I found an article in Art Education which led me to believe that "artistic play" is not as popular among North America art educators as it is in Japan. 1 For Japanese art educators, especially at the elementary level, this word is well-known as (...) a key term. In Japanese we say "zoukei-asobi." "Zoukei" means "plastic arts activities" and "Asobi" means "playing." I recognized that the basic concept of "artistic play" has something in common with that of "zoukei-asobi." In this article I will identify this as "J-artistic play." The aim of this essay is to compare the meaning of "J-artistic play" by studying its use in Japan and the United States. The Curriculum Guidelines for Art Education in Japan Before considering J-artistic play, I should explain the national guideline for art education in Japan, since the objectives and contents of J-artistic play are prescribed by this guideline. We have had a national guideline since 1872 though this has changed drastically to resemble the American model after World War II. The subject corresponding to "Visual Art" in the elementary school is "Art and Handicraft (Zuga-Kousaku)." "Zuga" means drawing and painting, "Kousaku" means design and craft. The current guideline is divided into three parts (I-III) as shown in Table 1.The first shows a general goal of art education in the elementary school. The second describes the objectives and contents of each grade. The third indicates some key points of teaching for teachers. In the elementary school the curriculum sequence falls into three steps. The content is divided into the two areas ("Hyougen" and appreciation), and Hyougen is divided further into "artistic play" and "art-making." [End Page 107] [Begin Page 110]I should make some comments on Hyougen. In this guideline, Hyougen is used both as expression and representation. In traditional Japanese aesthetic consciousness, "expression, representation, and decoration" constitute a kind of trinity. The concept of J-artistic play was introduced into the national guidelines for art education in1977. 2 At first, this was available only for grades 1 and 2 in the elementary school, but since 1998 the concept has been extended to grades 1 and 6, as shown in Table 1. About the Property of J-artistic Play The activities in J-artistic play do not refer to any traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, or handicraft, nor are they derived from any specific art forms. In fact, the purpose for the introduction of this concept into the national guideline is to protect children from falling into conventional ways of representation as found in the traditional art forms. The promoters of J-artistic play thought that the preconceived ideas found in such existing art forms, such as painting might depress children's spontaneous and free expression. Some concepts from contemporary art, such as performance art, have also influenced J-artistic play.As Eliza Pitri said, "Play is spontaneous and voluntary. It is not obligatory but is freely chosen by the player." Though schooling is compulsory and a student cannot choose it independently, advocates of J-artistic insist that the character of "play" in the school curriculum should be an original and undifferentiated form of learning. One of the advocates of J-artistic play explains the significance of artistic play as an operation of integrated intelligence. 3 Artistic play is different in function from ordinary expressing activities. Ordinary expressing activity works with a blank drawing paper as sterile space, conditioned, virtual...laboratory. Contrarily artistic play works with raw materials, living places, and real environments, and is composed of organized and integrated formative activity by working on the subjects that make conditions for human, objective, and phenomenal interaction. Reorganization of intelligence and the opportunity for acquiring new intelligence are embedded in the activities that work interactively. Here we note that children will learn a reality from the interaction between the person and his... (shrink)

Today the use of English is dominant, and even epistemologists in the " use English, using " But why, and to what extent can this be justified? As the first volume ever to be dedicated solely to this topic, the papers collected here will contribute to this important topic and in epistemology in general.

In this paper we will propose a simple linguistic approach to the Knobe effect, or the moral asymmetry of intention attribution in general, which is just to ask the felicity judgments on the relevant sentences without any vignette at all. Through this approach we were in fact able to reproduce the Knobe effects in different languages, with large effect sizes. We shall defend the significance of this simple approach by arguing that our approach and its results not only tell interesting (...) facts about the concept of intentional action, but also show the existence of the linguistic default, which requires independent investigation. We will then argue that, despite the recent view on experimental philosophy by Knobe himself, there is a legitimate role of the empirical study of concepts in the investigations of cognitive processes in mainstream experimental philosophy, which suggests a broadly supplementary picture of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Nevin & Grace's primary argument against theory and research on behavioral momentum is that preference and resistance to change may not covary. The method for evaluating preference and resistance to change seems problematic. Moreover, the theory fails to account convincingly for effects of average overall time to primary reinforcement on choice and preference for unsegmented schedules.

According to Bengson et al.’s Salchow case, Irina is a novice skater who has a mistaken belief about what amounts to a Salchow, but also has a neurological abnormality which, unknowingly to her, affects both her movement and her sense of it. As a result of this twist, she always ends up succeeding in jumping the Salchow whenever she tries. This story was presented as a counterexample to a variant of anti-intellectualism, and as Bengson and colleagues expected, the vast majority (...) of participants in their survey judged both that Irina is able to do the Salchow and that she does not know how to do it. But the three conditions above leave some ambiguity about the story. That is whether Irina is aware of her own ability, or whether she is aware of what she is doing when she performs it, and therefore the fact that she can reliably perform the Salchow. However, as we report here, disambiguating this point will radically change the responses of people, which rather poses a serious challenge to intellectualism. (shrink)

This work explores the conceptual and empirical issues of the concept of knowledge and its relation to the pattern of our belief change, from formal and experimental perspectives. Part I gives an analysis of knowledge (called Sustainability) that is formally represented and naturalistically plausible at the same time, which is claimed to be a synthesized view of knowledge, covering not only empirical knowledge, but also knowledge of future, practical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, knowledge of general facts. Part II tries to formalize (...) the natural pattern of belief change assumed in Sustainability in terms of a specific formal theory of belief change, after carefully examining the notions of belief, belief change, and Information, from which the cognitive function F in Chapter 3 is actually constructed, which is later implemented by a computer program and its behavior against random input is demonstrated. In Part III we proceed to examine the analysis empirically. In particular, we will investigate Sustainability from the developmental point of view. We first justify experimental approach in philosophy as a legitimate method of philosophical investigation, and then developmental approach in particular. The specific proposal of experiment here is what we call the Gettier Task, an analogue of the famous false-belief task in developmental psychology, which has been much discussed in philosophy of mind. Two versions of the Gettier Task were tested on children aged from 6 to 12, and we claim that the data obtained empirically supports our analysis of knowledge, or Sustainability. (shrink)

Cellular pattern formations of some epithelia are believed to be governed by the direct lateral inhibition rule of cell differentiation. That is, initially equivalent cells are all competent to differentiate, but once a cell has differentiated, the cell inhibits its immediate neighbors from following this pathway. Such a differentiation repeats until all non-inhibited cells have differentiated. The cellular polygonal patterns can be characterized by the numbers of undifferentiated cells and differentiated ones. When the differentiated cells become large in size, the (...) polygonal pattern is deformed since more cells are needed to enclose the large cell. An actual example of such a cellular pattern was examined. The pupal wing epidermis of a butterfly Pieris rapae shows a transition of the equivalent-size cell pattern to the pattern involving large cells. The process of the transition was analyzed by using the method of weighted Voronoi tessellation that is useful for treatment of irregularly sized polygons. The analysis supported that the pattern transition of the early stage of the pupal wing epidermis is governed by the lateral inhibition rule. The differentiation takes place in order of largeness, but not smallness, of the apical polygonal area in the differentiating region of the pupal wing. (shrink)

This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophyordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. (...) I will then examine the reasons for the demise of OLP, and show that the contemporary meta-philosophical debates over X-Phi are in fact a revival of the debates in the heyday of OLP. This will then also indicate a parallel between Wittgenstein’s negative programnegative program, called quietism, and the negative program of X-Phi, especially Stich’s. The positive program of X-Phi can no doubt contribute to science, but the question of whether it is philosophy may depend on our conception of philosophy. The negative program of X-Phi is no doubt philosophy, but the question is whether it can make any positive contribution to philosophy, let alone science. I will answer “yes” to it, by sketching a radical negative picture of philosophy in general. (shrink)

Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philosophers judge whether it is true that (...) S knows that p, or whether saying “S knows that p” is false, deviant, etc. in that situation. However, English is just one of over 6000 languages spoken around the world, and is the native language of less than 6% of the world’s population. When Western epistemology first emerged, in ancient Greece, English did not even exist. So why should we think that facts about the English word “know,” the concept it expresses, or subtle semantic properties of “S knows that p” have important implications for epistemology? Are the properties of the English word “know” and the English sentence ‘S knows that p’ shared by their translations in most or all languages? If that turned out to be true, it would be a remarkable fact that cries out for an explanation. But if it turned out to be false, what are the implications for epistemology? Should epistemologists study knowledge attributions in languages other than English with the same diligence they have shown for the study of English knowledge attributions? If not, why not? In what ways do the concepts expressed by ‘know’ and its counterparts in different languages differ? And what should epistemologists make of all this? (shrink)

We should seek to justify, from a moral perspective, policies associated with serious and irreversible risks to the health of human beings, their societies, and the environment for these risks may have great impacts on the autonomy of both existing and future persons. The ideal of discursive democracy provides a way of morally justifying such policies to both existing and future persons. It calls for the inclusive, informed, and uncoerced deliberation toward an agreement of both existing and future persons, which (...) can serve as a justificatory basis for such public policies. This agreement best protects their fundamental interests and basic needs, and garners their general acceptance. It does so by upholding their agency in decision-making processes and, more specifically, by counseling a maxim of precaution in their public reasoning. The aim of this maxim is to protect the social and environmental conditions that will enable members of existing and future generations to review and, if necessary, revise decisions made in the past but that impact upon them in the present. Precautionary public reasoning thus serves to uphold the decisional agency of existing and future persons, which is a necessary condition of their democratic involvement in the policies that affect them and thus of their autonomous existence defined by their conceptions of the good. (shrink)

The Blinking Qualia Argument is the argument presented in Mizumoto (2006), which is to establish that zombies are impossible a priori. In this paper I will defend the argument from the actual and possible criticisms. Since such criticisms mainly focus on the premise “If qualia blinks, the subject can notice the blinking qualia,” I will give arguments to specifically defend that premise. This will bring into light the critic’s misunderstandings on the argument, and more generally, typical misunderstandings surrounding the debates (...) over the possibility of zombies, concerning the very concept of qualia. (shrink)

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this (...) grounded normative theory (GNT) approach – to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This review analyzes the social perspective of patient safety and how pharmacists should consider these elements when adopting health information technology (HIT) into their practice.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)