Neural network models of memory are notorious for catastrophic interference: Old items are forgotten as new items are memorized (French, 1999; McCloskey & Cohen, 1989). While working memory (WM) in human adults shows severe capacity limitations, these capacity limitations do not reflect neural network style catastrophic interference. However, our ability to quickly apprehend the numerosity of small sets of objects (i.e., subitizing) does show catastrophic capacity limitations, and this subitizing capacity and WM might reflect a common capacity. Accordingly, computational investigations (...) (Knops, Piazza, Sengupta, Eger & Melcher, 2014; Sengupta, Surampudi & Melcher, 2014) suggest that mutual inhibition among neurons can explain both kinds of capacity limitations as well as why our ability to estimate the numerosity of larger sets is limited according to a Weber ratio signature. Based on simulations with a saliency map‐like network and mathematical proofs, we provide three results. First, mutual inhibition among neurons leads to catastrophic interference when items are presented simultaneously. The network can remember a limited number of items, but when more items are presented, the network forgets all of them. Second, if memory items are presented sequentially rather than simultaneously, the network remembers the most recent items rather than forgetting all of them. Hence, the tendency in WM tasks to sequentially attend even to simultaneously presented items might not only reflect attentional limitations, but also an adaptive strategy to avoid catastrophic interference. Third, the mean activation level in the network can be used to estimate the number of items in small sets, but it does not accurately reflect the number of items in larger sets. Rather, we suggest that the Weber ratio signature of large number discrimination emerges naturally from the interaction between the limited precision of a numeric estimation system and a multiplicative gain control mechanism. (shrink)

…entities? 2. How to be a nominalist 2.1. “Speak with the vulgar …” 2.2. “…think with the learned” 3. Arguments for nominalism 3.1. Intelligibility, physicalism, and economy 3.2. Causal..

Contemporary medicine views health as the individual’s physical, mental, and social well-being. Oral health plays a crucial role in one’s well-being, as the oral cavity and its surrounding regions execute essential functions in verbal and nonverbal communication, sensing, digestion, and significantly contribute to aesthetic appearance. The multifaceted nature of the notion of oral health, as well as the patient’s needs and autonomous will result in various treatment options for the same oral state, favouring often contrasting ethical values and different aspects (...) of oral health. The objective of this article is to suggest alternative treatment strategies in dentistry with respect to the following factors: extent of rehabilitation, preserving one’s anatomical structures, aesthetic outcome, number of sessions, patient autonomy. Additionally, this article describes the suggested treatment strategies in an ethical context and determines the conditions of their employment. The suggested treatment strategies are divided in two categories, extensive treatment strategies focusing on the patient’s entire craniofacial complex, while specific treatment strategies focus on specific paramount issues. (shrink)

A number of recent articles have invoked the republican ideal of non-domination to justify either open borders, and/or the reduction of states’ discretionary powers to unilaterally determine immigration policy. In this paper, I show that such arguments are one-sided, as they fail to fully account for the deep ambiguity of the very ideal which they invoke. In fact, non-domination lends just as powerful support to maintaining state border controls as it does to dismantling them. There are only two exceptions to (...) the rule. It is well established that promoting non-domination demands, one the one hand, that refugees be admitted, and second, that all migrants have a right to contest decisions concerning their own admission. But aside from these things, the policy implications of the ideal are unclear. In itself, therefore, it is insufficient to justify either open borders, or the reduction of states said discretionary powers. Such arguments will have to rely on other, additional moral criteria. -/- . (shrink)

I will sketch a possible way of empirical/operational definition of space and time tags of physical events, without logical or operational circularities and with a minimal number of conventional elements. As it turns out, the task is not trivial; and the analysis of the problem leads to a few surprising conclusions.

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. This article gives a sketch of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics; it is the intention of the rest of this article to make it more precise. It starts by considering three alternative characterizations and explain what the article finds problematic about each of them. This leads to the discussion of utterance interpretation, which situates semantics and pragmatics in a (...) larger enterprise. But the characterization of their contrast remains sketchy until the final section, where the article discusses how truth-conditions and the notion of what is said fit into the picture. (shrink)

My paper is on the republican version of patriotism and its justification, as developed most systematically by Philip Pettit and Maurizio Viroli. The essence of the justification is as follows: patriotism is to be viewed as valuable insofar as it is an indispensable instrument for the upholding of the central republican ideal, namely freedom understood as non-domination. My primary aim is to evaluate the normative force of this justification. In the first section, I introduce minimal descriptive definitions of the concepts (...) of patriotism and the patria. Second, I reconstruct the republican patria-ideal to which patriotism is linked to. In the third section, I reconstruct the republican justification of patriotism. Finally, I ask what we justify when we justify republican patriotism. Two views are prevalent in this regard. According to the first, republican patriotic motivation, similarly to its justification, ought to be instrumental itself too. I argue that this view is untenable, since it is in tension with the minimal definition of patriotism. The conclusion is that the other view – according to which the patriotic motivation ought to be of intrinsic character – possesses greater normative force. (shrink)

Shoot From The Hip - Professional Intuition In Decision-Making -/- Why do eighty percent of decision-makers say that they use intuition often or very often in their decision-making? What is intuition? How does it function? How can we achieve becoming more intuitive? How can we apply it in understanding the world and making more ethical decisions?

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of (...) context‐dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context‐dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. (shrink)

This article is a brief formulation of a radical thesis. We start with the formalist doctrine that mathematical objects have no meanings; we have marks and rules governing how these marks can be combined. That's all. Then I go further by arguing that the signs of a formal system of mathematics should be considered as physical objects, and the formal operations as physical processes. The rules of the formal operations are or can be expressed in terms of the laws of (...) physics governing these processes. In accordance with the physicalist understanding of mind, this is true even if the operations in question are executed in the head. A truth obtained through (mathematical) reasoning is, therefore, an observed outcome of a neuro-physiological (or other physical) experiment. Consequently, deduction is nothing but a particular case of induction. (shrink)

A recent analysis by de Barros and Suppes of experimentally realizable GHZ correlations supports the conclusion that these correlations cannot be explained by introducing local hidden variables. We show, nevertheless, that their analysis does not exclude local hidden variable models in which the inefficiency in the experiment is an effect not only of random errors in the detector equipment, but is also the manifestation of a pre-set, hidden property of the particles ("prism models"). Indeed, we present an explicit prism model (...) for the GHZ scenario; that is, a local hidden variable model entirely compatible with recent GHZ experiments. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions seem context sensitive. Yet it is widely thought that epistemic contextualism does not have a plausible semantic implementation. We aim to overcome this concern by articulating and defending an explicit contextualist semantics for ‘know,’ which integrates a fairly orthodox contextualist conception of knowledge as the elimination of the relevant alternatives, with a fairly orthodox “Amherst” semantics for A-quantification over a contextually variable domain of situations. Whatever problems epistemic contextualism might face, lack of an orthodox semantic implementation is not (...) among them. (shrink)

It is shown that, given any finite set of pairs of random events in a Boolean algebra which are correlated with respect to a fixed probability measure on the algebra, the algebra can be extended in such a way that the extension contains events that can be regarded as common causes of the correlations in the sense of Reichenbach's definition of common cause. It is shown, further, that, given any quantum probability space and any set of commuting events in it (...) which are correlated with respect to a fixed quantum state, the quantum probability space can be extended in such a way that the extension contains common causes of all the selected correlations, where common cause is again taken in the sense of Reichenbach's definition. It is argued that these results very strongly restrict the possible ways of disproving Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle. (shrink)

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and modal epistemology.

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) published an important paper in which they claimed that the whole formalism of quantum mechanics together with what they called a “Reality Criterion” imply that quantum mechanics cannot be complete. That is, there must exist some elements of reality that are not described by quantum mechanics. They concluded that there must be a more complete description of physical reality involving some hidden variables that can characterize the state of affairs in the world in (...) more detail than the quantum mechanical state. This conclusion leads to paradoxical results. -/- As Bell proved in 1964, under some further but quite plausible assumptions, this conclusion that there are hidden variables implies that, in some spin-correlation experiments, the measured quantum mechanical probabilities should satisfy particular inequalities (Bell-type inequalities). The paradox consists in the fact that quantum probabilities do not satisfy these inequalities. And this paradoxical fact has been confirmed by several laboratory experiments since the 1970s. -/- Some researchers have interpreted this result as showing that quantum mechanics is telling us nature is non-local, that is, that particles can affect each other across great distances in a time too brief for the effect to have been due to ordinary causal interaction. Others object to this interpretation, and the problem is still open and hotly debated among both physicists and philosophers. It has motivated a wide range of research from the most fundamental quantum mechanical experiments through foundations of probability theory to the theory of stochastic causality as well as the metaphysics of free will. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 203 Seiten: 9-37.

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

When we utter sentences containing quantifiers, typically we are not to be taken to speak about absolutely everything there is. Suppose Mary has invited her friend John to a party to which she is going. If, upon entering the party, Mary turns to Jack and utters (1), it would be rather odd of Jack to object by pointing out that John in fact knows several people who are not present.

A partition $\{C_i\}_{i\in I}$ of a Boolean algebra $\cS$ in a probability measure space $(\cS,p)$ is called a Reichenbachian common cause system for the correlated pair $A,B$ of events in $\cS$ if any two elements in the partition behave like a Reichenbachian common cause and its complement, the cardinality of the index set $I$ is called the size of the common cause system. It is shown that given any correlation in $(\cS,p)$, and given any finite size $n>2$, the probability space (...) $(\cS,p)$ can be embedded into a larger probability space in such a manner that the larger space contains a Reichenbachian common cause system of size $n$ for the correlation. It also is shown that every totally ordered subset in the partially ordered set of all partitions of \cS$ contains only one Reichenbachian common cause system. Some open problems concerning Reichenbachian common cause systems are formulated. (shrink)

On the basis of what I call physico-formalist philosophy of mathematics, I will develop an amended account of the Kantian–Reichenbachian conception of constitutive a priori. It will be shown that the features attributed to a real object are not possessed by the object as a “thing-in-itself”; they require a physical theory by means of which these features are constituted. It will be seen that the existence of such a physical theory implies that a physical object can possess a property only (...) if other contingently existing physical objects exist; therefore, the intrinsic–extrinsic distinction is flawed. (shrink)

This essay has two main claims about EPR’s Reality Criterion. First, we claim that the application of the Reality Criterion makes an essential difference between the EPR argument and Einstein’s later arguments against quantum mechanics. We show that while the EPR argument, making use of the Reality Criterion, does derive that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics are incomplete, Einstein’s later arguments, making no use of the Reality Criterion, do not prove incompleteness, but rather point to the inadequacy of the Copenhagen (...) interpretation. We take this fact as an indication that the Reality Criterion is a crucial, indispensable component of the incompleteness argument(s). The second claim is more substantive. We argue that the Reality Criterion is a special case of the Common Cause Principle. Finally, we relate this proposal to Tim Maudlin’s recent assertion that the Reality Criterion is an analytic truth. (shrink)

Standard derivations of the Bell inequalities assume a common common cause system that is a common screener-off for all correlations and some additional assumptions concerning locality and no-conspiracy. In a recent paper (Grasshoff et al., 2005) Bell inequalities have been derived via separate common causes assuming perfect correlations between the events. In the paper it will be shown that the assumptions of this separate-common-cause-type derivation of the Bell inequalities in the case of perfect correlations can be reduced to the assumptions (...) of common-common-cause-system-type derivation. However, in the case of non-perfect correlations a non-reducible separate-common-cause-type derivation of some Bell-like inequalities can be given. The violation of these Bell-like inequalities proves Szabó's (2000) conjecture concerning the non-existence of a local, non-conspiratorial, separate-common-cause-model for a delta δ-neighborhood of perfect EPR correlations. (shrink)

A condition is formulated in terms of the probabilities of two pairs of correlated events in a classical probability space which is necessary for the two correlations to have a single (Reichenbachian) common-cause and it is shown that there exists pairs of correlated events probabilities of which violate the necessary condition. It is concluded that different correlations do not in general have a common common-cause. It is also shown that this conclusion remains valid even if one weakens slightly Reichenbach's definition (...) of common-cause. The significance of the difference between common-causes and common common-causes is emphasized from the perspective of Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle. (shrink)