This volume presents a collection of refereed papers reflecting the state of the art in the area of over-constrained systems. Besides 11 revised full papers, selected from the 24 submissions to the OCS workshop held in conjunction with the First International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP '95, held in Marseilles in September 1995, the book includes three comprehensive background papers of central importance for the workshop papers and the whole field. Also included is an introduction by (...) one of the volume editors together with a bibliography listing 243 entries. All in all this is a very useful reference book relevant for all researchers and practitioners interested in hierarchical, partial, and over-constrained systems. (shrink)

This article argues that Bernard Williams’ Critical Theory Principle (CTP) is in tension with his realist commitments, i.e., deriving political norms from practices that are inherent to political life. The Williamsian theory of legitimate state power is based on the central importance of the distinction between political rule and domination. Further, Williams supplements the normative force of his theory with the CTP, i.e., the principle that acceptance of a justification regarding power relations ought not to be created by the very (...) same coercive power. I contend that the CTP is an epistemic criterion of reflective (un)acceptability which is not strictly connected to the question of whether people are dominated or not. I show that there are cases of non-domination that fail the epistemic requirements of the CTP. (shrink)

Can we understand brain lateralization in humans by analysis in terms of an evolutionarily stable strategy? The attempt to demonstrate a link between lateralization in humans and that in, for example, fish appears to hinge critically on whether the isomorphism is viewed as a matter of homology or homoplasy. Consideration of human handedness presents a number of challenges to the proposed framework.

What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon.

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)

Solar radiation management (SRM), a form of climate engineering, would offset the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations by reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth. To encourage support for SRM research, advocates argue that SRM may someday be needed to reduce the risks from climate change. This paper examines the implications of two moral constraints—the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, and the Doctrine of Double Effect—on this argument for SRM and SRM research. The Doctrine of Doing (...) and Allowing, and perhaps the Doctrine of Double Effect, shows that the argument is weaker than it appears. (shrink)

Existing accounts of mechanistic causation are not suited for understanding causation in biological and neural mechanisms because they do not have the resources to capture the unique causal structure of control heterarchies. In this paper, we provide a new account on which the causal powers of mechanisms are grounded by time-dependent, variable constraints. Constraints can also serve as a key bridge concept between the mechanistic approach to explanation and underappreciated work in theoretical biology that sheds light on how (...) biological systems channel energy to actively respond to the environment in adaptive ways, perform work, and fulfill the requirements to maintain themselves far from equilibrium. We show how the framework applies to several concrete examples of control in simple organisms as well as the nervous system of complex organisms. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it reflects on how it is possible to enjoy the freedom envisaged in the Zhuangzi. Many discussions welcome the Zhuangzi’s picture of release from life shaped by canonical visions, without also giving thought to life without these driving visions. Consider this scenario: in a world with limitless possibilities, would it not be (...) fraught, not knowing how to interpret situations? I suggest that freedom in the Zhuangzi is possible only if one succeeds in reorienting herself to the new ‘normal’. Second, I introduce and develop the idea of working with constraints. This focuses on an agent's maximizing the fit between relevant conditions, on the one hand, and their capabilities, on the other. Finally, I propose that self-directed practice, an important expression of agency, is required for building capabilities that enable such freedom. I examine the idea of risk involved in these firsthand experiences, articulating an account of agency that sits at the heart of hard-won Zhuangzian freedom. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it reflects on how it is possible to enjoy the freedom envisaged in the Zhuangzi. Many discussions welcome the Zhuangzi’s picture of release from life shaped by canonical visions, without also giving thought to life without these driving visions. Consider this scenario: in a world with limitless possibilities, would it not be (...) fraught, not knowing how to interpret situations? I suggest that freedom in the Zhuangzi is possible only if one succeeds in reorienting herself to the new ‘normal’. Second, I introduce and develop the idea of working with constraints. This focuses on an agent's maximizing the fit between relevant conditions, on the one hand, and their capabilities, on the other. Finally, I propose that self-directed practice, an important expression of agency, is required for building capabilities that enable such freedom. I examine the idea of risk involved in these firsthand experiences, articulating an account of agency that sits at the heart of hard-won Zhuangzian freedom. (shrink)

At the bottom of all human activities are “values,” the conviction that some things “ought to be” and others not. Science, however, with its immense interest in mere facts seems to lack all understanding of such‘requiredness.’… A science … which would seriously admit nothing but indifferent facts … could not fail to destroy itself.

Anderson's theory is plausible and largely consistent with the data. However, it remains underspecified on several fronts, and we highlight areas for potential improvement. Reuse is described as duplicating a functional component, preserving one function and tinkering to add another function. This is a promising model, but Anderson neglects other reasonable alternatives and we highlight several. Evidence cited in support of reuse fails to uniquely support it among a broader set of multi-use theories. We suggest that a more stringent criterion (...) for direct support of reuse may be satisfied by focusing on previous adaptive functions (original use). (shrink)

This paper provides an early evaluation of Artificial Intelligence against COVID-19. The main areas where AI can contribute to the fight against COVID-19 are discussed. It is concluded that AI has not yet been impactful against COVID-19. Its use is hampered by a lack of data, and by too much data. Overcoming these constraints will require a careful balance between data privacy and public health, and rigorous human-AI interaction. It is unlikely that these will be addressed in time to (...) be of much help during the present pandemic. In the meantime, extensive gathering of diagnostic data on who is infectious will be essential to save lives, train AI, and limit economic damages. (shrink)

Although military personnel are required to follow all legal orders, morally the traditional contract between soldier and state rests on shared assumptions about the purposes for which national militaries will and will not be used.

Effective stakeholder engagement and inclusive governance are essential for effective and equitable ocean management. However, few cross-national studies have been conducted to examine how stakeholders’ economic and cultural benefit perceptions influence their support level for policies focused on ocean preservation. The current study aims to fill this gap by employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 709 stakeholders from 42 countries, a part of the MaCoBioS project funded by the European Commission H2020. We found that economic (...) and cultural benefit perceptions are generally negatively associated with the policy support level. Regarding economic aspects, stakeholders considering transportation and shipping, renewable energy generation, and oil and gas provision as the most crucial benefits their countries’ oceans provide tend to obtain less support for policies focusing on ocean preservation. Meanwhile, for cultural aspects, perceiving recreation and tourism, aesthetic pleasure, mental health and well-being support, and sense of identity provision as the most important benefits provided by the country’s ocean are negatively associated with the policy support level. The perceived economic, cultural, and environmental tradeoffs when supporting policies focused on ocean preservation were discussed. Recommendations for improving the effective management of multi-use marine space are also provided to reduce the perceived competing interests among stakeholders. (shrink)

Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt seeks to reorient the conversation among religious ethicists and political theorists about religion in public life. Rather than focus on religious speech in general, Kaveny distinguishes deliberation and indictment as forms of discourse, and she subjects indictment to ethical evaluation. She aims to constrain the public exercise of inordinate indictment, while encouraging prophetic indictment that meets the demands of justice. While the book is a much-needed corrective, Kaveny's focus on the powerful rhetoric of prophetic indictment (...) omits the harms that can come to the body politic from unjust silence. Such silence deserves more moral attention. (shrink)

For most philosophers of psychology and cognitive science, inquiry into human cognitive activity begins at the level of intrapersonal processes. A central question is whether these processes are sufficiently autonomous from more basic neurophysiological processes to be investigated in their own terms, or whether all explanations must be in neurophysiological terms. Some philosophers have insisted on the relative autonomy of the cognitive level. One currently quite popular view, eliminative materialism, however, holds that the explanations that have been advanced at the (...) intrapersonal cognitive level are misguided, and must be replaced by accounts developed from an understanding of the underlying neurophysiological processes. (shrink)

Some ecologists have argued that theoretical model building in population and community ecology has gone evidentially unconstrained. In the essay, I argue that "bottle experiments" offer ecological model building evidential constraints and illustrate this by considering work on chaotic models tested by the dynamics of flour beetles. Critics reply that these experiments are importantly unlike nonmanipulated natural systems and thus do not constitute genuine tests of the models. I conclude by considering two responses to this worry and a suggestion (...) on how to move forward on this debate. (shrink)

"Representation" is one of those Janus-faced terms that seems blatantly obvious when used in a casual or pre-theoretic manner, but which reveals itself far more slippery when attentively studied. Any allusion to "metarepresentation", it would then seem, only compounds these difficulties. Taking the metarepresentationalist framework in its roughest outline as our point of departure, we thus articulate four key "structural" features that appear binding for any such theory.

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both (...) German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect. (shrink)

Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project grants and the epistemic properties of research. However, the potentially very different affordances and constraints of (...) funding arrangements such as awards, prizes and fellowships, have not yet been taken into account. Drawing on eight case studies of funding arrangements in high performing Dutch research groups, this study compares the institutional affordances and constraints of prizes with those of project grants and their effects on organizational and epistemic properties of research. We argue that the prize case studies diverge from project-funded research in three ways: 1) a more flexible use, and adaptation of use, of funds during the research process compared to project grants; 2) investments in the larger organization which have effects beyond the research project itself; and 3), closely related, greater deviation from epistemic and organizational standards. The increasing dominance of project funding arrangements in Western science systems is therefore argued to be problematic in light of epistemic and organizational innovation. Funding arrangements that offer funding without scholars having to submit a project-proposal remain crucial to support researchers and research groups to deviate from epistemic and organizational standards. (shrink)

A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active, the passive and “fronting” constructions. But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, (...) we conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions. The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies. (shrink)

This commentary explores biological models of analogical and associative learning in support of Illusion 1 and Illusion 4 in D. Noble’s target article. The intent is to support Noble’s theses of emergent higher level functionality from lower level stochastic dynamics and his etiological claim that “there is no privileged level of causation” through a biosemiotic lens. Upon these arguments, a case for creative agency via higher-dimensional constraints will also be made in support of Noble’s claim that organismic behavior is (...) actively directed by an agent. (shrink)

In contemporary debates about the nature of bioethics there is a widespread view that bioethical decision making should involve certain knowledge of and respect for cultural diversity of persons to be affected. The aim of this article is to show that this view is untenable and misleading. It is argued that introducing the idea of respect for cultural diversity into bioethics encounters a series of conceptual and empirical constraints. While acknowledging that cultural diversity is something that decision makers in (...) bioethical contexts should try to understand and, when possible, respect, it is argued that this cultural turn ignores the typically normative role of bioethics and thus threatens to undermine its very foundations. (shrink)

Should journalists resist business constraints they perceive as a threat to their professional integrity? This article suggests that the answer, at least sometimes, is yes. But in choosing a resistance strategy, journalists should not consider the "take this job and shove it" stance as the only option with moral integrity-or even as the best ethical option. This article develops a model of resistance strategies using the experiences of journalists at one newspaper to illustrate the range of options available for (...) resisting business constraints within a news organization. The types of strategies identified vary along the ethical dimensions of (a) consideration of organizational, as well as professional, goals; and (b) openness with regard to journalists' preference for professional goals. (shrink)

This study assessed the demographic characteristics of Koreans engaged in leisure sports activities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the differences in their preventive health behaviors and constraints on leisure activities. For this study, the demographic characteristics of 544 leisure sport participants, who were recruited on a nationwide basis, were examined through an online survey. Then, comparisons between groups were performed using independent t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, and multivariate analysis of variance. Women who participated in both indoor and outdoor (...) leisure sports showed higher adoption of health prevention behaviors than their male counterparts, and married individuals who participated in indoor leisure sports showed higher adoption of health prevention behaviors than unmarried participants. Moreover, individuals who participated in both indoor and outdoor leisure sports by themselves had many interpersonal constraints overall, and the group of married individuals who participated in indoor leisure sports showed structural constraints. In conclusion, leisure sports participants have adopted many health prevention behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, but this had led to some interpersonal constraints. These results indicate that, in the case of future pandemics, personal and institutional efforts will need to be made to promote participation in leisure sports and prevent excessive social isolation. (shrink)

The Greek poets and philosophers, united in a belief that men and women perceive the world around them very poorly, for this reason describe much of human behavior as fumbling for happiness in the dark. By contrast, perception failure is anathema to the modern tradition, as even the most innocent sort plays havoc with modern preference axioms.

In this paper, I argue that a modified version of well-being subjectivism can avoid the standard, yet unintuitive, conclusion that morally horrible acts may contribute to an agent’s well-being. To make my case, I argue that “Modified Subjectivists” need not accept such conclusions about well-being so long as they accept the following three theoretical addenda: 1) there are a plurality of values pertaining to well-being, 2) there are some objective goods, even if they do not directly contribute to well-being, and (...) 3) some of these values and goods are bound-up with one another. (shrink)

An adaptive neural network control problem is addressed for a class of nonlinear hydraulic servo-systems with time-varying state constraints. In view of the low precision problem of the traditional hydraulic servo-system which is caused by the tracking errors surpassing appropriate bound, the previous works have shown that the constraint for the system is a good way to solve the low precision problem. Meanwhile, compared with constant constraints, the time-varying state constraints are more general in the actual systems. (...) Therefore, when the states of the system are forced to obey bounded time-varying constraint conditions, the high precision tracking performance of the system can be easily realized. In order to achieve this goal, the time-varying barrier Lyapunov function is used to prevent the states from violating time-varying constraints. By the backstepping design, the adaptive controller will be obtained. A radial basis function neural network is used to estimate the uncertainties. Based on analyzing the stability of the hydraulic servo-system, we show that the error signals are bounded in the compacts sets; the time-varying state constrains are never violated and all singles of the hydraulic servo-system are bounded. The simulation and experimental results show that the tracking accuracy of system is improved and the controller has fast tracking ability and strong robustness. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; has no qualm with the idea of a specific, teleological principle (...) or force underlying generation, and conceives of germs and predispositions as specific constraints on such a principle or force. Neither of these conceptions of what is “preformed”, I argue, is in strict opposition to classical epigenesis. I further suggest that Kant’s lingering use of preformationist terminology is due to his belief that this is required to account for the specificity of the specific generative force; his resistance towards the unrestricted plasticity of the generative force in radical epigenesis, which violates species-fixism; and his insistence on the internal, organic basis of developmental plasticity and variation within species. I conclude by suggesting that this terminological and interpretative peculiarity is partly due to a larger shift in the natural philosophical concerns surrounding the debate on epigenesis and preformation. Specifically, it is a sign that the original reasons for resisting epigenesis, namely its use of specific, teleological principles and its commitment to the natural production of biological structure, became less of a concern, whereas unrestricted plasticity and its undermining of fixism became a real issue, thereby also becoming the focal point of the debate. (shrink)

In “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance,” Johan E. Gustafsson argues that the parties in the Original Position would not choose the Difference Principle to regulate their society’s basic structure. In reply to this internal critique, we provide two arguments. First, his choice models do not serve as a counterexample to the choice of the difference principle, as the models must assume that individual rationality scales to collective contexts in a way that begs the (...) question in favor of utilitarianism. Second, the choice models he develops are incompatible with the constraints of fairness that apply in the OP, which by design subordinates claims of rationality to claims of impartiality. When the OP is modeled correctly the difference principle is indeed entailed by the conditions of the OP. (shrink)