In the curve fitting problem two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness-of-fit, pull in opposite directions. To this problem, we propose a solution that strikes a balance between simplicity and goodness-of-fit. Using Bayes' theorem we argue that the notion of prior probability represents a measurement of simplicity of a theory, whereas the notion of likelihood represents the theory's goodness-of-fit. We justify the use of prior probability and show how to calculate the likelihood of a family of curves. We diagnose the relationship (...) between simplicity of a theory and its predictive accuracy. (shrink)

In the curve fitting problem two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness-of-fit, pull in opposite directions. To this problem, we propose a solution that strikes a balance between simplicity and goodness-of-fit. Using Bayes' theorem we argue that the notion of prior probability represents a measurement of simplicity of a theory, whereas the notion of likelihood represents the theory's goodness-of-fit. We justify the use of prior probability and show how to calculate the likelihood of a family of curves. We diagnose the relationship (...) between simplicity of a theory and its predictive accuracy. (shrink)

In the curve fitting problem two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness-of-fit pull in opposite directions. To solve this problem, two proposals, the first one based on Bayes's theorem criterion (BTC) and the second one advocated by Forster and Sober based on Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) are discussed. We show that AIC, which is frequentist in spirit, is logically equivalent to BTC, provided that a suitable choice of priors is made. We evaluate the charges against Bayesianism and contend that AIC approach (...) has shortcomings. We also discuss the relationship between Schwarz's Bayesian Information Criterion and BTC. (shrink)

In the curve fitting problem two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness-of-fit, pull in opposite directions. To this problem, we propose a solution that strikes a balance between simplicity and goodness-of-fit. Using Bayes’ theorem we argue that the notion of prior probability represents a measurement of simplicity of a theory, whereas the notion of likelihood represents the theory’s goodness-of-fit. We justify the use of prior probability and show how to calculate the likelihood of a family of curves. We diagnose the relationship (...) between simplicity of a theory and its predictive accuracy. (shrink)

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people (...) who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

A prospective introduction -- The received view -- Troubles with the received view -- Are propositional attitudes relations? -- Foundations of a measurement-theoretic account of the attitudes -- The basic measurement-theoretic account -- Elaboration and explication of the proposed measurement-theoretic account.

The goal of this paper is two-fold: first, to emphasize causality in disease ontology and knowledge representation, presenting a general and cursory discussion of causality and causal chains; and second, to clarify and develop the River Flow Model of Diseases (RFM). The RFM is an ontological account of disease, representing the causal structure of pathology. It applies general knowledge of causality using the concept of causal chains. The river analogy of disease is explained, formal descriptions are offered, and the RFM (...) disease definition is refined by describing causal chains in terms of causal relations. The definition is updated to coincide with the actual RFM classes found in its upper-level ontology, YAMATO, which brings to light some challenges in developing both YAMATO and the RFM. The RFM is also discussed in relation to another ontological account of disease. Strategies are offered toward interoperability between these theories. (shrink)

Classifications of animals and plants have long been represented by hierarchical lists of taxa, but occasional authors have drawn diagrammatic versions of their classifications in an attempt to better depict the "natural relationships" of their organisms. Ornithologists in 19th-century Britain produced and pioneered many types of classificatory diagrams, and these fall into three groups: (a) the quinarian systems of Vigors and Swainson (1820s and 1830s); (b) the "maps" of Strickland and Wallace (1840s and 1850s); and (c) the evolutionary diagrams of (...) the post-Darwin authors (1860 on). The quinarians distinguished between affinity and analogy and used both in their classifications, whereas Strickland rejected the quinarians' belief in numerical regularity and their use of analogy. Wallace's "maps" are easily given an evolutionary interpretation, and his approach was taken up and modified by later evolutionary anatomists. Sharpe returned to Strickland's methods and merely appended a superficial evolutionary interpretation. Contrary to common belief systematics has a rich conceptual history, and many of the conceptual developments in 19th-century systematics were made by ornithologists. (shrink)

Putnam and Searle famously argue against computational theories of mind on the skeptical ground that there is no fact of the matter as to what mathematical function a physical system is computing: both conclude (albeit for somewhat different reasons) that virtually any physical object computes every computable function, implements every program or automaton. There has been considerable discussion of Putnam's and Searle's arguments, though as yet there is little consensus as to what, if anything, is wrong with these arguments. In (...) the present paper we show that an analogous line of reasoning can be raised against the numerical measurement (i.e., numerical representation) of physical magnitudes, and we argue that this result is a reductio ad absurdum of the challenge to computational skepticism. We then use this reductio to get clearer about both (i) what's wrong with Putnam's and Searle's arguments against computationalism, and (ii) what can be learned about both computational implementation and numerical measurement from the shortcomings of both sorts of skeptical argument. (shrink)

Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), Fodor and McLaughlin (1990) and McLaughlin (1993) challenge connectionists to explain systematicity without simply implementing a classical architecture. In this paper I argue that what makes the challenge difficult for connectionists to meet has less to do with what is to be explained than with what is to count as an explanation. Fodor et al. are prepared to admit as explanatory, accounts of a sort that only classical models can provide. If connectionists are to meet the (...) challenge, they are going to have to insist on the propriety of changing what counts as an explanation of systematicity. Once that is done, there would seem to be as yet no reason to suppose that connectionists are unable to explain systematicity. (shrink)

This paper defends the commonsense conception of linguistic competence according to which linguistic competence involves propositional knowledge of language. More specifically, the paper defends three propositions challenged by Devitt in his Ignorance af Language. First, Chomskian linguists were right to embrace this commonsense conception of linguistic cornpetence. Second, the grammars that these linguists propose make a substantive claim about the computational processes that are presumed to constitute a speaker’s linguistic competence. Third, Chomskian linguistics is indeed a subfield of psychology, in (...) the business of characterizing the linguistic competence of speakers. (shrink)

Propositional relationalists about the attitudes claim to find support for their view in what they assume to be the dyadic relational logical form of the predicates by which we canonically attribute propositional attitudes. In this paper I argue that the considerations that they adduce in support of this assumption, specifically for the assumption that the that-clauses that figure in these predicates are singular terms, are suspect on linguistic grounds. Propositional relationalism may nonetheless be true, but the logical form of attitude (...) predicates provides no grounds for thinking this to be so. (shrink)

Robert Roth, among the first few Catholics to write favorably, even if critically, about American pragmatism, presents here a creative piece of comparative philosophy in which he achieves a long-term goal of attempting a reconciliation between pragmatism and a classical spiritual and religious perspective. The title, Radical Pragmatism, is an adaptation of William James’s "radical empiricism." James had argues that the classical empiricists, Locke and Hume, did not go far enough in their account of experience. They missed some of (...) its most important aspects, namely connections and relations, and as a result they were left with discrete sense data and sense objects. (shrink)

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is a research topic with both theoretical and practical significance. However, the ethical and moral aspects of conceptual, ontological, semantic, and knowledge modeling, more specifically, and which are sometimes found in AI applications, is not being given sufficient attention. I argue that it should. Whether considering using or developing these meaning-focused models, there are ethical aspects. This paper offers a preliminary outline about this potentially new research field, discussing: some questions and areas of concern, (...) their significance; scenarios of ethical import, and initial ethical guidelines. A focus area, potential case study, and lens through which to see the ethical significance at hand, is ontologies, with emphasis on the most abstract ontologies (so-called generic, foundational, top-level or upper ontologies). This would aim to show the ethical import of highly abstract (often philosophical) ontological choices, assumptions, and their effects on data, developers, users, and society. In particular, I stress the need for critical examination of such models, their content, their intended meanings, assumptions, ideologies, as well as the development process. Both the ethics of, and ethics in, these activities are, therefore, of interest. Topics in the ethics of AI that are relevant include: transparency, bias, data-sharing, privacy, control over data, etc. This paper thereby contributes to the ethics of AI, as well as the ethics of information, of knowledge managment and relevant topics by developing and discussing the ethics of ontology (and similar systems). Future development will refine and add to the ideas expressed in this paper. (shrink)

Next SectionIn a series of previous articles, we have considered how we might reconceptualise central themes in medicine and medical education through ‘thinking with Homer’. This has involved using textual approaches, scenes and characters from the Iliad and Odyssey for rethinking what is a ‘communication skill’, and what do we mean by ‘empathy’ in medical practice; in what sense is medical practice formulaic, like a Homeric ‘song’; and what is lyrical about medical practice. Our approach is not to historicise medicine (...) and medical education, but to use thinking with Homer as a medium and metaphor for questioning the habitual and the taken-for-granted in contemporary practice. In this article, we tackle the complex theme of ‘translation’. We use the lens of translation studies to examine the process of turning the patient's story into medical language. We address the questions: what makes a ‘good’ translation? What are the consequences of mistranslation and poor translation? And, while things are inevitably lost in translation, does this matter? (shrink)

In “A Defense of Presentism ”, Ned Markosian addresses the problem of singular propositions about non-present objects. The proposed solution uses a paraphrasing strategy that differentiates between two kinds of meaning in declarative sentences, and also distinguishes between two truth-conditions for singular propositions. The solution, however, is unsatisfactory. I demonstrate that the both truth-conditions suffer from the same problems in spite of the examples used to support the claim that one is a proper treatment for singular propositions. Part of the (...) difficulty is in the limited expressivity of logical formalisms, a limitation not unique to the philosophy of time, but which calls for greater attention. (shrink)

80 titles published between 1965 and 1996 in multiple languages attest to an increase in scholarly interest in the history of systematic biology, both among scientific practitioners and also among historians and philosophers of science. Topics studied have included the early history of the field (Ray, Linnaeus, Buffon), the influence of essentialism on systematics, the history of systematic diagrams, the development of cladistic analysis, the nature of species, and the growth of phylogenetic thinking.

138 titles across a wide range of scholarly publications illustrate the conceptual affinities that connect the palaetiological sciences of biological systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. These three fields all have as their central objective the reconstruction of evolutionary "trees of history" that depict phylogenetic patterns of descent with modification among species, languages, and manuscripts. All three fields flourished in the nineteenth century, underwent parallel periods of quiescence in the early twentieth century, and in recent decades have seen widespread parallel revivals. (...) "Tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988) is now standard within evolutionary biology, and the unity of what William Whewell called palaetiology is being once again appreciated by scholars and scientists in many fields. (shrink)

In Darwinian Heresies, which was originally published in 2004, prominent historians and philosophers of science trace the history of evolutionary thought, and challenge many of the assumptions that have built up over the years. Covering a wide range of issues starting in the eighteenth century, Darwinian Heresies brings us through the time of Charles Darwin and the Origin, and then through the twentieth century to the present. It is suggested that Darwin's true roots lie in Germany, not his native England, (...) that Russian evolutionism is more significant than many are prepared to allow, and that the true influence on twentieth-century evolution biology was not Charles Darwin at all, but his often-despised contemporary, Herbert Spencer. The collection was intended to interest, to excite, to infuriate, and to stimulate further work. (shrink)

This volume contributes to the remarkable resurgence in interest for American pragmatism and its proponents by focusing on the influence of British empiricism, ...