The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

The three intertwining careers of William Torrey Harris [1835-1909] in philosophy, philosophy of education, and educational administration converge in twelve of the Annual Reports of the board of directors of the St. Louis public schools, most of the essential features of which he formulated as the superintendent of schools from 1867-79. These twelve reports, comprising philosophical and educational principles, have been acclaimed nationally and internationally to be among the most valuable official publications in American educational literature. The major purpose of (...) this paper is to clarify the nature and scope of the philosophical principles of Harris expressed in his Annual Reports. The areas of philosophy represented are metaphysics, anthropology, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. While the motivation and context of these philosophical principles are pedagogical in orientation, it is evident that Harris produced here a philosophical synthesis worthy of consideration in a formal survey of the history of American philosophy. (shrink)

The intertwining careers of William Torrey Harris converge in twelve of the Annual Reports of the Board of Directors for St. Louis Public Schools. Harris formulated most of the essential features of these twelve reports as the Superintendent of Schools from 1867 to 1869. These particular reports—which have been acclaimed nationally and internationally—are said to be among the most valuable official publications in American educational literature. They are far different from the descriptive documents originally intended by their author. This study (...) demonstrates that Harris provided an authentic philosophy of education, a set of interrelated philosophical principles and their applications to educational problems. The substance of Harris's philosophy of education is focused upon a broadly based philosophical anthropology in relationship primarily to the purposes, curriculum, and teaching methods in intellectual, moral, and religious education. (shrink)

Deprivation accounts of death's badness, such as Feldman’s (1992), that purport to avoid questionable life-death comparatives Silverstein warns against (1980) by comparing only the values of various alternative life-wholes, implicitly depend upon assigning greater comparative value to periods of these life-wholes (for the person who lives) than is assigned to periods when the person is not alive, and thus are simply special cases of the problematic life-death comparative. Life-death comparatives undermine any deprivation account if (1) there is no way things (...) are (good or bad) for one who does not exist, and (2) values are comparative in the way specified by VC. Rejecting VC is not an option for the standard deprivation account, since this account uses VC to show that since continued life is good for the person who continues to live, death must be worse for that person. The non-standard deprivation account, dubbed by McMahan the reconciliation strategy, does not employ VC, but it also fails to vindicate common sense attitudes towards matters of life and death, and is in the main a capitulation to the Epicurean position. The remaining option for one who wishes to defend the view that death is typically bad for the person who dies is to directly target the Epicurean starting point, that things cannot be good or bad for a person when he does not exist. (shrink)

Are there aspects of human intelligence that artificial intelligence cannot emulate? Harry Collins uses a distinction between tacit aspects of knowing, which cannot be digitized, and explicit aspects, which can be, to formulate an answer to this question. He postulates three purported areas of the tacit and argues that only “collective tacit knowing” cannot be adequately digitized. I argue, first, that Collins’s approach rests upon problematic Cartesian assumptions—particularly his claim that animal knowing is strictly deterministic and, thus, radically different (...) from human knowing. I offer evidence that human linguistic intelligence depends upon embodied forms of animal intelligence. Second, I suggest the development of deep-learning algorithms means that Collins’s mimesis assumption is no longer appropriate; equivalent accomplishment of goals is what counts. However, persons must realize and integrate many goals and also deal with failures; a general-purpose AI capable of integrating all the needs and goals of human existence resists development. Third, I explain how Michael Polanyi’s understanding of tacit knowing, quite different than Collins’s concept of the tacit, exemplifies features that are missing in contemporary AI. I make use of evolutionary theory, studies of animal intelligence, biological insights, individual construction of meaning, and notions of human responsibility to argue for the existence of three categories that distinguish human from artificial intelligence. (shrink)

For Harry Collins, the key to understanding the limits and prospects of artificial intelligence is ‘context’, that is, the way computers become ‘embedded’ in human society. Incre...

Gravity’s Ghost is a book about the search for gravitational waves , which are predicted by the general theory of relativity to be ripples in space–time that propagate at the speed of light. The direct detection of GWs, if they exist at all, is exceptionally difficult, because they are theoretically expected to be very weakly coupled to matter. To this date, there is yet no conclusive evidence for the direct detection of GWs. The search for GWs was started by a (...) series of experiments performed by Joseph Weber in the 1960s. The history of the early GW detection experiments, as well as Weber’s claimed detection of GWs, which was eventually discredited, has been examined in great details by Harry Collins .Collins has long advocated a sociological approach to the study of scientific research groups that is premised on the view that in order to understand how scientific knowledge is produced collectively by a group of researchers, it is necessary to engage in the cultu .. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Harry Collins’s influential writing on tacit knowledge. In particular I turn my attention to his recent book, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge [Collins 2010], or TEK, which is arguably the most complete and systematic statement of what he means by the term “tacit knowledge”. As well as examining tacit knowledge as elaborated in this contribution, I draw out an underlying tension in Collins’s major contributions to the sociology of scientific knowledge in general between the realism (...) underlying his notion of “tacit knowledge” and the constructivism underlying his other well-known concept, “the experimenters’ regress” (as for instance, elaborated in his well-known book Changing Order [Collins 1992]). In order to make this argument I pay particular attention to an aspect of his writings on tacit knowledge which I think is worthy of closer examination: namely the sorts of empirical support claimed for the features and properties of tacit knowledge to which he attends. In short I ask questions concerning some of the specific empirical examples and the conclusions he draws from them. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Harry Collins’s influential writing on tacit knowledge. In particular I turn my attention to his recent book, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge [Collins 2010], or TEK, which is arguably the most complete and systematic statement of what he means by the term “tacit knowledge”. As well as examining tacit knowledge as elaborated in this contribution, I draw out an underlying tension in Collins’s major contributions to the sociology of scientific knowledge in general between the realism (...) underlying his notion of “tacit knowledge” and the constructivism underlying his other well-known concept, “the experimenters’ regress” (as for instance, elaborated in his well-known book Changing Order [Collins 1992]). In order to make this argument I pay particular attention to an aspect of his writings on tacit knowledge which I think is worthy of closer examination: namely the sorts of empirical support claimed for the features and properties of tacit knowledge to which he attends. In short I ask questions concerning some of the specific empirical examples and the conclusions he draws from them. (shrink)

Harry Collins interprets Hubert Dreyfus’s philosophy of embodiment as a criticism of all possible forms of artificial intelligence. I argue that this characterization is inaccurate and predicated upon a misunderstanding of the relevance of phenomenology for empirical scientific research.

The ongoing pursuit of tacit knowledge Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9500-6 Authors Charles W. Smith, Department of Sociology, Queens College, CUNY, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Introduction Harry Collins is internationally recognized as a distinguished sociologist of science who writes creatively on a substantial number of varied subjects. He is acknowledged as one of the prominent specialists on the topic of tacit knowledge and has played an important role in the introduction of this topic into science studies. He has investigated the topic extensively, most famously through several case studies of physics [Collins 1974, 1984, 1985, 1990, 2001a,b, 2004], [Collins &...

Introduction Harry Collins is internationally recognized as a distinguished sociologist of science who writes creatively on a substantial number of varied subjects. He is acknowledged as one of the prominent specialists on the topic of tacit knowledge and has played an important role in the introduction of this topic into science studies. He has investigated the topic extensively, most famously through several case studies of physics [Collins 1974, 1984, 1985, 1990, 2001a,b, 2004], [Collins &...

This book demonstrates how children's imagination makes a continuing contribution to their cognitive and emotional development.

Wolfson's systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza has long been a classic. It is with pride that we make it available again in a one-volume edition.

In this long-awaited volume, on which he worked for twenty years, Mr. Wolfson describes the body of doctrine known as the Kalam.

Saussure as a linguist and Wittgenstein as a philosopher of language are arguably the two most important figures in the development of twentieth-century ...