En las obras de Kant las observaciones respecto del lenguaje y la gramática son pocas y dispersas. Ello llevó a la tesis del 'silencio de Kant' respecto del lenguaje y la gramática. Este trabajo sostiene por el contrario: 1) en las obras de Kant hay comentarios explícitos respecto de la gramática; 2) comprenderlos en su propio horizonte terminológico y conceptual es necesario para proponer una versión unificada de éstos; 3) es posible identificar un triple enfoque de la gramática: empírico, formal (...) y trascendental: esta identificación ofrece la base para analizar la posición de Kant respecto de la gramática filosófica en relación con la filosofía del lenguaje actual. Observations on language and grammar and scattered throughout the writings of Kant. This led to thesis such as the 'silence of Kant' with regards to language and grammar. This paper adopts a different view, sustaining following theses: 1. There are explicit remarks on grammar in Kant's writings; 2. Understanding these remarks within the terminological and conceptual Kantian own horizon seems to be a necessary first step to propose a unified interpretation of them; 3. from the point of view of the critical writings it is possible to identify a triple approach to grammar: empirical, formal and transcendental; 4. This identification offers a basis for discussing Kant's position on philosophical grammar in connection with contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

El trabajo sostiene que el aspecto temporal del significado constituye un elemento común a la reflexión de la Crítica de la razón pura y Ser y tiempo y propone su identificación como línea de argumentación entre ambas obras. Esta línea puede ser trazada desde la afirmación de que sólo la temporalidad posibilita el significado de los conceptos puros hasta la idea de la génesis temporal del significado. Acorde a ello el trabajo se propone: a) mostrar la posibilidad de trazar dicha (...) línea de argumentación común a ambas obras; b) indicar que a partir de ello ambas confluyen en una perspectiva que puede ser comprendida como una reflexión trascendental sobre el significado; c) exponer esta confluencia como el aspecto temporal del significado, y d) sugerir que, así comprendida, dicha reflexión conjunta puede proponer un enfoque relevante en la actual reflexión filosófica sobre el significado. (shrink)

The mature cerebral cortex contains a staggering variety of projection neuron subtypes, and a number of complementary studies have recently begun to define their identity and embryonic origin. Among the different types of cortical projection neurons, subcerebral projection neurons, including corticospinal motor neurons (CSMN), have been extensively studied and some of the molecular controls over their differentiation have been elucidated. Here, we first provide an overview of the approaches used to purify and molecularly profile neuronal populations of the neocortex and, (...) more broadly, of the central nervous system (CNS). Next, we specifically review recent progress in understanding the genes that define and control development of the CSMN population. Finally, we briefly discuss the relevance of this work to current questions regarding the mechanisms of the establishment of projection neuron subtype identity in the neocortex and its implications to direct the differentiation of CSMN for therapeutic benefit. (shrink)

The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. In the decade before this publication, Popper fiercely attacked the ideas of Rudolf Carnap about confirmation and induction; and ten years later, in the famous tenth chapter of Conjectures he introduced his own ideas about scientific progress and verisimilitude. Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve (...) the purpose of approach to the truth. To substantiate this idea he formalized the common sense intuition about preferences, that is: B is to be preferred to A if B has more advantages andfewer drawbacks than A. In 1974, however, David Millerand Pavel Tichy proved that Popper's formal explication could not be used to compare false theories. Subsequently, many researchers proposed alternatives or tried to improve Popper's original definition. (shrink)

Discrepancies between the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) and the adult and pediatric diagnostic guidelines for brain death (BD) (the “Guidelines”) have motivated proposals to revise the UDDA. A revision proposed by Lewis, Bonnie and Pope (the RUDDA), has received particular attention, the three novelties of which would be: (1) to specify the Guidelines as the legally recognized “medical standard,” (2) to exclude hypothalamic function from the category of “brain function,” and (3) to authorize physicians to conduct an apnea (...) test without consent and even over a proxy’s objection. One hundred seven experts in medicine, bioethics, philosophy, and law, spanning a wide variety of perspectives, have come together in agreement that while the UDDA needs revision, the RUDDA is not the way to do it. Specifically, (1) the Guidelines have a non-negligible risk of false-positive error, (2) hypothalamic function is more relevant to the organism as a whole than any brainstem reflex, and (3) the apnea test carries a risk of precipitating BD in a non-BD patient, provides no benefit to the patient, does not reliably accomplish its intended purpose, and is not even absolutely necessary for diagnosing BD according to the internal logic of the Guidelines; it should at the very least require informed consent, as do many procedures that are much more beneficial and less risky. Finally, objections to a neurologic criterion of death are not based only on religious belief or ignorance. People have a right to not have a concept of death that experts vigorously debate imposed upon them against their judgment and conscience; any revision of the UDDA should therefore contain an opt-out clause for those who accept only a circulatory-respiratory criterion. (shrink)

In debates about criteria for human death, several camps have emerged, the main two focusing on either loss of the "organism as a whole" (the mainstream view) or loss of consciousness or "personhood." Controversies also rage over the proper definition of "irreversible" in criteria for death. The situation is reminiscent of the proverbial blind men palpating an elephant; each describes the creature according to the part he can touch. Similarly, each camp grasps some aspect of the complex reality of death. (...) The personhood camp, in contrast to the mainstream "organism" camp, recognizes that a human organism can still be a biological living whole even without brain function. The mainstream camp, in contrast to the personhood camp, recognizes that a person can be permanently, even irreversibly unconscious, and still be a living person so long as his/her body is alive. The author proposes that hylomorphic dualism incorporates both these key insights. But to complete the picture of the entire "death elephant," a fundamental paradigm shift is needed to make sense of other seemingly conflicting insights. The author proposes a "semantic bisection" of the concept of death, analogous to the traditional distinction at the beginning of life between "conception" and "birth." To avoid the semantic baggage associated with the term "death," the two new death-related concepts are referred to as "passing away" (or "deceased") and "deanimation," corresponding, respectively, to sociolegal ceasing-to-be (mirror image of birth) and ontological/theological ceasing-to-be of the bodily organism (mirror image of conception). Regarding criteria, the distinguishing feature is whether the cessation of function is permanent (passing away) or irreversible (deanimation). If the "dead donor rule" were renamed the "deceased donor rule" (both acronyms felicitously being "DDR"), the ethics of organ transplantation from non–heart-beating donors could, in principle, be validly governed by the DDR, even though the donors are not yet ontologically "deanimated." Thus, the paradigm shift satisfies both those who insist on maintaining the DDR and those who claim that it has all along been receiving only lip service and should be explicitly loosened to include those who are "as good as dead." Even so, a number of practical caveats remain to be worked out for non–heart-beating protocols. (shrink)

Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting increase in synaptic efficacy that many consider the best candidate currently available for a neural mechanism of memory formation and/or storage in the mammalian brain. In our target article, LTP: What's learning got to do with it?, we concluded that there was insufficient data to warrant such a conclusion. In their commentaries, Jeffery and Zhadin raise a number of important issues that we did not raise, both for and against the hypothesis. Although we agree (...) with a number of these issues, we maintain that there remains insufficient evidence that LTP is a memory mechanism. (shrink)

At its inception, “brain death” was proposed not as a coherent concept but as a useful one. The 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death gave no reason that “irreversible coma” should be death itself, but simply asserted that the time had come for it to be declared so. Subsequent writings by chairman Henry Beecher made clear that, to him at least, death was essentially a social construct, and society could define (...) it however it pleased. The first widely endorsed attempt at a philosophical justification appeared thirteen years later, with a report from the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research and a seminal paper by James Bernat, Charles Culver, and Bernard Gert, which introduced the insightful tripartite scheme of concept, criterion, and tests for death. Their paper proposed that the correct concept of death is the “permanent cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole,” which tenuously remains the mainstream concept to this day. In this essay, I focus on this mainstream concept, arguing that equating brain death with death involves several levels of incoherence: between concept and criterion, between criterion and tests, between tests and concept, and between all of these and actual brain death praxis. (shrink)

A central theme in western philosophy was to find formal methods that can reliably discover empirical relationships and their explanations from data assembled from experience. As a philosophical project, that ambition was abandoned in the 20th century and generally dismissed as impossible. It was replaced in philosophy by neo-Kantian efforts at reconstruction and justification, and in professional statistics by the more limited ambition to estimate a small number of parameters in pre-specified hypotheses. The influx of “big data” from climate science, (...) neuropsychology, biology, astronomy and elsewhere implicitly called for a revival of the grander philosophical ambition. Search algorithms are meeting that call, but they pose a problem: how are their accuracies to be assessed in domains where experimentation is limited or impossible? Increasingly, the answer is through simulation of data from models of the kind of process in the domain. In some cases, these innovations require rethinking how the accuracy and informativeness of inference methods can be assessed. Focusing on causal inference, we give an example from neuroscience, but to show that the model/simulation strategy is not confined to causal inference, we also consider two classification problems from astrophysics: identifying exoplanets and identifying dark matter concentrations. (shrink)

Surrogate endpoints are a common application of biomarkers to estimate clinical benefit in clinical trials, despite questions about reliability. This article discusses ongoing opportunities for their validation, in the context of a regulatory environment in which they are increasingly championed.

If you do not know the correct answer, guess.Design addresses need, of various types. A designer “designs” to address, to propose a possibility, or to meet a need. A great variety of things are designed: shoes, posters, watches, houses, televisions, keyboards, movies, washing machines, toasters, belts, and cars, to mention only some.A designer, be he or she an architect, interior designer, graphic designer, product designer, or industrial designer, nearly always provides drawings, models, written descriptions, and overarching ideas in response to (...) a need, articulated, stated, by someone. The need might be one that the designer recognizes on his or her own and decides to address, or the need might come to the... (shrink)

Infant language learners are faced with the difficult inductive problem of determining how new words map to novel or known objects in their environment. Bayesian inference models have been successful at using the sparse information available in natural child-directed speech to build candidate lexicons and infer speakers’ referential intentions. We begin by asking how a Bayesian model optimized for monolingual input generalizes to new monolingual or bilingual corpora and find that, especially in the case of the bilingual input, the model (...) shows a significant decrease in performance. In the next experiment, we propose the ME Model, a modified Bayesian model, which approximates infants’ mutual exclusivity bias to support the differential demands of monolingual and bilingual learning situations. The extended model is assessed using the same corpora of real child-directed speech, showing that its performance is more robust against varying input and less dependent than the Intentional Model on optimization of its parsimony parameter. We argue that both monolingual and bilingual demands on word learning are important considerations for a computational model, as they can yield significantly different results than when only one such context is considered. (shrink)

L'oeuvre et le concept! Tels sont bien les deux objets, par excellence, de la philosophie de l'art. L'oeuvre d'art sur laquelle " philosophe " Olivier Revault d'Allonnes n'est pas l'oeuvre achevee, celebree, sacralisee, sanctifiee, mais au contraire l'oeuvre qui, de tout temps, deroute, irrite, scandalise, dejoue le discours apprete et conciliant de l'esthetique traditionnelle. Le concept est l'autre nom de la critique, parole enfin donnee aux oeuvres, passees et presentes, afin qu'elles puissent dire non aux ordres etablis... Leur interpretation se (...) joue donc a l'infini, mais non pas dans l'indetermination, car ce qu'elles expriment, qu'il s'agisse d'un tableau de Rembrandt, d'un quatuor de Beethoven, ou d'une piece pour piano de Schonberg, est chaque fois identique, a savoir l'irreductible et " irrespectueuse " liberte de la creation artistique. Cette esthetique, a l'ecart des dogmatismes, des systemes et des modes, est ici pretexte aux reflexions et aux temoignages qui composent cet ouvrage. (shrink)

Reinhard Heckmann: Kants Kategoriendeduktion. Ein Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Geistes, 484 Seiten, Freiburg/münchen 1997 [Verlag Karl Alber]. Immanuel Kant: Religion within the boundaries of mere reason and other writings, translated and edited by Allen Wood, George Di Giovanni; with an introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; XXXIX, 229 Seiten. Hermann Berger: Leeswijzer bij de Kritiek van de Oordeelskracht, Tilburg: Tilburg University Press 1997, 331 S. Martin Bondeli: Der Kantianismus des jungen Hegel. Die Kant-Aneignung und Kant-Überwindung (...) Hegels auf seinem Weg zum philosophischen System, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1997, 353 S., ISBN 3-7873-1335-4 . Pierre Kerszberg: Critique and Totality. Albany 1997, 274 S. Nathan Rotenstreich: Synthesis and Intentional Objectivity. On Kant and Husserl. Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998, viii + 135 pages. (shrink)