Barrett and others have used Lewis-style evolutionary games to argue that we ought not to trust our scientific languages to inform us about ontology. More specifically, Barrett has shown that in some simple evolutionary contexts the best descriptive languages need not cut nature at its joints, that they may guide action as successfully as possible while simultaneously being deeply conventional. The present article expands upon Barrett’s argument, exploring the space for conventionalism in more metaphysically robust causal evolutionary models. By using (...) evolutionary prediction games, the present article examines the range of metaphysical facts in these models and shows how Barrett’s sceptical argument may be both challenged and expanded to cover these systems, resulting in a more thoroughgoing scepticism about what metaphysical conclusions may be drawn from linguistic and theoretical structure. (shrink)

I critically examine some recent work on the philosophy of scientific fictions, focusing on the work of Winsberg. By considering two case studies in fracture mechanics, the strip yield model and the imaginary crack method, I argue that his reliance upon the social norms associated with an element of a model forces him to remain silent whenever those norms fail to clearly match the characteristic of fictions or non-fictions. In its place, I propose a normative epistemology of fictions which clarifies (...) a model's ontological commitments when the community of scientists lack any clear, shared norms of use. Specifically, I will introduce a variational account of fictions as an extension of Laymon's monotonic improvability account of idealizations. I will conclude by connecting this variational account of fictions to didactic fictions in general. (shrink)

In a previous article, I argued that some recent philosophical work on the use of fictions in science is, while illuminating about some aspects of current scientific practice, unduly limited to cases of well-established fictions. In other words, this earlier work contended, a philosophical account of scientific fictions can do more than merely describe scientific practices, but can aid in the resolution of disputes about the proper interpretation of scientific theories and the epistemic status of some scientific models. In the (...) present paper, I expand upon the variational account of fictions and idealizations... (shrink)

We consider an extension of signaling games to the case of prediction, where one agent perceives the current state of the world and sends a signal. The second agent perceives this signal, and makes a prediction about the next state of the world. We suggest that such games may be the basis of a model for the evolution of successful theorizing about the world.

To many, the idea of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) killing human beings is grotesque. Yet critics have had difficulty explaining why it should make a significant moral difference if a human combatant is killed by an AWS as opposed to being killed by a human combatant. The purpose of this paper is to explore the roots of various deontological concerns with AWS and to consider whether these concerns are distinct from any concerns that also apply to long-distance, human-guided weaponry. We (...) suggest that at least one major driver of the intuitive moral aversion to lethal AWS is that their use disrespects their human targets by violating the martial contract between human combatants. On our understanding of this doctrine, service personnel cede a right not to be directly targeted with lethal violence to other human agents alone. Artificial agents, of which AWS are one example, cannot understand the value of human life. A human combatant cannot transfer his privileges of targeting enemy combatants to a robot. Therefore, the human duty-holder who deploys AWS breaches the martial contract between human combatants and disrespects the targeted combatants. We consider whether this novel deontological objection to AWS forms the foundation of several other popular yet imperfect deontological objections to AWS. (shrink)

To many, the idea of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) killing human beings is grotesque. Yet critics have had difficulty explaining why it should make a significant moral difference if a human combatant is killed by an AWS as opposed to being killed by a human combatant. The purpose of this paper is to explore the roots of various deontological concerns with AWS and to consider whether these concerns are distinct from any concerns that also apply to long- distance, human-guided weaponry. (...) We suggest that at least one major driver of the intuitive moral aversion to lethal AWS is that their use disrespects their human targets by violating the martial contract between human combatants. On our understanding of this doctrine, service personnel cede a right not to be directly targeted with lethal violence to other human agents alone. Artificial agents, of which AWS are one example, cannot understand the value of human life. A human combatant cannot transfer his privileges of targeting enemy combatants to a robot. Therefore, the human duty-holder who deploys AWS breaches the martial contract between human combatants and disrespects the targeted combatants. We consider whether this novel deontological objection to AWS forms the foundation of several other popular yet imperfect deontological objections to AWS. (shrink)

The authors examine the internal and external motivating factors behind the actions of the House Committee on Ethics members by looking at the procedural efficiency of the Committee on Ethics (or lack thereof), as a natural consequence of the committee members' implicit public policy actions.

Higher-Order Logic (HOL) is a proof development system intended for applications to both hardware and software. It is principally used in two ways: for directly proving theorems, and as theorem-proving support for application-specific verification systems. HOL is currently being applied to a wide variety of problems, including the specification and verification of critical systems. Introduction to HOL provides a coherent and self-contained description of HOL containing both a tutorial introduction and most of the material that is needed for day-to-day work (...) with the system. After a quick overview that gives a "hands-on feel" for the way HOL is used, there follows a detailed description of the ML language. The logic that HOL supports and how this logic is embedded in ML, are then described in detail. This is followed by an explanation of the theorem-proving infrastructure provided by HOL. Finally two appendices contain a subset of the reference manual, and an overview of the HOL library, including an example of an actual library documentation. (shrink)

Arising from a graduate course taught to math and engineering students, this text provides a systematic grounding in the theory of Hamiltonian systems, as well as introducing the theory of integrals and reduction. A number of other topics are covered too.

The attack on the written word is not new. It has happened many times through history, especially in modern times as the availability of books has grown so rapidly. It is most often in authoritarian regimes that books are deemed a potential threat, and the elimination of this threat a means to maintain control of a potentially rebellious population. Probably the most heinous of book banning and burnings occurred during Nazi rule, prior to and during the Second World War. To (...) witness, recently, in the United States the ugly head book banning and their removal from libraries is a sad commentary on the state of some senior politicians, including Governors and Judicial leaders. Fortunately, there is vigorous opposition to these efforts and notable successes in the quest for universal access to the world of books. (shrink)

Few clinical situations arouse more emotion and drama and lead to more conflict in decision-making than cardio-pulmonary resuscitation . The procedure was described as potentially beneficial more than 40 years ago. However, its efficacy and place in the care of the frail elderly have taken a long time to be established. In the world of secular medical practice, there are many situations when CPR may be provided to elderly, frail and cognitively compromised individuals for whom its clinical benefit is questionable. (...) In those patients suffering from dementia, surrogates are responsible for decision-making, which complicates the process. When the clinical uncertainty is coupled with strong cultural and religious influences, as within Orthodox Judaism, the development of an acceptable approach to cardiac arrest is more challenging. A clinically sound, ethically defensible and religiously sensitive approach to CPR requires a deep understanding of all the factors involved in the decision-making process and may require periodic re-evaluation not only by clinicians but by religious scholars and leaders. (shrink)

Most of us would agree with the almost trite saying that “life is a journey”. Of course it is, unless it ends tragically at birth, and even then it is a very short journey. All of us can describe how we got from one stage in life to another, whether personal, family, education or career. Many journeys seem to be in an almost straight line while others meander from one place to another, changing direction and alternating goals, sometimes zigging back (...) and forth. I have had many wonderful journeys in my life; the choice to change career aspirations from engineering to medicine, the choice the study in medicine in Scotland, the choice to focus on geriatrics and then the choice to branch out into medical ethics to add more depth to clinical medicine. The early undergraduate study of philosophy planted the seed that eventually grew into my completing a Master’s in Medical Ethics; and then expanding my teaching and practice to include palliative care and end of life-decision-making, to most recently participating in the assessment of those requesting medical assistance in dying (MAID in Canada). (shrink)

Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our perceptual experience and that there is something 'it is like' to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be mistaken about (...) our own current phenomenology. (shrink)

This history of the modern introduction of assisted suicide in North America follow a tortuous course, with complete rejection of the idea, to implementation in many of its jurisdictions. North America was not a leader in this approach to end-of-life care, with the Netherlands and Belgium playing that role. Tracing the path from a felonious and ethically anathematic place in North American society it was resurrected into a legally and ethically acceptable practice over a period of two decades. The historical (...) course of PAS (Physician Assisted Suicide) and MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) in many ways mimicked the evolution of other major changes in our view of the world, and like assisted suicide, experienced almost universal rejection and ultimately the embrace of those people and institutions that initially rejected the ideas first expressed by thoughtful and heroic persons. Galileo Galilei was one of the icons of science and discovery: he was almost burned at the stake during the Inquisition only to be “resurrected” to his place in the pantheon of great thinkers – but it took almost four hundred years to reach that pinnacle. We must be very careful how we interpret new ideas and thoughts about the process we apply and the consequences if we reject them. (shrink)

Drawing on the author’s lifelong practice in the non-competitive and defensive Japanese art of Aikido, this book examines education as self-cultivation, from a Japanese philosophy perspective. Contemplative practices, such as secular mindfulness meditation, are being increasingly integrated into pedagogical settings to enhance social and emotional learning and well-being and to address stress-induced overwhelm due to increased pressures on the education system and its constituents. The chapters in this book explore the various ways, through the lens of this non-violent relational art (...) of Aikido, that pedagogy is always something being practiced and thus holding potential for transformation into being more relational, ecological-minded, and reflecting more ‘embodied attunement.’ Positioning education as a practice, one of self-discovery, the author argues that one can approach personal development as engaging in a spiritual process of integrating mind and body towards full presence of being and existence. (shrink)

This article analyses the work of Martin Loughlin on the nature of public law, and in particular, his ostensibly strident anti-positivism. It is argued that despite this, Loughlin's work can be reconciled with a normative account of legal positivism, based on the work of Jeremy Waldron. The article maintains that Loughlin's account of public law as political jurisprudence is methodologically compatible with, and potentially even substantively complementary to, normative legal positivism. It is ultimately suggested that this reconciliation provides a methodology (...) for public law scholarship which is both positivist and political, and which may offer insight into the subject beyond that which either approach might generate alone. (shrink)

The global array might prove to be an important and even necessary concept for explaining some multi-modal phenomena from the specificational perspective. However, we suspect that specification exists in energy arrays detectable by single or multiple sensory systems. We argue for a more general modality-neutral perspective and review results from recent research on audiovisual speech perception.

Previous research on gender-based economic inequality has emphasized occupational segregation as the leading explanatory factor for the gender wage gap. Yet the globalization of the U.S. economy has affected gender inequality in fundamental ways and potentially diminished the influence of occupational gender segregation. We examine whether occupational gender segregation continues to be the main determinant of gender earnings inequality and to what extent globalization processes have emerged as important determinants of inequality between women’s and men’s earnings. We study factors contributing (...) to the gender earnings ratio as well as the median earnings of men and women for 271 U.S. metropolitan areas. The results indicate that occupational segregation is still the leading determinant of gender earnings inequality, that its effects are only slightly diminished by the presence of globalization, and that various aspects of the global economy independently influence the gender earnings gap. (shrink)

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

BackgroundKinarm Standard Tests is a suite of upper limb tasks to assess sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, which produces granular performance data that reflect spatial and temporal aspects of behavior. We have previously used principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data using the Kinarm End-Point Lab. Here, we performed PCA using data from the Kinarm Exoskeleton Lab, and determined agreement of PCA results across EP and EXO platforms in healthy participants. We additionally examined whether further dimensionality reduction (...) was possible by using PCA across behavioral tasks.MethodsHealthy participants were assessed using the Kinarm EXO and EP. Four behavioral tasks were performed that quantified arm sensory and motor function, including position sense [Arm Position Matching ] and three motor tasks [Visually Guided Reaching, Object Hit, and Object Hit and Avoid ]. The number of components to include per task was determined from scree plots and parallel analysis, and rotation type was decided on a per-task basis. To assess agreement, we compared principal components across platforms using distance correlation. We additionally considered inter-task interactions in EXO data by performing PCA across all six behavioral assessments.ResultsBy applying PCA on a per task basis to data collected using the EXO, the number of behavioral parameters were substantially reduced by 58–75% while accounting for 76–87% of the variance. These results compared well to the EP analysis, and we found good-to-excellent agreement values between PCs from the EXO and those from the EP. Finally, we were able to reduce the dimensionality of the EXO data across tasks down to 16 components out of a total of 76 behavioral parameters, which represents a reduction of 79% while accounting for 73% of the total variance.ConclusionPCA of Kinarm robotic assessment appears to capture similar relationships between kinematic features in healthy individuals and is agnostic to the robotic platform used for collection. Further work is needed to investigate the use of PCA-based data reduction for the characterization of neurological deficits in clinical populations. (shrink)

Modern Jewish philosophy emerged in the seventeenth century, with the impact of the new science and modern philosophy on thinkers who were reflecting upon the nature of Judaism and Jewish life. This collection of new essays examines the work of several of the most important of these figures, from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth centuries, and addresses themes central to the tradition of modern Jewish philosophy: language and revelation, autonomy and authority, the problem of evil, messianism, the influence of Kant, (...) and feminism. Included are essays on Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Fackenheim, Soloveitchik, Strauss, and Levinas. Other thinkers discussed include Maimon, Benjamin, Derrida, Scholem, and Arendt. The sixteen original essays are written by a world-renowned group of scholars especially for this volume and give a broad and rich picture of the tradition of modern Jewish philosophy over a period of four centuries. (shrink)

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems, is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year, leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloqium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice.Law (...) and Psychology, the latest volume in the Current Legal Issues series, contains a broad range of essays by scholars interested in the interactions between law and psychology. The volume includes studies of jury trials in terrorism cases, psychological evidence in family law cases, child witness testimony and the role of psychology in punishment theory. (shrink)

For decades, technologies that ease information sharing (e.g., the wireless telegraph; Mckernon, 1925) have inspired concerns about the proliferation of misinformation. Today, these worries often c...

The repertoire of acceptor glycoproteins for concanavalin A expressed by a cultured tumour cell reflects the normal developmental lineage from which it was derived, as well as the degree of maturation along that lineage. Antibodies to this particular set of glycoproteins show a considerable specificity towards normal differentiation antigens which are often preferentially associated with the less mature intermediates of the corresponding pathway. In addition, comparisons between ‘immature’ and ‘mature’ tumour cells can be used to identify glycoproteins associated with specific (...) differentiated functions such as secretion. Thus tumour cell glycoproteins provide useful probes for analysis of the molecular biology of development and differentiation. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Animal Consciousness. By Daisie Radner and Michael Radner The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science. By Bernard E. Rollin.