The present discussion arose from the desire to explain, to an audience of non-physicists, the epistemology to which one is forced if one pursues the quantum mechanical theory of observation to its ultimate consequences. However, the conclusions will not be derived from the aforementioned theory but obtained on the basis of a rather general analysis of what we mean by real. Quantum theory will form the background but not the basis for the analysis. The concept of the real to be (...) arrived at shows considerable similarity to that of the idealist. As the title indicates, it is formulated as a dualism. It is quite possible that it will soon be rejected not only by the community of the philosophers but also by that of the scientists. If this should be the case, the attempt to derive an epistemology from physics will prove to have been premature. Naturally, the author hopes that this will not be the case because, quite apart from the quantum theoretical background, the concepts to be presented appear natural also as an outgrowth of common sense considerations. They have been arrived at by many who did not accept the epistemology of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

It is proposed to consider present-day physics as dealing with a special situation, the situation in which the phenomena of life and consciousness play no role. It is pointed out that physical theory has often dealt, in the past, with similarly special situations. Planetary theory neglects all but gravitational forces, macroscopic physics neglects fluctuations due to the atomic structure of matter, nuclear physics disregards weak and gravitational interactions. In some of these cases, physicists were well aware of dealing with special (...) situations, or limiting cases as they are called in the article; in other cases, they were not. It is pointed out that, even if it were true that present-day physics accurately describes the motion of the physical constituents of living bodies, it would not give the whole story. Arguments are adduced, however, to show that the laws of physics, applicable for inanimate matter, will have to be modified when dealing with the more general situation in which life and consciousness play significant roles. (shrink)

The book should be a gem for all those interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Attempts at solving what has been labeled as Eugene Wigner’s puzzle of applicability of mathematics are still far from arriving at an acceptable solution. The accounts developed to explain the “miracle” of applied mathematics vary in nature, foundation, and solution, from denying the existence of a genuine problem to designing structural theories based on mathematical formalism. Despite this variation, all investigations treated the problem in a unitary way with respect to the target, pointing to one or two ‘why’ (...) or ‘how’ questions to be answered. In this paper, I argue that two analyses, a semantic analysis ab initio and a metatheoretical analysis starting from the types of unreasonableness involved in this problem, will establish the interdisciplinary character of the problem and reveal many more targets, which may be addressed with different methodologies. In order to address objectively the philosophical problem of applicability of mathematics, a foundational revision of the problem is needed. (shrink)

This paper traces the origins of Eugene Wigner's pioneering application of group theory to quantum physics to his early work in chemistry and crystallography. In the early 1920s, crystallography was the only discipline in which symmetry groups were routinely used. Wigner's early training in chemistry, and his work in crystallography with Herman Mark and Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for fiber research in Berlin exposed him to conceptual tools which were absent from the pedagogy available (...) to physicists for many years to come. This both enabled and pushed him to apply the group theoretic approach to quantum physics. It took many years for the approach first introduced by Wigner in the 1920s – and whose reception by the physicists was initially problematical – to assume the pivotal place it now holds in physical theory and education. This is but one example that attests to the historic contribution made by the periphery in initiating new types of thought-perspectives and scientific careers. (shrink)

Attempts at solving what has been labeled as Eugene Wigner’s puzzle of applicability of mathematics are still far from arriving at an acceptable solution. The accounts developed to explain the “miracle” of applied mathematics vary in nature, foundation, and solution, from denying the existence of a genuine problem to designing structural theories based on mathematical formalism. Despite this variation, all investigations treated the problem in a unitary way with respect to the target, pointing to one or two ‘why’ (...) or ‘how’ questions to be answered. In this paper, I argue that two analyses, a semantic analysis ab initio and a metatheoretical analysis starting from the types of unreasonableness involved in this problem, will establish the interdisciplinary character of the problem and reveal many more targets, which may be addressed with different methodologies. In order to address objectively the philosophical problem of applicability of mathematics, a foundational revision of the problem is needed. (shrink)

Attempts at solving what has been labeled as Eugene Wigner’s puzzle of applicability of mathematics are still far from arriving at an acceptable solution. The accounts developed to explain the “miracle” of applied mathematics vary in nature, foundation, and solution, from denying the existence of a genuine problem to designing structural theories based on mathematical formalism. Despite this variation, all investigations treated the problem in a unitary way with respect to the target, pointing to one or two ‘why’ (...) or ‘how’ questions to be answered. In this paper, I argue that two analyses, a semantic analysis ab initio and a metatheoretical analysis starting from the types of unreasonableness involved in this problem, will establish the interdisciplinary character of the problem and reveal many more targets, which may be addressed with different methodologies. In order to address objectively the philosophical problem of applicability of mathematics, a foundational revision of the problem is needed. (shrink)

Eugene Wigner's several general discussions of symmetry and invariance principles are among the canonical texts of contemporary philosophy of physics. Wigner spoke from a position of authority, having pioneered for recognition of the importance of symmetry principles from nuclear to molecular physics. But perhaps recent commentators have not sufficiently stressed that Wigner always took care to situate the notion of invariance principles with respect to two others, initial conditions and laws of nature. Wigner's first such (...) general consideration of invariance principles, an address presented at Einstein's 70th birthday celebration, held in Princeton on 19 March 1949, began by laying out just this distinction, and in a way that seems to suggest that the three notions arise through abstraction in an analysis of the general problem of cognition in the natural sciences: The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found. The complications are called initial conditions; the domain of regularities, laws of nature. the underlying abstraction is probably one of the most fruitful the human mind has made. It has made the natural sciences possible. (shrink)

Jagdish Mehra (ed.): The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner. Part B. Historical, Philosophical, and Socio-Political Papers. Volume 6: Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses (annotated by Gérard G. Emch) (Berlin: Springer, 1995), XX + 631 pp., ISBN 3-.

Review of "The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner", Volume I, III, and VI. Excerpt from the Conclusions: Many of Wigner’s papers on mathematical physics are great classics. Most famous is his work on group representations which is of lasting value for a proper mathematical foundation of quantum theory. The modern development of quantum theory (which is not reflected in Wigner’s work) is in an essential way a representation theory (e.g. representations of kinematical groups, or representations (...) of C*-algebras). This view owes very much to Wigner’s seminal papers on the unitary representations of compact and noncompact groups. Wigner showed much courage in relating the then unresolved questions of the measurement problem to the much deeper problem of consciousness. In view of this very unorthodox proposal it is astonishing that Wigner was very reactionary with respect of the dogmas of orthodox quantum mechanics. In contrast to von Neumann himself, he took the old von-Neumann codification of quantum mechanics as authoritative and not to be questioned. Much of the efforts to interpret the meaning of this codification and to prove no-go theorems, such as the insolubility of the measurement problem or the impossibility of a quantum theory of individual objects, are physically irrelevant since they are based on a codification of quantum mechanics that is valid only for strictly closed systems with finitely many degrees of freedom. However, in nature there are no such systems. Every material system is coupled to the gravitational and to the electromagnetic field – systems which require in a Hamiltonian description infinitely many degrees of freedom. A deeper insight into the conceptual problems of quantum theory is possible only if the modern development of a quantum theory of infinite systems is taken into account. (shrink)

In his influential 1960 paper ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’, Eugene P. Wigner raises the question of why something that was developed without concern for empirical facts—mathematics—should turn out to be so powerful in explaining facts about the natural world. Recent philosophy of science has developed ‘Wigner’s puzzle’ in two different directions: First, in relation to the supposed indispensability of mathematical facts to particular scientific explanations and, secondly, in connection with the idea that (...) aesthetic criteria track theoretical desiderata such as empirical success. An important aspect of Wigner’s article has, however, been overlooked in these debates: his worries about the underdetermination of physical theories by mathematical frameworks. The present paper argues that, by restoring this aspect of Wigner’s argument to its proper place, Wigner’s puzzle may become an instructive case study for the teaching of core issues in the philosophy of science and its history. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life II: (...) Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of Cognitive Fitness (CF), identify its key ingredients underpinning both real-time task performance and career longevity in high-risk occupations, and to canvas a holistic framework for their assessment, training, and augmentation. CF as a capacity to deploy neurocognitive resources, knowledge and skills to meet the demands of operational task performance, is likely to be multi-faceted and differentially malleable. A taxonomy of CF constructs derived from Cognitive Readiness (CR) and Mental fitness (...) (MF) literature maps into phases of operational cycles from foundational to advanced, mission-ready and recovery. Foundational cognitive attributes, such as attention, executive control and co-action, were hypothesized to be trainable at the initial Cognitive Gym phase. More advanced training targets at the CR phase included stress and arousal regulation, adaptability, teamwork, situation awareness (including detection, sense-making and prediction) and decision making (de-biasing and confidence calibration). The mission-ready training phase is focused on tolerances (to sleep loss, monotony, pain, frustration, uncertainty) and resistance (to distraction, deception or manipulation). Operational Augmentation phase relies on support tools such as decision aids and fatigue countermeasures, while the Recovery phase employs reflexive (e.g., mindfulness), and restorative practices (e.g., nutrition and sleep hygiene). The periodization of cognitive training in this cycle is hypothesized to optimize both real-time cognitive performance and the resilience that enables life-long thriving. One of the most promising avenues of validating this hypothesis is by developing an expert consensus on the key CF ingredients and their relative importance in high-performance settings. (shrink)

Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal reasoning – including philosophical arguments. The evidential strand of experimental philosophy uses mainly (...) questionnaire-based methods to assess the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments that are adduced as evidence for philosophical theories and as premises for philosophical arguments. Extending this prominent strand of experimental philosophy, EAA underpins such assessments, extends the scope of the assessments, and expands the range of the empirical methods employed: EAA examines how automatic inferences that are continually made in language comprehension and production shape verbal reasoning, and draws on findings about comprehension biases that affect the contextualisation of such default inferences, in order to explain and expose fallacies. It deploys findings to assess premises and inferences from premises to conclusions, in philosophical arguments. To do so, it adapts methods from psycholinguistics and recruits methods from computational linguistics. (shrink)

In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we develop the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend the standard Everettian justifications for the Born rule to this setting. This (...) extended framework provides a unification of 'classical' and 'quantum' probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture. (shrink)

Linguistics. Artificial intelligence. Related fields. Computation.

Conventional wisdom holds that the von Neumann entropy corresponds to thermodynamic entropy, but Hemmo and Shenker (2006) have recently argued against this view by attacking von Neumann's (1955) argument. I argue that Hemmo and Shenker's arguments fail due to several misunderstandings: about statistical-mechanical and thermodynamic domains of applicability, about the nature of mixed states, and about the role of approximations in physics. As a result, their arguments fail in all cases: in the single-particle case, the finite particles case, and the (...) infinite particles case. (shrink)

La démarche tient d'une « science de l'entre-deux » à la recherche de l'intervalle qui permettra de déchiffrer l'opposition de termes contraires et faire résonner leur fonction corrélative.

G.E. Moore noticed the oddity of statements like: “It's raining, but I don't believe it.” This oddity is often seen as analogous to the oddity of believing akratically, or believing what one believes one should not believe, and has been appealed to in denying the possibility of akratic belief. I describe a Belief Akratic's Paradox, analogous to Moore's paradox and centered on sentences such as: “I believe it's raining, but I shouldn't believe it.” I then defend the possibility of akratic (...) belief against appeals to this analogy, arguing both that akratic belief does not require belief-akratic-paradoxical belief, and that the latter is importantly different from Moorean belief. I conclude by considering the implications of these arguments for an understanding of both Moorean and akratic belief. (shrink)

Most Artificial Intelligence theories of language either assume a syntactic component which serves as “front end” for the rest of the system, or else reject all attempts at distinguishing modules within the comprehension system. In this paper we will present an alternative which, while keeping modularity, will account for several puzzles for typical “syntax first” theories. The major addition to this theory is a “marker passing” (or “spreading activation”) component, which operates in parallel to the normal syntactic component.

Akratic belief, or belief one believes one should not have, has often been thought to be impossible. I argue that the possibility of akratic belief should be accepted as a pre-theoretical datum. I distinguish intuitive, defensive, systematic, and diagnostic ways of arguing for this view, and offer an argument that combines them. After offering intuitive examples of akratic belief, I defend those examples against a common argument against the possibility of akratic belief, which I call the Nullification Argument. I then (...) offer an Argument from Belief Attribution, using a discussion of the marks by which we typically attribute belief to defend attributions of akratic belief. I conclude by offering a way to explain what is puzzling about akratic belief, while allowing that it is possible. (shrink)

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive states of affairs to be located in the future not the past, and for negative states of affairs to be located in the past not the future. Three explanations for future-bias have been posited: the temporal metaphysics explanation, the practical irrelevance explanation, and the three mechanisms explanation. Understanding what explains future-bias is important not only for better understanding the phenomenon itself, but also because many philosophers think that which explanation is (...) the correct one has implications for our evaluation of the normative status of future-bias. In this paper we focus on the connection between future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry. The latter refers to the fact that people tend to assign more value to a state of affairs when it is located in the future, as opposed to being equidistant in the past. All three candidate explanations offered for future-bias proceed by explaining the temporal value asymmetry, and then supposing that future-bias is simply a manifestation of that asymmetry. Recently, however, it has been argued that the conditions under which people display the temporal value asymmetry and future-bias are different, and that this is reason to doubt that the latter is a manifestation of the former. In this paper we empirically test one response to this argument against the manifestation thesis—the simulation response—according to which once we control for the degree to which people can simulate the object of their preference, we find that people display future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry in the same conditions. We find no evidence in favour of the simulation response. Moreover, our results support some previous research that suggests that the temporal value asymmetry is less robust than previously thought, and this in itself casts doubt on the idea that future bias is just a manifestation of this asymmetry. (shrink)