_The Hearing Impaired Child_ introduces the background issues of hearing impairment then discusses specific aspects. These include causes of hearing loss, speech and language, personality and emotional development, and careers. Appendices provide checklists for language acquisition and reading and writing skills, lists of useful addresses, a helpful glossary and references for further reading.

This paper argues that a range of current AI systems have learned how to deceive humans. We define deception as the systematic inducement of false beliefs in the pursuit of some outcome other than the truth. We first survey empirical examples of AI deception, discussing both special-use AI systems (including Meta's CICERO) built for specific competitive situations, and general-purpose AI systems (such as large language models). Next, we detail several risks from AI deception, such as fraud, election tampering, and losing (...) control of AI systems. Finally, we outline several potential solutions to the problems posed by AI deception: first, regulatory frameworks should subject AI systems that are capable of deception to robust risk-assessment requirements; second, policymakers should implement bot-or-not laws; and finally, policymakers should prioritize the funding of relevant research, including tools to detect AI deception and to make AI systems less deceptive. Policymakers, researchers, and the broader public should work proactively to prevent AI deception from destabilizing the shared foundations of our society. (shrink)

Abraham ibn Ezra d'Espagne (m. 1167) fut l'un des plus importants savants ayant contribué à la transmission de la science arabe à l'Occident. Ses ouvrages en astrologie et en astronomie, rédigés en hébreu puis traduits en latin, étaient considéréd comme faisant autorité par de nombreux savants juifs et Chrétiens. Parmi les ouvrages qu'il a traduits de l'arabe en hébreu, certains sont perdus dans leur langue originale et ses propres ouvrages renferment certaines informations concernant des sources anciennes mal ou pas du (...) tout connues par ailleurs. Ibn Ezra semble être le premier a avoir consigne l'une des sept méthodes pour dresser les maisons astrologiques. Cette méthode avait par la suite été utilisée par Lévi ben Gershom (m. 1344) dans le Midi de la France. (shrink)

Focalisé sur un problème posé par Bernard Frenicle de Bessy vers 1639, sa solution et les réponses de ses correspondants, cet article s'attache à décrire plusieurs registres enchevêtrés de l'expérience du mathématicien: expérimentation sur les nombres empruntée en partie aux sciences de la nature, injonctions d'une pratique collective cimentée par les problèmes et leurs constructions explicites, entraînement personnel de l'attention et du savoir-faire s'articulent ainsi dans les efforts de Frenicle pour contester la suprématie de l'analyse algébrique et dans les modes (...) de conviction qui fondent son travail. Ce récit d'expérience permet en retour d'apprécier les problèmes que posèrent à Frenicle la transmission de ses résultats et, à ses historiens, la restitution de son activité. (shrink)

Dans sa thèse de médecine de 1943 sur le normal et le pathologique, Georges Canguilhem se sert largement des idées de Kurt Goldstein lorsqu’il définit la normalité comme la capacité de l’organisme à créer de nouvelles normes de vie dans un débat polarisé avec son milieu. Pourtant, il déclara ensuite que les conceptions de Goldstein avaient constitué pour lui un « encouragement et non une inspiration ». Les archives personnelles de Canguilhem nous permettent effectivement de considérer le rapport (...) de Canguilhem à Goldstein comme une convergence plutôt que comme une influence mais surtout, l’usage que Canguilhem fait de Goldstein nous permet de mieux saisir la portée de ses propres idées. Nous interrogeons dans une première partie la conception holiste de l’organisme de Goldstein, dans ses rapports à la gestalt-théorie et à Kant, conception qui se réfère au processus d’actualisation de l’essence de l’organisme dans son rapport avec le milieu. Ceci nous permet d’appréhender l’usage que fait Canguilhem de certains concepts et idées de Goldstein pour élaborer son propre concept de normativité vitale. Dans une deuxième partie, nous nous proposons de comprendre la manière dont Canguilhem pose le problème du rapport de la connaissance à la normativité vitale à partir de sa lecture des textes du neurologue allemand. (shrink)

Laurence Goldstein gives a straightforward and lively account of some of the central themes of Wittgenstein's writings on meaning, mind, and mathematics.

Pourquoi faire la guerre est-il dans l’immense majorité des cultures et à toutes les époques une activité exclusivement masculine? Comment expliquer que de nombreuses sociétés aient préféré périr plutôt que d’appeler leurs femmes à combattre sur le champ de bataille? Ces questions sont au coeur d’un ouvrage particulièrement ambitieux qui tente de repenser les rapports entre le genre et la guerre, en s’appuyant sur les acquis de disciplines aussi diverses que la biologie, l’anthropologie, la...

The category of« organism » has an ambiguous status: scientific or philosophical? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific « bolstering » for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the « mechanistic » or « reductionist » trend, which is seen as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the « phenomenology of organic life » in the (...) 20th century, with authors such as Goldstein, Straws, and Weizsäcker, whose influence on Merleau-Ponty but also Canguilhem is obvious. The aim of this article is both to bring to light the sedimentation of this category and to give a critical evaluation of it, in other words, to sec in what way it might still be useful once one has eliminated the possibility of any « organicist » excesses. I suggest a notion of organism as an instrumental fiction. (shrink)

This paper presents a direction for narrative ethics based on ethical ideas found in the works of Michel Foucault. Narrative ethics is understood here at the meta-level of cultural discourse to see how the moral subject is constituted by the discursive practices that structure the contemporary debate on reproductive technologies. At this level it becomes meta-narrative-ethics. After a theoretical discussion, this paper uses two literary narratives representing the polarized views in the debate to show how the moral subject may be (...) compelled to relate to its self. Ethics is redefined as Foucauldian rapport à soi, and ethical analysis, at this meta-level, shows how the moral self is intimately connected to cultural discourse. (shrink)

The idea of 'holiness' is central to religion, but it is also one of the hardest concepts to define. Is 'holiness' a synonym for Godliness, one of God's attributes, or does it have independent existence? What does it mean to say that both God and man are holy? What is the proper understanding of 'Be holy, because I the Lord your God am holy'? A Theology of Holiness analyzes the meaning of the Hebrew root k-d-sh from ancient sources, throughout Tanakh, (...) the Talmud, Rashi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Ultimately, it is a work of theology, and helps the reader achieve a deeper understanding of holiness"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Chapter One The Karaite Community of Jerusalem in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Background and Development A time of intellectual change The eighth and ninth centuries were a time of great political and intellectual change for Jews ...

... Let me start my investigation by taking a brief look at the way in which self-awareness is expressed linguistically, as in the sentences "I am tired" or ...

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

Bohmian mechanics and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory provide opposite resolutions of the quantum measurement problem: the former postulates additional variables (the particle positions) besides the wave function, whereas the latter implements spontaneous collapses of the wave function by a nonlinear and stochastic modification of Schrödinger's equation. Still, both theories, when understood appropriately, share the following structure: They are ultimately not about wave functions but about 'matter' moving in space, represented by either particle trajectories, fields on space-time, or a discrete set of (...) space-time points. The role of the wave function then is to govern the motion of the matter. (shrink)

Book Information Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Edited by Allen Colin, Bekoff Mark and Lauder George. MIT Press. Cambridge. 1998. Pp. vi + 597. Paperback, US$31.50.

Schrödinger’s first proposal for the interpretation of quantum mechanics was based on a postulate relating the wave function on configuration space to charge density in physical space. Schrödinger apparently later thought that his proposal was empirically wrong. We argue here that this is not the case, at least for a very similar proposal with charge density replaced by mass density. We argue that when analyzed carefully, this theory is seen to be an empirically adequate many-worlds theory and not an empirically (...) inadequate theory describing a single world. Moreover, this formulation—Schrödinger’s first quantum theory—can be regarded as a formulation of the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics that is ontologically clearer than Everett’s. (shrink)

Formal models of appearance and reality have proved fruitful for investigating structural properties of perceptual knowledge. This paper applies the same approach to epistemic justification. Our central goal is to give a simple account of The Preface, in which justified belief fails to agglomerate. Following recent work by a number of authors, we understand knowledge in terms of normality. An agent knows p iff p is true throughout all relevant normal worlds. To model The Preface, we appeal to the normality (...) of error. Sometimes, it is more normal for reality and appearance to diverge than to match. We show that this simple idea has dramatic consequences for the theory of knowledge and justification. Among other things, we argue that a proper treatment of The Preface requires a departure from the internalist idea that epistemic justification supervenes on the appearances and the widespread idea that one knows most when free from error. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the issue of what to do if a couple who generates embryos chooses to lawfully, and in their (and my) view, ethnically discard those embryos. Specifically, is it appropriate to use the cells that come from “excess” embryos in medical research instead of discarding them when a couple has ceased trying to have any additional children?

A major disagreement between different views about the foundations of quantum mechanics concerns whether for a theory to be intelligible as a fundamental physical theory it must involve a ‘primitive ontology’ (PO), i.e. variables describing the distribution of matter in four-dimensional space–time. In this article, we illustrate the value of having a PO. We do so by focusing on the role that the PO plays for extracting predictions from a given theory and discuss valid and invalid derivations of predictions. To (...) this end, we investigate a number of examples based on toy models built from the elements of familiar interpretations of quantum theory. (shrink)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

A source of much difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a naive realism about operators. By this we refer to various ways of taking too seriously the notion of operator-as-observable, and in particular to the all too casual talk about measuring operators that occurs when the subject is quantum mechanics. Without a specification of what should be meant by measuring a quantum observable, such an expression can have no clear meaning. A definite specification is provided by (...) Bohmian mechanics, a theory that emerges from Schrödinger's equation for a system of particles when we merely insist that particles means particles. Bohmian mechanics clarifies the status and the role of operators as observables in quantum mechanics by providing the operational details absent from standard quantum mechanics. It thereby allows us to readily dismiss all the radical claims traditionally enveloping the transition from the classical to the quantum realm — for example, that we must abandon classical logic or classical probability. The moral is rather simple: Beware naive realism, especially about operators! (shrink)

The views on contradiction and consistency that Wittgenstein expressed in his later writings have met with misunderstanding and almost uniform hositility. In this paper, I trace the roots of these views by attempting to show that, in his early writings, Wittgenstein accorded a ?unique status? to tautologies and contradictions, marking them off logically from genuine propositions. This is integral both to his Tractatus project of furnishing a theory of inference, and to the enterprise of explaining the nature of the Satz (...) (statement, proposition). Wittgenstein mantained that contradictions are not false. In his early writings this surprising thesis is a consequence of his view that contradictions are not statements. In his late writings he continues to advocate the thesis, but for quite different reasons. In these late writings, I contend, Wittgenstein succeeds in making the surprising thesis plausible. (shrink)

We often claim to know what might be—or probably is—the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that (...) arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases. (shrink)

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)

An excellent critical analysis and scientific assessment of the nature and actual level of risk leading environmental health hazards pose to the public. Issues such as radiation from nuclear testing, radon in the home, and the connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer, environmental factors and asthma, pesticides and breast cancer and leukemia clusters around nuclear plants are discussed and how scientists assess these risks is illuminated.

It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic. The continuing publication of Husserl’s manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. Drawing upon (...) both Husserl’s published works and posthumous material, Husserl’s Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl’s thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking. (shrink)