The standard theory for belief revision provides an elegant and powerful framework for reasoning about how a rational agent should change its beliefs when confronted with new information. However, the agents considered are extremely idealized. Some recent models attempt to tackle the problem of plausible belief revision by adding structure to the belief bases and using nonstandard inference operations. One of the key ideas is that not all of an agent's beliefs are relevant for an operation of belief change.In this (...) paper we incorporate the insights pertaining to local change and relevance sensitivity with the use of approximate inference relations. These approximate inference relations offer us partial solutions at any stage of the revision process. The quality of the approximations improves as we allow for more and more resources to be used. We are provided with upper and lower bounds to what would be obtained with the use of classical inference. (shrink)

Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately reveal pharmaceutical-author interactions and their potential conflicts of interest. This investigation: evaluates the correspondence of two well-utilized CoI databases: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments and ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs and quantifies CoIs among authors of a publicly available point of care clinical support website which is used to inform evidence-based medicine decisions. Two data (...) sources were used: the hundred most common drugs and the top fifty causes of death. These topics were entered into a freely available database. The authors were then input into CMSOP and PDD and compensation and number of payments were determined for 2013–2015. The subset of highly compensated authors that also reported “Nothing to disclose” were further examined. There was a high degree of similarity between CMSOP and PDD for compensation and payment number. The amount received was 1.4% higher in CMSOP than in PDD. The articles where the authors had received the greatest compensation were in neurology, oncology, and endocrinology. Two authors reporting “Nothing to disclose” received appreciable and potentially relevant compensation. CMSOP and PDD produced almost identical results. CoIs were common among authors but self-reporting may be an inadequate reporting mechanism. Recommendations are offered for improving the CoI transparency of pharmaceutical-author interactions in point-of-care electronic resources. (shrink)

Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately reveal pharmaceutical-author interactions and their potential conflicts of interest. This investigation: evaluates the correspondence of two well-utilized CoI databases: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments and ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs and quantifies CoIs among authors of a publicly available point of care clinical support website which is used to inform evidence-based medicine decisions. Two data (...) sources were used: the hundred most common drugs and the top fifty causes of death. These topics were entered into a freely available database. The authors were then input into CMSOP and PDD and compensation and number of payments were determined for 2013–2015. The subset of highly compensated authors that also reported “Nothing to disclose” were further examined. There was a high degree of similarity between CMSOP and PDD for compensation and payment number. The amount received was 1.4% higher in CMSOP than in PDD. The articles where the authors had received the greatest compensation were in neurology, oncology, and endocrinology. Two authors reporting “Nothing to disclose” received appreciable and potentially relevant compensation. CMSOP and PDD produced almost identical results. CoIs were common among authors but self-reporting may be an inadequate reporting mechanism. Recommendations are offered for improving the CoI transparency of pharmaceutical-author interactions in point-of-care electronic resources. (shrink)

Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately reveal pharmaceutical-author interactions and their potential conflicts of interest. This investigation: evaluates the correspondence of two well-utilized CoI databases: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments and ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs and quantifies CoIs among authors of a publicly available point of care clinical support website which is used to inform evidence-based medicine decisions. Two data (...) sources were used: the hundred most common drugs and the top fifty causes of death. These topics were entered into a freely available database. The authors were then input into CMSOP and PDD and compensation and number of payments were determined for 2013–2015. The subset of highly compensated authors that also reported “Nothing to disclose” were further examined. There was a high degree of similarity between CMSOP and PDD for compensation and payment number. The amount received was 1.4% higher in CMSOP than in PDD. The articles where the authors had received the greatest compensation were in neurology, oncology, and endocrinology. Two authors reporting “Nothing to disclose” received appreciable and potentially relevant compensation. CMSOP and PDD produced almost identical results. CoIs were common among authors but self-reporting may be an inadequate reporting mechanism. Recommendations are offered for improving the CoI transparency of pharmaceutical-author interactions in point-of-care electronic resources. (shrink)

Claims about the potential of free software to reform the production and distribution of software are routinely countered by skepticism that the free software community fails to engage the pragmatic and economic ‘realities’ of a software industry. We argue to the contrary that contemporary business and economic trends definitively demonstrate the financial viability of an economy based on free software. But the argument for free software derives its true normative weight from social justice considerations: the evaluation of the basis for (...) a software economy should be guided by consideration of the social and cultural states which are the ultimate goals of any economic arrangement. That is, the software economy should be evaluated in light of its ability to provide justice. We conclude with a discussion of possible avenues for reform. (shrink)

Our freedoms in cyberspace are those granted by code and the protocols it implements. When man and machine interact, co-exist, and intermingle, cyberspace comes to interpenetrate the real world fully. In this cyborg world, software retains its regulatory role, becoming a language of interaction with our extended cyborg selves. The mediation of our extended selves by closed software threatens individual autonomy. We define a notion of freedom for software that does justice to our conception of it as language, sketching the (...) outlines of a social and political philosophy for a cyborg world. In a cyberspace underwritten by free software, political structures become contingent and flexible: the polity can choose to change the extent and character of its participation. The rejection of opaque power is an old anarchist ideal: free software, by making power transparent, carries the potential to place substantive restrictions on the regulatory power of cyborg government. (shrink)

Free and open source software is taking an increasingly significant role in our software infrastructure. Yet many questions still exist about whether a software economy based on FOSS would be viable. We argue that contemporary trends definitively demonstrate this viability. Claiming that an economy must be evaluated as much by the ends it brings about as by its size or vigor, we draw on widely accepted notions of redistributive justice to show the ethical superiority of a software economy based on (...) FOSS. (shrink)

Micro RNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to control many cellular processes including developmental timing in different organisms. The prediction that miRNAs are involved in regulating hox genes of flies and mouse is quite a recent idea and is supported by the finding that mir‐196 represses Hoxb8 gene expression. The non‐coding regions that encode these miRNAs are also conserved across species in the same way as other mechanisms that regulate expression of hox genes. On the contrary, until now no homeotic phenotype, (...) a hallmark of any hox gene mutation, had been associated with any hox miRNA. Recent work on bithorax complex miRNA (miR–iab‐4–5p) shows, for the first time, that miRNAs can lead to homeotic transformation. This miRNA regulates Ultrabithorax (Ubx) and results in the transformation of haltere to wing.1 This study unveils a new complexity and finesse to the regulation of hox gene expression pattern that is needed for determining the anteroposterior body axis in all bilaterians. BioEssays 28: 445–448, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

When you gaze out at the night sky with its awe-inspiring display of stars and galaxies, do you ever ask yourself if it could be possible that you are actually looking into a mirror? What if we inhabit a universe that perfectly fits our needs here on Earth -- a truly human universe? That's the bold thesis author Deepak Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos set out to prove: quite literally, "You are the universe." The startling truth is that the (...) everyday world of physical objects "out there" disguises a hidden dimension. By turning our investigation "in here" to the world of consciousness, the real reality emerges. You Are the Universe guides the reader into a realm in which each of us has the power to transform our personal existence, while at the same time fashioning a new story about how time, space, matter, and energy came into existence. Looking to overturn the traditional model of scientific reality, Chopra and Kafatos hold that each of us is a cocreator of reality and we can uncover the hidden dimensions where consciousness is a field of infinite possibilities. This seemingly impossible proposition follows from the cutting-edge modern thinking of the quantum universe and the great mysteries that must be unriddled before human beings actually know who they are. These include but are not limited to questions such as What came before the big bang? Why does the universe fit together so perfectly? Where did time come from? And do we live in a conscious universe? These mysteries are part and parcel of everyone's life. "All of us live in a participatory universe," the authors write. "Once you decide that you want to participate fully with mind, body, and soul, the paradigm shift becomes personal. The reality you inhabit will be yours to either embrace or change. (shrink)

Through inspirational wisdom, compelling storytelling, and practical advice, this book will help you discover your life's purpose.

Although J. S. Mill′s essay On Liberty was intended by its author to be read as a self-contained work, 1 and even though a careful reading would justify seeing it in this way, it has far too often been denied this right even by its defenders. There is a crucial distinction to be made between eliciting some point of substance from a particular work by an author and then turning to the rest of his work to throw further light on (...) it, and employing other texts from the corpus of his writings to put the construction on certain things said in it which the work by itself cannot sustain, thus treating the former as essentially a fragment, albeit a most important fragment, of a whole. 2 I would suggest that recourse to the latter course is justified only when the possibilities of treating it autarchically have already been explored. In this paper I propose to treat a celebrated text in the former way only because I believe that the results will show such an approach to be uniquely worthwhile, or at least fruitful enough to justify a paper conceived in this way. And, with a view to putting what I want to say about it in maximum focus I shall with one or two exceptions eschew giving supporting evidence from Mill′s other writings, even when this is permitted by the distinction I have made in this opening paragraph. (shrink)

To walk or not to walk: Should a batsman acknowledge his own dismissal by leaving the wicket without even waiting for the umpire's decision? David Coady and Samir Chopra examine this flashpoint ethical debate in cricket.

Possible-world semantics are provided for Parikh’s relevance-sensitive model for belief revision. Having Grove’s system-of-spheres construction as a base, we consider additional constraints on measuring distance between possible worlds, and we prove that, in the presence of the AGM postulates, these constraints characterize precisely Parikh’s axiom (P). These additional constraints essentially generalize a criterion of similarity that predates axiom (P) and was originally introduced in the context of Reasoning about Action. A by-product of our study is the identification of two possible (...) readings of Parikh’s axiom (P), which we call the strong and the weak versions of the axiom. An interesting feature of the strong version is that, unlike classical AGM belief revision, it makes associations between the revision policies of different theories. (shrink)

We propose a new relevance sensitive model for representing and revising belief structures, which relies on a notion of partial language splitting and tolerates some amount of inconsistency while retaining classical logic. The model preserves an agent's ability to answer queries in a coherent way using Belnap's four-valued logic. Axioms analogous to the AGM axioms hold for this new model. The distinction between implicit and explicit beliefs is represented and psychologically plausible, computationally tractable procedures for query answering and belief..

Edited by David Rondel and Samir Chopra, The Moral Psychology of Anxiety presents new work on the causes, consequences, and value of anxiety. Straddling philosophy, psychology, clinical medicine, history, and other disciplines, the chapters in this volume explore anxiety from an impressively wide range of perspectives. The first part is more historical, exploring the meaning of anxiety in different philosophical traditions and historical periods, including ancient Chinese Confucianism, twentieth-century European existentialism, and the Roman Stoics. The second part focuses on (...) a cluster of questions having to do with anxiety’s nature and significance: Is anxiety something biological or cultural, or perhaps both? What is at the root of anxiety? Why should human beings suffer in this way? What is the experience of anxiety like, and what, if anything, are the benefits associated with it? Does anxiety have the potential to make us more virtuous or improve the quality of our inquiry? Addressing an area where newer work in moral psychology is sorely needed, this collection and the varied perspectives it offers will be of great interest to scholars, professionals, and students across philosophy, psychology, and related fields. (shrink)

We provide a formal study of belief retraction operators that do not necessarily satisfy the postulate. Our intuition is that a rational description of belief change must do justice to cases in which dropping a belief can lead to the inclusion, or ‘liberation’, of others in an agent's corpus. We provide two models of liberation via retraction operators: ρ-liberation and linear liberation. We show that the class of ρ-liberation operators is included in the class of linear ones and provide axiomatic (...) characterisations for each class. We show how any retraction operator can be ‘converted’ into either a withdrawal operator ) or a revision operator via the Harper Identity and the Levi Identity respectively. (shrink)

Collaborative filtering recommender system (CFRS) plays a vital role in today’s e-commerce industry. CFRSs collect ratings from the users and predict recommendations for the targeted product. Conventionally, CFRS uses the user-product ratings to make recommendations. Often these user-product ratings are biased. The higher ratings are called push ratings (PRs) and the lower ratings are called nuke ratings (NRs). PRs and NRs are injected by factitious users with an intention either to aggravate or degrade the recommendations of a product. Hence, it (...) is necessary to investigate PRs or NRs and discard them. In this work, opinion mining approach is applied on textual reviews that are given by users for a product to detect the PRs and NRs. The work also examines the effect of PRs and NRs on the performance of CFRS by evaluating various measures such as precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy. (shrink)

Although J. S. Mill′s essay On Liberty was intended by its author to be read as a self-contained work,1 and even though a careful reading would justify seeing it in this way, it has far too often been denied this right even by its defenders. There is a crucial distinction to be made between eliciting some point of substance from a particular work by an author and then turning to the rest of his work to throw further light on it, (...) and employing other texts from the corpus of his writings to put the construction on certain things said in it which the work by itself cannot sustain, thus treating the former as essentially a fragment, albeit a most important fragment, of a whole.2 I would suggest that recourse to the latter course is justified only when the possibilities of treating it autarchically have already been explored. In this paper I propose to treat a celebrated text in the former way only because I believe that the results will show such an approach to be uniquely worthwhile, or at least fruitful enough to justify a paper conceived in this way. And, with a view to putting what I want to say about it in maximum focus I shall with one or two exceptions eschew giving supporting evidence from Mill′s other writings, even when this is permitted by the distinction I have made in this opening paragraph. (shrink)

Martha P. Nochimson _Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2_ Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002 ISBN 0-292-75578-3 (hb) 0-292-75579-1 (pb) 394 pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Am I the Bad Guy?Tavishi ChopraWhat do you do when the 6-year-old patient you have vowed to protect suddenly deems you the bad guy?The afternoon started out like any typical afternoon during my inpatient pediatric rotation. We had finished rounding, grabbed lunch, and began to see our new admits. My residents told me to go see a 6-year-old, Ela, in the ED. All I knew was that she had (...) a burn injury. As I walked to her ED room, my heart sank.Burns from cigarette stumps covered her torso and back. She was holding her shirt off her chest to prevent the excruciating pain caused by her t-shirt rubbing against her skin. As soon as Ela made eye contact with me, she immediately started crying and exclaiming, "Mommy didn't mean to!" confirming exactly what I thought. These burns were inflicted from someone she loved.Ela was eventually admitted into the hospital, and the Department of Child Services was contacted. Little did I know that I would be so conflicted by this decision.DCS launched an investigation on Ela's mom, but during the investigation, Ela's mom was permitted at her bedside. It was very clear that Ela felt protected and loved by her mom. Often it was only her mom who could get her to stop crying during the painful dressing changes. I felt torn allowing Ela's mom to have such a strong presence in Ela's hospital stay. To me, nothing in the world can justify hurting a child so cruelly, and inflicting that pain so many times. However, my job was to help Ela heal. That meant that because Ela turned to her mom for support, I also needed to include Ela's mom in our medical decisions. I buried away any negative feelings I had, and I proceeded to interact with Ela's mom in a professional manner.It was this that allowed me to get to understand Ela's mom a little bit more. She was a single mom [End Page E8] working multiple jobs to help keep her family afloat. She often lived her day on three to four hours of sleep, so she was very tired. The sleep deprivation made her frustrated more easily, and she didn't have a healthy outlet to release her emotions. Unfortunately, Ela was on the receiving end of that frustration.Hearing her story made me even more angry, confused, and upset that a child suffered. I strongly believed that as adults, we should have better control of our emotions, and sleep deprivation and frustration weren't an excuse. I couldn't find it in me to respect Ela's mom, who I shamefully began to avoid.I still wanted to bond with Ela and show her unconditional love. When Ela's mom was at work, I would use that opportunity to go and spend time with her. We would play "princesses," blow bubbles together, and turn dressing changes into a game. We formed a special bond, and I always made it a goal to go and spend some time with her every day.DCS, meanwhile, was actively conducting an investigation. They interviewed Ela's mom, Ela's siblings, and Ela. The findings of their investigation revealed that Ela's mom often would lose her temper, and the kids feared their mom. Hearing this further proved to me that I did not need to interact with Ela's mom. Embarrassingly, it was just as much a priority for me to avoid Ela's mom as it was to spend time with Ela.DCS eventually concluded that Ela's mom would lose custody of Ela for the time being. Because of the connection that Ela and I had, I took it upon myself to deliver the news to her. Our bond was shattered right then and there. She immediately began to cry, told me she hated me, and asked me to leave the room. Anytime I would go into her room after that, she would start screaming and refused to talk to me. In a span of five minutes, Ela's mom made a decision that destroyed their family... (shrink)

Is it possible to venture beyond daily living and experience heightened states of awareness? Deepak Chopra says that higher consciousness is available here and now. “Metahuman helps us harvest peak experiences so we can see our truth and mold the universe’s chaos into a form that brings light to the world.”—Dr. Mehmet Oz, attending physician, New York–Presbyterian, Columbia University New York Times bestselling author Deepak Chopra unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field (...) of infinite possibilities. How does one do this? By becoming metahuman. To be metahuman, however, isn’t science fiction and is certainly not about being a superhero. To be metahuman means to move past the limitation constructed by the mind and enter a new state of awareness where we have deliberate and concrete access to peak experiences that can transform people’s lives from the inside out. Humans do this naturally—to a point. For centuries the great artists, scientists, writers, and many so-called ordinary people have gone beyond the everyday physical world. But if we could channel these often bewildering experiences, what would happen? Chopra argues we would wake up to experiences that would blow open your body, mind, and soul. Metahuman invites the reader to walk the path here and now. Waking up, we learn, isn’t just about mindfulness or meditation. Waking up, to become metahuman, is to expand our consciousness in all that we think, say, and do. By going beyond, we liberate ourselves from old conditioning and all the mental constructs that underlie anxiety, tension, and ego-driven demands. Waking up allows life to make sense as never before. To make this as practical as possible, Chopra ends the book with a 31-day guide to becoming metahuman. Once you wake up, he writes, life becomes transformed, because pure consciousness—which is the field of all possibilities—dawns in your life. Only then does your infinite potential become your personal reality. (shrink)

Software is much more than sequences of instructions for a computing machine: it can be an enabler (or disabler) of political imperatives and policies. Hence, it is subject to the same assessment in a normative dimension as other political and social phenomena. The core distinction between free software and its proprietary counterpart is that free software makes available to its user the knowledge and innovation contributed by the creator(s) of the software, in the form of the created source code. From (...) an ethical perspective, one of the most pressing questions raised by this form of collaboration is the question of the rights, and the restrictions on them, that are passed on to users and collaborators by the creators of programs. That is, what freedoms do software users deserve, and how can they best be protected? In this study we analyze free software licensing schemes in order to determine which most effectively protects such freedoms. We conclude that so-called copyleft licensing schemes are the morally superior alternative. (shrink)

This thesis proposes and presents two new models for belief representation and belief revision. The first model is the B-structures model which relies on a notion of partial language splitting and tolerates some amount of inconsistency while retaining classical logic. The model preserves an agent's ability to answer queries in a coherent way using Belnap's four-valued logic. Axioms analogous to the AGM axioms hold for this new model. The distinction between implicit and explicit beliefs is represented and psychologically plausible, computationally (...) tractable procedures for query answering and belief base revision are obtained. ;The second model presents a method for relevance sensitive non-monotonic inference from belief sequences which incorporates insights pertaining to prioritized inference and relevance sensitive, inconsistency tolerant belief revision. Our model uses a finite, logically open sequence of propositional formulas as a representation for beliefs and defines a notion of inference from maxiconsistent subsets of formulas guided by two orderings: a temporal sequencing and an ordering based on relevance relations between the conclusion and formulas in the sequence. The relevance relations are ternary as opposed to standard binary axiomatizations. The inference operation thus defined easily handles iterated revision by maintaining a revision history, blocks the derivation of inconsistent answers from a possibly inconsistent sequence and maintains the distinction between explicit and implicit beliefs. In doing so, it provides a finitely representable formalism and a plausible model of reasoning for automated agents. (shrink)

This note is prompted by a re-reading of the late Professor J. L. Austin's British Academy Lecture of 1956 “Ifs and Cans” and Professor P. H. Nowell-Smith's rejoinder to it. Austin states his topic at the beginning, and though he re-formulates it more precisely later on, it will suffice for my purposes to quote the opening short paragraph. He asks: “Are cans constitutionally iffy? Whenever, that is, we say that we can do something, or could do something, or could have (...) done something, is there an if in the offing—suppressed, it may be, but due nevertheless to appear when we set out our sentence in full or when we give an explanation of its meaning?”. Towards the end of his lecture he states his conclusion concerning the issue, viz. determinism, which is usually prominent at least implicitly in our discussion of such questions, in the following terms: “Determinism, whatever it may be, may yet be the case, but at least it appears not consistent with what we ordinarily say and presumably think.”. (shrink)

Disabled/“differently abled” persons by virtue of being human have the right to enjoy human rights to life, liberty, equality, security, and dignity. However, due to social indifference, psychological barriers, a limited definition of “disability” entitling protection of law, and a lack of proper data, disabled persons in India remain an invisible category. Although several laws exit to ensure their full and effective participation in society, they remain insufficient as they are primarily based on the government's discretion. At the same time, (...) whenever the judiciary finds an opportunity, it acts as a real protector of disabled persons, but it is not feasible to knock on the door of the judiciary for every request. Interestingly, various civil societies and human rights activists have occasionally asserted the rights of the disabled. However, unless the foundation stones of law are fortified, disabled persons cannot fully realize their rights. It is high time to enact effective laws, with timely implementation, to protect their interests and empower their capabilities that are based on a “rights-based approach” rather than on the charity, medical, or social approaches. Thus, the horizons of law must be expanded to provide a “human friendly environment” for all of the disabled to overcome the barriers that impair their development. (shrink)

COVID-19 has created additional challenges in mental health services, including the impact of social distancing measures on care and treatment. For situations where a detention under mental health legislation is required to keep an individual safe, psychiatrists may consider whether to conduct an assessment in person or using video technology. The Mental Health Act 2003 does not stipulate that an assessment has to be conducted in person. Yet, the Code of Practice envisions that detention assessments would be conducted face to (...) face in all circumstances. During the pandemic, the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, a statutory body with a duty to promote best practice of the Act, has been asked whether it may be acceptable and indeed preferable for some assessments to be conducted via video technology. Where an assessment is needed to determine if a patient needs to be detained, and where there is a need for social distancing or the need for ‘shielding’, remote assessments may in some circumstances be preferable. In this article, we outline the modification of the Mental Welfare Commission’s previous outright rejection of virtual assessments as the pandemic progressed and discuss the ethical and legal issues the possibility of remote assessments has exposed. We also discuss the limits and when a virtual assessment is not considered ethical. As the pandemic moves from a state of emergency into a ‘new normal’ in psychiatric services during second, or subsequent, waves, the use and place of remote assessments for detention needs to be considered. (shrink)

Religion and spirituality (R/S) serve as coping mechanisms for circumstances that threaten people’s psychological well-being. However, using R/S inappropriately to deal with difficulties and problems in daily life may include the practice of Spiritual Bypass (SB). SB refers to avoiding addressing emotional problems and trauma, rather than healing and learning from them. On the other hand, coping strategies may be determined by the cultural context. This study aims to describe the presence of SB in individuals who may have experienced stressful (...) situations and to understand the influence of culture on SB by comparing SB in two culturally different groups. The sample consists of a total of 435 people, 262 of Honduran nationality and 173 of Spanish nationality. Both groups are approximately equivalent in age and gender. The degree of SB, stressful events, perception of social support and spiritual well-being are examined, respectively, through the Spiritual Bypass Scale, and specific items and subscales from the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Spiritual Wellbeing. The results showed a higher spiritual well-being and use of SB in the Honduran sample as compared to the Spanish sample, but similar social support and stressful events. Furthermore, some of the factors predicting SB were different between the two samples. While age and a greater number of R/S practices were important in both samples, for the Honduran sample the variables that best explained SB were being a Christian, having greater social support, fewer stressful events, and greater attendance at church or temple. For the Spanish sample, however, the variable that best explained SB was studying R/S texts. Therefore, SB must be understood within the culture in which it develops, since in different cultural contexts it appears to relate to differing factors. Thus, SB becomes a possible functional or dysfunctional coping strategy depending on the social context. (shrink)

We present a framework that provides a logic for science by generalizing the notion of logical (Tarskian) consequence. This framework will introduce hierarchies of logical consequences, the first level of each of which is identified with deduction. We argue for identification of the second level of the hierarchies with inductive inference. The notion of induction presented here has some resonance with Popper's notion of scientific discovery by refutation. Our framework rests on the assumption of a restricted class of structures in (...) contrast to the permissibility of classical first-order logic. We make a distinction between deductive and inductive inference via the notions of compactness and weak compactness. Connections with the arithmetical hierarchy and formal learning theory are explored. For the latter, we argue against the identification of inductive inference with the notion of learnable in the limit. Several results highlighting desirable properties of these hierarchies of generalized logical consequence are also presented. (shrink)

This research examines the concept of entrepreneurial learning and relates it to Deepak Chopra's seven spiritual laws of success. The article first examines generic processes in motivating entrepreneurs to engage in self-directed learning projects on behalf of their businesses. Then it examines three modes of learning as they apply to practising entrepreneurs. Triple-loop learning is proposed as the deepest level of entrepreneurial learning. Triple-loop learners are considered the most likely entrepreneurs to practise the seven spiritual laws of success. Finally, (...) each of the seven laws is related back to the motives that inspire entrepreneurs to learn. (shrink)

Mike Chopra-Gant 'Theorizing the Couple: On Nochimson's _Screen Couple Chemistry_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 44, December 200.

Ken Mogg 'Small World: Deborah Thomas's _Beyond Genre_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 4, February 2003 Mike Chopra-Gant 'Hollywood Spaces: Deborah Thomas's _Reading Hollywood_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 5, February 2003.

Several authors have recently suggested that classic psychedelics might be safe and effective agents of moral enhancement. This raises the question: can we learn anything interesting about the nature of moral experience from a close examination of transformative psychedelic experiences? The interdisciplinary enterprise of philosophical psychopathology attempts to learn about the structure and function of the “ordinary” mind by studying the radically altered mind. By analogy, in this chapter we argue that we can gain knowledge about the everyday moral life (...) by studying extraordinary experiences of altered moral cognition and experience. We focus on a specific class of cases: experiences of forgiveness induced by psychedelics. We argue that close attention to such experiences reveals the importance of thought/emotion coherence and dissonance in the moral life and vindicates some heterodox ideas about moral phenomenology and psychology. (shrink)

Today, anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, the most diagnosed and medicated of all psychological disorders. But anxiety isn't always or only a medical condition. Indeed, many philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative, allowing us to live more meaningful lives by giving us a richer understanding of ourselves. In Anxiety, Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety offered by ancient (...) and modern philosophies-Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Blending memoir and philosophy, he also tells how serious anxiety has affected his own life-and how philosophy has helped him cope with it. Chopra shows that many philosophers-including the Buddha, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger-view anxiety as an inevitable human response to existence: to be is to be anxious. Drawing on Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, Chopra examines how poverty and other material conditions can make anxiety worse, but he emphasizes that not even the rich can escape it. Nor can the medicated. Inseparable from the human condition, anxiety is indispensable for grasping it. Philosophy may not be able to cure anxiety but, by leading us to greater self-knowledge and self-acceptance, it may be able to make us less anxious about being anxious. Personal, poignant, and hopeful, Anxiety is a book for anyone who is curious about rethinking anxiety and learning why it might be a source not only of suffering but of insight. (shrink)

Today, anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, the most diagnosed and medicated of all psychological disorders. But anxiety isn't always or only a medical condition. Indeed, many philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative, allowing us to live more meaningful lives by giving us a richer understanding of ourselves. In Anxiety, Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety offered by ancient (...) and modern philosophies-Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Blending memoir and philosophy, he also tells how serious anxiety has affected his own life-and how philosophy has helped him cope with it. Chopra shows that many philosophers-including the Buddha, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger-view anxiety as an inevitable human response to existence: to be is to be anxious. Drawing on Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, Chopra examines how poverty and other material conditions can make anxiety worse, but he emphasizes that not even the rich can escape it. Nor can the medicated. Inseparable from the human condition, anxiety is indispensable for grasping it. Philosophy may not be able to cure anxiety but, by leading us to greater self-knowledge and self-acceptance, it may be able to make us less anxious about being anxious. Personal, poignant, and hopeful, Anxiety is a book for anyone who is curious about rethinking anxiety and learning why it might be a source not only of suffering but of insight. (shrink)

In a paper entitled ‘Saints and Heroes’ 1 Professor J. O. Urmson has criticised ‘the trichotomy of duties, indifferent actions, and wrongdoing’ , commonly found in moral philosophy, on the ground that it fails to cover an important class of actions, of which saintly and heroic actions are ‘conspicuous” but by no means the only examples. I am inclined to think that this trichotomy is defensible, and that at least it deserves a much longer run for its money than Urmson (...) gives it. The form in which he presents it, however, makes it more implausible than it need be and this is perhaps the main reason why he finds it so indefensible. (shrink)

Chopra and Weiss address perhaps the fundamental issue in international relations today: the sacrosanct sets of sovereignty. The word "sovereignty" explains why the international community has difficulty countering human rights violations.

Routledge (New Media and Cyberculture Series), July 2007.

The axiom of recovery, while capturing a central intuition regarding belief change, has been the source of much controversy. We argue briefly against putative counterexamples to the axiom—while agreeing that some of their insight deserves to be preserved—and present additional recovery-like axioms in a framework that uses epistemic states, which encode preferences, as the object of revisions. This makes iterated revision possible and renders explicit the connection between iterated belief change and the axiom of recovery. We provide a representation theorem (...) that connects the semantic conditions we impose on iterated revision and our additional syntactical properties. We show interesting similarities between our framework and that of Darwiche–Pearl (Artificial Intelligence 89:1–29 1997). In particular, we show that intuitions underlying the controversial (C2) postulate are captured by the recovery axiom and our recovery-like postulates (the latter can be seen as weakenings of (C2)). We present postulates for contraction, in the same spirit as the Darwiche–Pearl postulates for revision, and provide a theorem that connects our syntactic postulates with a set of semantic conditions. Lastly, we show a connection between the contraction postulates and a generalisation of the recovery axiom. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of belief change have been criticized for placing undue emphasis on the new belief provided as input. A recent proposal to address such issues is a framework for non-prioritized belief change based on default theories (Ghose and Goebel, 1998). A novel feature of this approach is the introduction of disbeliefs alongside beliefs which allows for a view of belief contraction as independently useful, instead of just being seen as an intermediate step in the process of belief revision. This (...) approach is, however, restrictive in assuming a linear ordering of reliability on the received inputs. In this paper, we replace the linear ordering with a preference ranking on inputs from which a total preorder on inputs can be induced. This extension brings along with it the problem of dealing with inputs of equal rank. We provide a semantic solution to this problem which contains, as a special case, AGM belief change on closed theories. (shrink)