In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Atoms, Gunk, and God:Natural Theology and the Debate over the Fundamental Composition of MatterTravis DumsdayLET US SAY we take a rock and divide it in two. We then divide each of the halves again. We repeat. We keep repeating, over and over and over again, until we have reached down to the level of molecules and then to atoms and then to subatomic particles and beyond. What, (...) eventually, will we end up with? (A) Do we eventually reach “rock bottom,” a layer of fundamental objects that can be divided no further? Or (B) could the dividing process be carried on forever?Let us take (A), the idea that there are fundamental, indivisible objects. We may call these “atoms,” and the theory that affirms their existence atomism. (I use the label for historical reasons; the “atoms” discussed in the history of metaphysics are of course not equivalent to the atoms of contemporary physics, which are divisible into constituent subatomic particles.) What must be the nature of these objects? Here we can identify two distinct versions of atomism.According to the first, these entities cannot be spatially extended, since extension entails divisibility. After all, if something has discernible length, then its conceptually distinguishable left and right halves, for instance, could be separated from each other, at least in theory. The existence of the matter constituting the left half seems not to entail the existence of the matter constituting the right half or vice versa, so one could persist without the other (e.g., the left half could be annihilated while the right half continues in existence), and [End Page 227] could be divided from the other. Whether they could actually be separated by us, using current or future technology, is of course an entirely different question from the philosophically significant issue of divisibility in principle. Atoms are, on this view, extensionless “point particles” with no actual or potential proper parts. This may be called atomism version 1.According to the second version of atomism, these indivisible objects are nevertheless spatially extended. The reality of atoms is affirmed, but the relation obtaining between extension and divisibility, which is supposedly entailed, is rejected. Despite being spatially extended, these particles cannot possibly be divided. Consequently, although they are spatially extended, they do not possess actual proper parts in the sense that “proper part” is typically understood (i.e., as involving smaller constituent objects, which could in theory exist apart from the whole). The claim is not merely that they cannot be divided by us using current or future technology, nor that their division would be inconsistent with contingent physical laws. The impossibility referenced here is not mere physical impossibility. Rather, the claim is that it is metaphysically impossible (and logically impossible, for those who equate metaphysical and logical impossibility) for them to be divided. There is no possible world in which these entities are in any way divided, either by splitting in two or by destroying one section while leaving the rest intact. This may be called atomism version 2.Atomism’s major competitors may be grouped under the affirmation of (B), according to which division could go on forever. Matter is infinitely divisible. But what does infinite divisibility imply? Here there is a further divergence of views. One camp affirms the gunky view of matter. On this view, a material object is infinitely divisible because it is composed of an actual infinity of proper parts: any material object is composed of smaller proper parts that are themselves real objects composed of smaller proper parts that are themselves real objects composed of smaller proper parts, and so on, ad infinitum. Another camp denies the reality of actual infinities (at least in the material realm), and affirms instead the reality of extended simples. On this view matter is infinitely divisible, as [End Page 228] on the gunky view, but not because material objects are composed of an actual infinity of smaller objects. Instead, material nature bottoms out (in a sense) at objects that are spatially extended and potentially subject to division, but that lack actual proper parts. They are not composed of real, smaller objects. Rather, what makes it true that the object... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper deals with two cases of acquisition and construction of Van de Graaff accelerators in 1950s Latin America, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of São Paulo, respectively. A comparative approach allows us to appreciate the significance of this particular technology within scientific, cultural, commercial, and political processes. Van de Graaff accelerators appeared as an affordable technology to engage in experimental nuclear physics and to be part of the atomic age. The circumstances that motivated (...) physics communities in Brazil and Mexico to choose this specific technology took shape in close interactions with US institutions and scientists. These inter-American alliances involved precisely the main companies and groups that competed for the market of this technology around the world. These accelerators also intertwined with the building of campuses for two major Latin American universities, occupying then a singular place (physically and symbolically) within their execution. This paper engages with comparison for the common goal of going beyond frameworks and methodologies tied to the nation, while integrating the study of connections and interactions, as well as the interplay of multiple scales. (shrink)

"The time-honored dualism of the mutually exclusive systems of thought, mechanistic biology on the one hand and vitalism on the other, expresses a pair of theoretical approaches which are both inadequate. We shall show how they can be replaced by an abstractly descriptive system of a different type that is far better adapted to the nature of biology"--Preface.

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing interest in science exhibitions, there has been hardly any work on mobile science exhibitions and their role within science diplomacy – a gap this thematic issue is meant to fill. Atomic mobile exhibitions are seen here not only as cultural sites but as multifaceted strategic processes of transnational nuclear history. We move beyond the bipolar Cold War history that portrays propagandist science exhibitions as instances of a one-way communication employed to promote the virtues of the two (...) major and conflicting political powers. Instead, Science Diplomacy on Display follows mobile atomic exhibitions as they move across national borders and around the world, functioning as spaces for diplomatic encounters. Exhibitions play a vital role not only in the production of knowledge and the formation of political worldviews but also as assets in diplomatic negotiations and as promoters of a new worldview in which nuclear stands at the centre. They are powerful iconic diplomatic devices, that is systems of representations that capture the diplomatic processes in action and make the nitty-gritty details of international relations visible. This issue seeks to trace the multiple and often contradictory meanings that mobile exhibitions took on for various actors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I present and evaluate Leibniz’s two main arguments against the existence of atoms. In this context atoms are extended particles that are absolutely hard, homogeneous, indivisible, and indestructible by natural means. As we shall see, Leibniz’s arguments are flawed in a very instructive way. The first argument is in tension with the claim that God created the best possible world. The second argument overgeneralizes in an undesirable way. However, as I shall discuss in the (...) last section of the paper, even if the arguments are somehow defective, at least the first one contributes valuable insights to contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine how any domain of Meinongian objects can be structured by a special kind of mereology. The basic definition of this mereology is the following: an object is part of another iff every characteristic property of the former is also a characteristic property of the latter. I will show that this kind of mereology ends up being very powerful for dealing with Meinongian objects. Mereological sums and products are not restricted in any way (...) in a domain of Meinongian objects: there is a sum and a product for any pair of Meinongian objects. With the mereological operations of sum, product and complement, and two special Meinongian objects, we can define a full boolean algebra on Meinongian objects. Moreover, this kind of mereology is atomic and extensional: an atom is a Meinongian object having just one characteristic property and two objects are identical iff the same atoms are parts of both of them. A Meinongian object can finally be defined in mereological terms as the sum of the atoms of its characteristic properties. (shrink)

We present in this paper an abstract categorical logic based on an abstraction of quantifier. More precisely, the proposed logic is abstract because no structural constraints are imposed on models (semantics free). By contrast, formulas are inductively defined from an abstraction both of atomic formulas and of quantifiers. In this sense, the proposed approach differs from other works interested in formalizing the notion of abstract logic and of which the closest to our approach are the institutions, which in (...) addition to be semantics free do not also impose any syntactic contingencies on the structure of formulas. To define the semantical framework in which formulas will be interpreted, we propose to follow the idea from categorical logic which defines the semantical interpretation of formulas from context and as subobjects of an object of a given category. In the spirit of Lawvere’s hyperdoctrines, we use a more abstract notion which generalizes the notion of subobject, standard in category theory: Pitt’s prop-categories. Always in the spirit of categorical logic, we propose a sequent calculus of which we show correctness and completeness for all semantical frameworks defined over any prop-categories. We then study some conditions which allow us to get this completeness result for particular classes of prop-categories. (shrink)

We continue the work on the relations between independence logic and the model-theoretic analysis of independence, generalizing the results of [15] and [16] to the framework of abstract independence relations for an arbitrary AEC. We give a model-theoretic interpretation of the independence atom and characterize under which conditions we can prove a completeness result with respect to the deductive system that axiomatizes independence in team semantics and statistics.

atomism involves point-sized philosophical atoms that are indistinguishable from one another, and that are nonphysical bits of energy that flash in and out of existence. In other words, they are nonphysical particles (hence the word "abstract"): they are not nonphysical in the way that some philosophers might believe a mind or number to be alleged to be nonphysical, but rather they are nonphysical merely because, I argue in an article, that they are ultimate building blocks that in no way (...) can be considered physical items. If that is the case, it indicates that reality is not physical (if, that is. (shrink)

When we press the “A” key on our computer keyboard, an “a” appears on our screen almost simultaneously. In between those two points there are a number of layers of computer program which communicate with each other: the keyboard controller sends a message to the operating system which is interpreted by a word processor, which then returns a message to the operating system, which communicates with the video controller and the video board sends a message that it needs an “a” (...) and this is mapped as a group of pixels which light up on the screen. Except that none of this actually happens. At the level of physical reality, all that happens is the shifting of magnetic fields and the passing of electrons. The electrons orbiting atoms slide from one atom to the next along wires, among silicon and metal. Entities like computer programs and operating systems are. (shrink)

There are three propositions that this author demonstrates in his argument: the contention that berkeley 's attack on abstract ideas is not made wholly compatible with his atomic sensationalism, that berkeley does not provide or employ a single definition or criterion for determining the limit of abstraction and that the doctrine of abstract ideas furnishes no real support to berkeley 's argument against the existence of material substance independent of perception.

Words in Semitic texts often consist of a concatenation of word segments, each corresponding to a Part-of-Speech (POS) category. Semitic words may be ambiguous with regard to their segmentation as well as to the POS tags assigned to each segment. When designing POS taggers for Semitic languages, a major architectural decision concerns the choice of the atomic input tokens (terminal symbols). If the tokenization is at the word level the output tags must be complex, and represent both the segmentation of (...) the word and the POS tag assigned to each word segment. If the tokenization is at the segment level, the input itself must encode the different alternative segmentations of the words, while the output consists of standard POS tags. Comparing these two alternatives is not trivial, as the choice between them may have global effects on the grammatical model. Moreover, intermediate levels of tokenization between these two extremes are conceivable, and, as we will aim to show, beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, the problem of tokenization for POS tagging of Semitic languages has not been addressed before in full generality. In this paper, we study this problem for the purpose of POS tagging of Modern Hebrew texts. After extensive error analysis of the two simple tokenization models, we propose a novel, linguistically-motivated, intermediate tokenization model that gives better performance for Hebrew over the two initial architectures. Our study is based on the well-known Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We start out from a manually devised morphological analyzer and a very small annotated corpus, and describe how to adapt an HMM-based POS tagger for both tokenization architectures. We present an effective technique for smoothing the lexical probabilities using an untagged corpus, and a novel transform for casting the segment-level tagger in terms of a standard, word-level, HMM implementation. The results obtained using our model are on par with the best published results on Modern Standard Arabic, despite the much smaller annotated corpus available for Modern Hebrew.. (shrink)

Since their introduction by Partee and Rooth (1983) into linguistic theory, type shifting principles have been extensively employed in various linguistic domains, including nominal predicates (Partee 1987), kind denoting NPs (Chierchia 1998), interrogatives (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1989), scrambled definites (De Hoop and Van der Does 1998) and plurals (Winter 2001,2002). Most of the accounts that use type shifting principles employ them as ``last resort'' mechanisms, which apply only when other compositional mechanisms fail. This failure is often sloppily referred to as (...) type mismatch . The motivation for introducing type mismatch into the compositional mechanism is twofold: on the one hand it allows lexical items to be assigned the minimal types that are needed for describing their denotation; on the other hand, it has been argued that the ``last resort'' strategy of type shifting prevents derivation of undesired meanings. The first goal of this paper is to define a simple notion of type mismatch, which will rather closely follow Partee and Rooth's original proposal but will be expressed within more familiar terms of categorial semantics. After introducing this implementation of traditional type mismatch, it will be argued that in fact, it covers only one possible kind of trigger for type shifting principles. Partee and Rooth's notion of mismatch is ``external'' in that the type of an expression is changed only when it combines with another type to which it cannot compose using the ``normal'' compositional mechanism. It will be argued that, within an appropriate type system, another notion of mismatch is also useful. This is the kind of mismatch in which the semantic type of an expression does not match its syntactic category. Two such cases will be explored: mismatch between morpho-syntactic number (singular or plural) and semantic number (a denotation ranging over atoms or sets), and mismatch between syntactic category (noun, DP, adjective etc.) and semantic role (predicate, quantifier, predicate modifier etc.).. (shrink)

We are used to the idea that computers operate on numbers, yet another kind of data is equally important: the syntax of formal languages, with variables, binding, and alpha-equivalence. The original application of nominal techniques, and the one with greatest prominence in this paper, is to reasoning on formal syntax with variables and binding. Variables can be modelled in many ways: for instance as numbers (since we usually take countably many of them); as links (since they may `point' to a (...) binding site in the term, where they are bound); or as functions (since they often, though not always, represent `an unknown'). None of these models is perfect. In every case for the models above, problems arise when trying to use them as a basis for a fully formal mechanical treatment of formal language. The problems are practical—but their underlying cause may be mathematical. The issue is not whether formal syntax exists, since clearly it does, so much as what kind of mathematical structure it is. To illustrate this point by a parody, logical derivations can be modelled using a Gödel encoding (i.e., injected into the natural numbers). It would be false to conclude from this that proof-theory is a branch of number theory and can be understood in terms of, say, Peano's axioms. Similarly, as it turns out, it is false to conclude from the fact that variables can be encoded e.g., as numbers, that the theory of syntax-with-binding can be understood in terms of the theory of syntax-without-binding, plus the theory of numbers (or, taking this to a logical extreme, purely in terms of the theory of numbers). It cannot; something else is going on. What that something else is, has not yet been fully understood. In nominal techniques, variables are an instance of names, and names are data. We model names using urelemente with properties that, pleasingly enough, turn out to have been investigated by Fraenkel and Mostowski in the first half of the 20th century for a completely different purpose than modelling formal language. What makes this model really interesting is that it gives names distinctive properties which can be related to useful logic and programming principles for formal syntax. Since the initial publications, advances in the mathematics and presentation have been introduced piecemeal in the literature. This paper provides in a single accessible document an updated development of the foundations of nominal techniques. This gives the reader easy access to updated results and new proofs which they would otherwise have to search across two or more papers to find, and full proofs that in other publications may have been elided. We also include some new material not appearing elsewhere. (shrink)

Argument“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the (...) urgent expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.– Yves Klein 1958. (shrink)

By operations on models we show how to relate completeness with respect to permissivenominal models to completeness with respect to nominal models with finite support. Models with finite support are a special case of permissive-nominal models, so the construction hinges on generating from an instance of the latter, some instance of the former in which sufficiently many inequalities are preserved between elements. We do this using an infinite generalisation of nominal atoms-abstraction. The results are of interest in their (...) own right, but also, we factor the mathematics so as to maximise the chances that it could be used off-the-shelf for other nominal reasoning systems too. Models with infinite support can be easier to work with, so it is useful to have a semi-automatic theorem to transfer results from classes of infinitely-supported nominal models to the more restricted class of models with finite support. In conclusion, we consider different permissive-nominal syntaxes and nominal models and discuss how they relate to the results proved here. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. In his Letters on the motion impressed by a moving mover, Gassendi offers a theory of the motion of composite bodies that closely follows Galileo’s. Elsewhere, he describes the motion of individual atoms in very different terms: individual atoms are always in motion, even when the body that contains them is at rest; atomic motion is discontinuous although the motion of composite bodies is at least apparently continuous; and atomic motion is grounded in an intrinsic vis motrix, (...) motive power, while composite bodies simply persist in their state of motion or rest in the absence of outside intereference. Gassendi does not make much effort to explain how his accounts of atomic and composite motion fit together, and it’s difficult to see how they could possible be integrated. My goal is to explain, given this difficulty, why he accepted both the Galilean theory of the motion of composite bodies and the Epicurean theory of atomic motion. (shrink)

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to present a topological method for constructing discretizations (tessellations) of conceptual spaces. The method works for a class of topological spaces that the Russian mathematician Pavel Alexandroff defined more than 80 years ago. Alexandroff spaces, as they are called today, have many interesting properties that distinguish them from other topological spaces. In particular, they exhibit a 1-1 correspondence between their specialization orders and their topological structures. Recently, a special type of Alexandroff spaces was (...) used by Ian Rumfitt to elucidate the logic of vague concepts in a new way. According to his approach, conceptual spaces such as the color spectrum give rise to classical systems of concepts that have the structure of atomic Boolean algebras. More precisely, concepts are represented as regular open regions of an underlying conceptual space endowed with a topological structure. Something is subsumed under a concept iff it is represented by an element of the conceptual space that is maximally close to the prototypical element p that defines that concept. This topological representation of concepts comes along with a representation of the familiar logical connectives of Aristotelian syllogistics in terms of natural settheoretical operations that characterize regular open interpretations of classical Boolean propositional logic. In the last 20 years, conceptual spaces have become a popular tool of dealing with a variety of problems in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, mainly due to the work of Peter Gärdenfors and his collaborators. By using prototypes and metrics of similarity spaces, one obtains geometrical discretizations of conceptual spaces by so-called Voronoi tessellations. These tessellations are extensionally equivalent to topological tessellations that can be constructed for Alexandroff spaces. Thereby, Rumfitt’s and Gärdenfors’s constructions turn out to be special cases of an approach that works for a more general class of spaces, namely, for weakly scattered Alexandroff spaces. This class of spaces provides a convenient framework for conceptual spaces as used in epistemology and related disciplines in general. Alexandroff spaces are useful for elucidating problems related to the logic of vague concepts, in particular they offer a solution of the Sorites paradox (Rumfitt). Further, they provide a semantics for the logic of clearness (Bobzien) that overcomes certain problems of the concept of higher2 order vagueness. Moreover, these spaces help find a natural place for classical syllogistics in the framework of conceptual spaces. The crucial role of order theory for Alexandroff spaces can be used to refine the all-or-nothing distinction between prototypical and nonprototypical stimuli in favor of a more fine-grained gradual distinction between more-orless prototypical elements of conceptual spaces. The greater conceptual flexibility of the topological approach helps avoid some inherent inadequacies of the geometrical approach, for instance, the so-called “thickness problem” (Douven et al.) and problems of selecting a unique metric for similarity spaces. Finally, it is shown that only the Alexandroff account can deal with an issue that is gaining more and more importance for the theory of conceptual spaces, namely, the role that digital conceptual spaces play in the area of artificial intelligence, computer science and related disciplines. Keywords: Conceptual Spaces, Polar Spaces, Alexandroff Spaces, Prototypes, Topological Tessellations, Voronoi Tessellations, Digital Topology. (shrink)

Scientific models invariably involve some degree of idealization, abstraction, or nationalization of their target system. Nonetheless, I argue that there are circumstances under which such false models can offer genuine scientific explanations. After reviewing three different proposals in the literature for how models can explain, I shall introduce a more general account of what I call model explanations, which specify the conditions under which models can be counted as explanatory. I shall illustrate this new framework by applying it to (...) the case of Bohr's model of the atom, and conclude by drawing some distinctions between phenomenological models, explanatory models, and fictional models. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 543-564 [Access article in PDF] Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism Warren Breckman In a 1834 report on the development of economic associationism in France, Johannes Schön detected an echo in Germany, the stirrings of a debate over the "modern Associationswesen." This discussion, he believed, would be crucial to the future of the "national economy." 1 Schön was an astute (...) observer, for the German discussion of associationism in the early 1830s was indeed but a faint echo of the French; and insofar as the idea of association was addressed by prominent social writers in those years, it was generally greeted with suspicion. This was the case, for instance, with the liberal thinker Robert von Mohl, whose influential 1835 tract on the social question criticized the notion of proletarian associationism. Conversely, by the early 1840s, association was on many tongues as a panacea for the social ills of the age. By 1840 Mohl himself had embraced the "Assoziationsprinzip" as an antidote to the atomized condition of modern social life. 2Among the relatively small number of German writers who did champion association in the 1830s, the claims for its significance were already grandiose. Moses Hess's Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (1837) and August von Cieszkowski's Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (1838) both linked social solidarity to millenarian expectations of a new age of humanity. Even before Hess or Cieszkowski, the first German book on Charles Fourier, by one S. R. Schneider, bore the title Das Problem der Zeit und dessen Lösung durch die Assoziation (1834), while another, by Fr. Hr. Tappehorn, was headed Die vollkommene Association, als Vermittlerin der Einheit des Vernunftstaates und der Lehre Jesu (1834). Yet the enormous importance assigned to associationism [End Page 543] in these titles exposes the ambiguity of the idea itself. For if, as one historian has claimed, "free association can be regarded in principle as the central organizational form of modern or industrial society," 3 there was no agreement on its nature. Should the right of association be understood as liberal or socialist, individualistic or collectivist? Is free association the core idea and mode of interaction of a pluralistic and competitive civil society, or is it the principle of unification that will overcome pluralism and competition? These fundamental questions were to preoccupy nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates in areas as diverse as revolutionary theory, labor union activism, and the regulation of business cartels. However, in the 1830s, under the pressure of the newly perceived social question, the stirrings of industrialization in Germany, and the revival of democratic politics in the July Revolution, these issues first appeared with a force that drew the attention of intellectuals.Perhaps no German intellectual of the 1830s so perfectly embodies the implicit tensions of the idea of associationism as the Hegelian philosopher of law, Eduard Gans (1797-1839). A student of the Heidelberg legal scholar A. J. Thibaut, Gans later came to be considered by Hegel as one of his most brilliant followers. Once Gans became a professor in the Juristic Faculty at the University of Berlin in the mid-1820s, it was he, not Hegel, who taught a generation of students the intricacies of Hegelian political philosophy. Gans died in 1839 at the age of 42, felled at a luncheon by a stroke while in mid-sentence, a victim, according to the Hallische Jahrbücher, of his own passion for discussion. This volubility is more than evident in his oeuvre, which includes a multi-volume study of inheritance law in world history, dozens of essays on legal philosophy and political and legal issues in his native Prussia and Europe, a popular memoir, and an edition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. He was instrumental, moreover, in creating the Society for Scientific Critique in 1826, the Hegelian "counter-academy" established in response to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences' decision to exclude Hegel, and he was a founder of Die Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, the organization's journal and the main organ of Hegelianism. At... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted (...) numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans—experiments publicized by post–Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere. (shrink)

In abstract argumentation, each argument is regarded as atomic. There is no internal structure to an argument. Also, there is no specification of what is an argument or an attack. They are assumed to be given. This abstract perspective provides many advantages for studying the nature of argumentation, but it does not cover all our needs for understanding argumentation or for building tools for supporting or undertaking argumentation. If we want a more detailed formalization of arguments than is available with (...) abstract argumentation, we can turn to structured argumentation, which is the topic of this special issue of Argument and Computation. In structured argumentation, we assume a formal language for representing knowledge and specifying how arguments and counterarguments can be constructed from that knowledge. An argument is then said to be structured in the sense that normally, the premises and claim of the argument are made explicit, and the relationship between the premises and claim is formally defined (for instance, using logical entailment). In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the approaches covered in this special issue on structured argumentation. (shrink)

Abstract Theories of personal well-being are typically developed so that they render verdicts on (a) how well-off a person is at a moment, (b) how well-off a person is over an interval of time, and (c) how good a whole life is for the person who lives it. Conative theories of welfare posit welfare-atoms that consist, e.g., in episodes of desire-satisfaction, aim-achievement, or values-realisation. Most extant conative theories are additive: they compute well-being over time - up to and including (...) the value of a whole life - by adding up the values of these welfare atoms. Here, it is shown that such atomistic, additive conative theories do not always generate plausible verdicts on (b) and (c) above. They imply that lives featuring incoherent plans and rapidly changing projects go surprisingly well for those who lived them. Holistic theories of well-being are often thought to provide a solution to problems like these. However, one of the best-known versions of welfare holism within the conative family, Rawls? rational life-preferentism, is based on the problematic assumption that there is one ideal life plan for each person. This paper presents a new form of paradigm-resemblance based conative holism that does not make this assumption and that explains the limits of additivity. (shrink)

Abstract. The Western conception of the individual as a rational, self-directing agent is a mythology that organizes and distorts religion, science, economics, and politics. It produces an abstracted and atomized form of engagement that is fatal to collective self-governance. And it turns democracy into the enemy of equality. Considering the meaning of democracy and autonomy from a perspective that takes the subject as truly social would refocus our attention on the constitutive contexts and practices necessary for the production of citizens (...) who are capable of meaningful self-governance. Under modern conditions, it is in the development of sexual autonomy that we learn how to take initiative with respect to our well-being and do so in concert with others. Where the view of rational agency as the defining characteristic of humanity yields a deracinated view of autonomy, a more realistic, humanistic view that we are, necessarily, social beings yields a view of freedom and self-governance as social phenomena that require empathy, negotiation, compromise, cooperation, and mutual recognition and respect. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has long been held that the structure of a protein is determined solely by the interactions of the atoms in the sequence of amino acids of which it is composed, and thus the stable, biologically functional conformation should be predictable by ab initio or de novo methods. However, except for small proteins, ab initio predictions have not been successful. We explain why this is the case and argue that the relationship among the different methods, models, and representations (...) of protein structure is one of integrative pluralism. Our defence appeals to specific features of the complexity of the functional protein structure and to the partial character of representation in general. We present examples of integrative strategies in protein science. _1._ Introduction _2._ Partiality of Representation _3._ Protein Functional Complexity _4._ Modelling Protein Structure _4.1_ Integrating ab initio and experimental models _4.2_ Integrating multiple experimental models _5._ Conclusion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. Associationist psychologists of the late 19th-century premised their research on a fundamentally Humean picture of the mind. So the very idea of mental science was called into question when T. H. Green, a founder of British idealism, wrote an influential attack on Hume’s Treatise. I first analyze Green’s interpretation and criticism of Hume, situating his reading with respect to more recent Hume scholarship. I focus on Green’s argument that Hume cannot consistently admit real ideas of spatial relations. I then (...) argue that William James’s early work on spatial perception attempted to vindicate the new science of mind by showing how to avoid the problems Green had exposed in Hume’s empiricism. James’s solution involved rejecting a basic Humean assumption—that perceptual experience is fundamentally composed of so-called minima sensibilia, or psychological atoms. The claim that there are no psychological atoms is interesting because James supported it with experimental data rather than (as commentators typically suppose) with introspective description or a priori argument. James claimed to be the real descendant of British empiricism on grounds that his anti-atomistic model of perception fortified what Green had perhaps most wanted to demolish—the prospect of using empirical, scientific methods in the study of mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the history of one of the “atomic patents.” The patent, which described a process to slow down neutrons in nuclear reactions, was the result of experimental research conducted in the 1930s by Enrico Fermi and his group at the Institute of Physics, University of Rome. The value of the patented process became clear during World War II, as it was involved in most of the military and industrial applications of atomic energy. This ignited a controversy (...) between Fermi and U.S. government representatives over royalties to be paid for use of the process during and after the war. The controversy sheds new light on the role that the management of patents played in the context of the Manhattan Project and in the postwar U.S. nuclear program, encompassing issues of power and economic influence in the relationship between scientists, the military, and public administrators. The invention covered by Patent No. 2,206,634 covers the basic process used in the research and development leading up the production of atomic energy and the production of the atomic bomb. Such invention is of continuing importance in the production of fissionable materials and atomic weapons. The Chairman: So Jones might make the greatest invention in the field and be deprived of any award for it? Captain Lavender: If he did not want to accept the award that was offered to him. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper criticizes an argument recently presented by Ross Cameron. The argument purports to show that, if time is gunky, and if changes in existence are underwritten by events of coming to be, then there are cases of indeterminate existence. The putative reason is that, if time is gunky, then events of coming to be cannot be instantaneous, and hence, changes in existence must be gradual, non-clear-cut. The paper argues that this argument conflates two different readings of “event of (...) coming to be”. Under one reading, the argument is unsound. Under the other, the argument is valid only if a further, nontrivial premise is added, which concerns the relation between time atoms, instants, and instantaneous events. (shrink)

Abstract This paper examines a fundamental, though relatively understudied, aspect of the physical theory of the physician Asclepiades of Bithynia, namely his doctrine of pores. My principal thesis is that this doctrine is dependent on a conception of void taken directly from Epicurean physics. The paper falls into two parts: the first half addresses the evidence for the presence of void in Asclepiades' theory, and concludes that his conception of void was basically that of Epicurus; the second half focuses on (...) the precise nature of Asclepiadean pores, and seeks to show that they represent void interstices between the primary particles of matter which are the constituents of the human body, and are thus exactly analogous to the void interstices between atoms within solid objects in Epicurus' theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy after ChristJohn O'CallaghanConsider the words of Justin Martyr written in the middle of the second century after the birth of Christ and after Justin's conversion to Christianity:Philosophy is indeed one's greatest possession, and is most precious in the sight of God, to whom it alone leads us and to whom it unites us, and in truth they who have applied themselves to philosophy are holy men.1In addition to (...) the praise heaped upon the philosophers, among whom Justin had counted himself before his conversion,2 the text is one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the historical reality of Christian intellectual engagement with pagan or secular philosophy. Whether that engagement proved spiritually fruitful or sterile in any particular age or any particular tradition of philosophy, Christian intellectuals have often sought out engagement with philosophy as an inherent task of the intellectual life of the Church, in order to pursue and develop the understanding of Christian revelation and the mode of life informed by it. One lasting result of the impetus represented by Justin is to be found even now in the normative requirement in Catholic education that, at a certain stage of development, anyone who receives a [End Page 49] serious Catholic education must be introduced to serious philosophical reflection on where we came from, what we are, and where we are born to go.In addition, one of the general points John Henry Newman made in The Idea of a University is that the human mind looks for unity in the diversity of intellectual disciplines it pursues. In search of this unity, it seeks a kind of primary discipline that takes into account the truths discovered throughout the other disciplines as it seeks to understand what it can of the whole of reality, not just its parts. But Newman also pointed out that, in the absence of such a unifying discipline, practitioners of each particular discipline will often claim for their particular discipline the prize of being primary—of being the discipline by which all others must be understood and judged.3Take classical and modern physics. A familiar claim of some physicists, but even more so of non-physicist physicalists, is that physics is the fundamental intellectual discipline for understanding what is real. All reality, living reality, historical reality, moral reality, indeed perhaps even literary reality, must be reduced to reality as described by the physicists or rejected as unreal or epiphenomenal, or in a kinder, gentler vein, non-reductively emergent and supervenient. Whichever position is taken, whether reduction, non-reductive emergence, or epiphenomenalism, the thought is that the real work of the really real is done by reality as described by physics, either in its actual contemporary state or, more likely, in an idealized future state always on the horizon of where physics presently is. We are really atoms spinning ceaselessly in the void, mostly empty space, the warp and woof of a four-dimensional space-time manifold, or congeries of strings in an even more bizarre thirteen-dimensional manifold, or whatever was said most recently to surpass what was said before that by the leading physicists in California or Cambridge.However, anyone who has actually practiced physics knows that, even when uttered by a physicist, these are not claims of physics, but about physics. What prompts them is the sense that there is no intellectual discipline other than contemporary physics itself that can both understand the achievements of physics and integrate them into a larger intellectual comprehension of reality as a whole. These claims about physics nicely display Newman's point about the way in which a particular discipline, in the absence of a larger more comprehensive discipline, can take on an importance for its practitioners well beyond its disciplinary limits. [End Page 50]In the case of physics, if a more comprehensive unifying discipline is not to be found, this attitude is not entirely unjustified, for Newman's point is partly Aristotelian. Aristotle had pointed out that, if one cannot show that unchangeable, and thus non-physical beings, exist, then what Aristotle called "first philosophy" would just be physics as he understood it, the science of... (shrink)

ABSTRACT:- Our universe is home to millions of galaxies, thousands of different species of flora and fauna, inhabited on different ecosystems, like under the ocean surface, in the air, on the surface of land, and inside the earth. Every single organism, whether biotic or abiotic, has a role to play in the universe. Above all these things, there is a crown of all the creation, and that we call as ‘man.’ Man has a significant place in the universe; therefore he (...) has a significant role to play here. What distinguishes a man from all the other creations is the possession of conscious, which according to the philosophers makes him the ‘desired creation.’ Every other thing, ranging from an atom to the mighty oceans and mountains are for the use of man, but the human is created for doing justice in the world with the creations of God. Keywords:- Existence, Human, Justice, Universe, Wonder. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A modal logic interpretation of Dempster-Shafer theory is developed in the framework of multivalued models of modal logic, i.e. models in which in any possible world an arbitrary number (possibly zero) of atomic propositions can be true. Several approaches to conditioning in multivalued models of modal logic are presented.

In Computer Science stepwise refinement of algebraic specifications is a well-known formal methodology for rigorous program development. This paper illustrates how techniques from Algebraic Logic, in particular that of interpretation, understood as a multifunction that preserves and reflects logical consequence, capture a number of relevant transformations in the context of software design, reuse, and adaptation, difficult to deal with in classical approaches. Examples include data encapsulation and the decomposition of operations into atomic transactions. But if interpretations open such a new (...) research avenue in program refinement, (conceptual) tools are needed to reason about them. In this line, the paper’s main contribution is a study of the correspondence between logical interpretations and morphisms of a particular kind of coalgebras. This opens way to the use of coalgebraic constructions, such as simulation and bisimulation, in the study of interpretations between (abstract) logics. (shrink)

We model the forgetting of propositional variables in a modal logical context where agents become ignorant and are aware of each others’ or their own resulting ignorance. The resulting logic is sound and complete. It can be compared to variable-forgetting as abstraction from information, wherein agents become unaware of certain variables: by employing elementary results for bisimulation, it follows that beliefs not involving the forgotten atom(s) remain true.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:336 BOOK REVIEWS The Nature of All Being: A Study of Wittgenstein's Modal Atomism. By RAYMOND BRADLEY. New York and Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 244. $39.95. Bradley offers as his point of departure this epigraph from Wittgenstein 's Notebooks 1914-1916, written 22 January, 1915: My whole task consists in giving the nature of the proposition. In giving the nature of all being. (And here (...) being does not stand for existence.) His aim in this contribution to the corpus of Wittgenstein scholarship is to " bring into sharp focus the crucial role which modal notions-the notions of necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility, and so onplay in Wittgenstein's early thinking" (xiii). At this task the book is a clear success. I know of no other work on the Tractatus which is so thoroughly dedicated to the role of modal notions, nor of any which does so much to bring the early Wittgenstein into conversation with contemporary philosophers who work on modal logic and who talk about possible worlds. Bradley convincingly argues that Wittgenstein is not only the largely unrecognized Urvater of modal logic in the twentieth century, with a stature that ought to be equivalent to that of Leibniz, he also presented arguments that even now have an important role to play in contemporary debates among possible world theorists and practitioners of modal logic. Philosophers who are interested in modal logic, especially its history, or in the logical structures of the Tractatus, will find very much of interest in this book. Those who, on the other hand, are chiefly interested in Wittgenstein's views on ethics, the aesthetic, God, or the mystical, or who are interested in the relation between the Tractatus and his later work, will find little here to their taste. The book's structure perspicuously tracks Bradley's argument. Chapter One sets the reader straight on what modal atomism is, giving the history of Wittgenstein's association with Russell, and establishing that the atomism of the Tractatus is in fact modal in nature. Chapter Two argues that Wittgenstein is a possibilist, that is, that he asserts the reality of merely possible entities and that his work is consistent with the modern modal logic called SS. Chapter Three turns to the ontological side, showing how Wittgenstein's commitments to atomic objects as the " substance of the world " entails certain modal relations among objects and the complex facts which they may form. In Chapter Four logic and ontology are brought together in an account of the mirroring relation through which language depicts the world, with attention to a set of intricately argued principles that makes this relation possible. The final chapter brings Wittgenstein's thought to bear on the BOOK REVIEWS 337 whole range of contemporary problems and issues in modal logic, demonstrating by example the author's contention that the Tractatus, rightly attended to, contains important contributions, still unappre· ciated, to the field. Bradley's overall intentions could not be more clear. His strategy for each chapter is clear. Each chapter is divided into between ten and twenty short sections each of which has a specific and well-defined topic. The argumentation within each such section, with a pardonable lapse or two, is well-structured and easy to follow, even for one whose expertise in modal logic is not honed by regular practice. And yet the hook has, on reading, the feel of a very dense landscape of trees, with· out much overview of the forest. This impression is given, I believe, by the style of argumentation. While the topics are sequentially related and build to a general picture, the arguments that must be articulated and answered in each section have little relation, one to the next: a problem in this view, a contradiction or a paradox in that, a resolution, and then on to the next section, where an apparent inconsistency of some sort must be addressed, and so on. There is the feeling of dealing serially with connected topics, but not the feeling of cumulative argumentation building toward a conclusion. A conclusion, however, there is: that Wittgenstein was the modal logician par excellence of the early 20th century, who has much... (shrink)

We show that Zilber’s conjecture that complex exponentiation is isomorphic to his pseudo-exponentiation follows from the a priori simpler conjecture that they are elementarily equivalent. An analysis of the first-order types in pseudo-exponentiation leads to a description of the elementary embeddings, and the result that pseudo-exponential fields are precisely the models of their common first-order theory which are atomic over exponential transcendence bases. We also show that the class of all pseudo-exponential fields is an example of a nonfinitary abstract elementary (...) class, answering a question of Kesälä and Baldwin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 219-227 [Access article in PDF] The Practical Kinds Model as a Pragmatist Theory of Classification Peter Zachar Pragmatist theories of scientific classification are intended to be pluralistic models that recognize different ways of cutting up the world as valuable, but do not require us to adopt whatever-goes relativism or metaphysical antirealism. How ironic that my application of pragmatism to psychopathology has been charged (...) with not being sufficiently pluralistic because it tries to fit all psychiatric disorders into the Procrustean bed of practical kinds. The Practical Kinds Model in General As a point of clarification, the practical kinds model is not a description of a type of category combined with an argument that all psychiatric disorders should be seen as belonging to that type. If it were that kind of model, I would fully agree with Haslam that practical kinds, fuzzy kinds, and discrete kinds are all potential types of psychiatric disorders. Like Nick Haslam, I believe that there are many different things in the DSM-IV and the ICD-10, and they cannot neatly be classified as the same type of thing.Rather than identifying a type of category, the practical kinds model is a general theory of scientific classification. It is a nonessentialistic theory. Essentialism is the view that things have real essences. In the Aristotelian version of essentialism, an essence is an internal structure, and it is the internal structure that makes anything be the kind of thing it really is. In this classical category model, category members either have the essence or they do not, and everything that has the appropriate essence is a member of that category. The world is supposed to therefore have a well-defined structure, and the job of the scientist is to discover that structure. Ian Hacking (1999) has termed this view of categorization inherent structurism.The practical kinds model does not deny that things have internal structures; it only denies that internal structure by itself determines category membership. Internal structure is an important consideration in identifying categories, but external criteria can always play a role. External or relational criteria play more important roles in some cases than they do in others, but they cannot be eliminated once and for all. Essentialistic theories, which favor an almost exclusive focus on inherent structures, have the advantage of being more parsimonious, but they do so by ignoring real complexity.The best way to illustrate this point is to examine a category whose identification is heavily weighted in terms of internal criteria, or an inherent structure, such as a chemical element. [End Page 219] For example, hydrogen is defined as the element that has an atomic number of 1. This means that it has one proton in its nucleus and normally one electron orbiting its nucleus. The atomic number reflects an internal property, and anything that has an atomic number of 1 is hydrogen. The same is true for the other elements. Anything that has an atomic number of 79 is gold; anything that has an atomic number of 19 is potassium, and so on. Also part of the essentialistic view is the notion that all the important properties of an element are systematically (or lawfully) related to its internal structure.It would be foolish to deny the practical utility of the atomic theory of chemistry. But even in this strongest of cases, external criteria can potentially play a role in how we decide to carve up the world and what we identify as the relevant categories. The point can be clearly illustrated with a Gedanken experiment based on the ideas of Donnellan (1983). Assume that we were to make contact with extraterrestrial life, and the result of that contact was our initiation into a larger galactic community like those portrayed on Star Trek or Babylon 5. Fortunately for us, it turns out that all planets in the community use a gold-based currency, just like we do on Earth. What we call gold, however, is too common to be the galactic basis of a currency, but a particular isotope... (shrink)

How should biological behaviour be modelled? A relatively new approach is to investigate problems in neuroethology by building physical robot models of biological sensorimotor systems. The explication and justification of this approach are here placed within a framework for describing and comparing models in the behavioural and biological sciences. First, simulation models – the representation of a hypothesis about a target system – are distinguished from several other relationships also termed “modelling” in discussions of scientific explanation. Seven dimensions on which (...) simulation models can differ are defined and distinctions between them discussed: 1. Relevance: whether the model tests and generates hypotheses applicable to biology. 2. Level: the elemental units of the model in the hierarchy from atoms to societies. 3. Generality: the range of biological systems the model can represent. 4. Abstraction: the complexity, relative to the target, or amount of detail included in the model. 5. Structural accuracy: how well the model represents the actual mechanisms underlying the behaviour. 6. Performance match: to what extent the model behaviour matches the target behaviour. 7. Medium: the physical basis by which the model is implemented. No specific position in the space of models thus defined is the only correct one, but a good modelling methodology should be explicit about its position and the justification for that position. It is argued that in building robot models biological relevance is more effective than loose biological inspiration; multiple levels can be integrated; that generality cannot be assumed but might emerge from studying specific instances; abstraction is better done by simplification than idealisation; accuracy can be approached through iterations of complete systems; that the model should be able to match and predict target behaviour; and that a physical medium can have significant advantages. These arguments reflect the view that biological behaviour needs to be studied and modelled in context, that is, in terms of the real problems faced by real animals in real environments. Key Words: animal behaviour; levels; models; neuroethology; realism; robotics; simulation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hyper-Abjects:Finitude, “Sustainability,” and the Maternal Body in the AnthropoceneBethany DoaneThe concept of the Anthropocene prioritizes a new paradigmatic scale that seems to outweigh that of “the political”: imagining deep time or the death of the human species as a result of climate change tends to negate the (relatively speaking) smaller-scale concerns of race, class, gender, or capitalism. While feminist critique is often circumscribed by this political scale, and thus (...) may seem to be dwarfed or rendered obsolete by the geological, deep-time scale of the Anthropocene, examining issues of feminist concern from this geological perspective has profound implications for thinking not only of gender politics but also of how to construct something like the political at all in this new era. Suggesting a new and normative global politics is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps we might begin to conceive of a political schema that would function more appropriately in light of this grander scale. At the very least we may begin to think the borders or limits of the species as it has existed in the modern era in a way that neither environmentalism nor posthumanism has yet been able to sufficiently tackle.The Anthropocene marks the epoch in which human activities have caused global environmental changes that will leave their mark in the geological strata of the earth itself.1 While the specific moments of its onset are contested, its beginnings are generally associated with the industrial age; Crutzen and Stoermer mark its onset at roughly 1800 with the beginnings [End Page 251] of the industrial revolution. (Timothy Morton pinpoints it more specifically with the invention of the steam engine in 1794.) The changes made in this era of geological, technological, and climate convergence have accelerated in the last seventy years or so in what scientists call the Great Acceleration, which began around 1940 and quickened anthropogenic impact with events like the testing/dropping of atomic bombs, the homogenization of biodiversity, mass extinctions as a result of human activity, and various types of drilling and mining.2 In the era broadly conceived as modernity, the steady march of “progress” that has so shaped the paradigm of the period has been made possible only through its own abjections: those phenomena that mark the era as limited, limiting, and unsustainable. In other words, the “birth of the modern world” was made possible only through devastating acts of violence: institutionalized inequalities like slavery, oppression, colonization, and war. These acts of violence translate as cannibalization at the global scale: the exploitation of most members of the species and the consumption of their resources for the benefit and luxury of the few. While these forms of violence have been criticized and confronted by political and theoretical movements since at least the middle of the twentieth century, thinking of them in terms of the Anthropocene and deep time allows us to consider their consequences in a new light. Our present awareness of the Anthropocene makes visible phenomena like climate, global warming, earth, and the “anthropos” that present us with the very real eventuality of species finitude. Species finitude calls into question not just the practices of modernity that have brought about the Anthropocene (the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few), but the entire paradigm of global thinking that is invested in progress, growth, and even in any environmentalism that calls for stewardship of the earth. The notion of care for an entity like “nature” or “the environment” only reinforces the separation between the human and its milieu, a separation that is impossible to maintain in light of the absolute inextricability that the Anthropocene brings to light.At the heart of this essay are two theoretical concepts: Julia Kristeva’s abjection, and Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, both of which stand for a sort of insufficiency or impossibility of discourse (politics, the Symbolic, etc.) in managing some Real object or phenomenon. Kristeva’s abject is generally thought of as functioning at two levels or scales: the personal, in which an individual must cast off the abject of the maternal body in order to become a proper subject; and the social or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.4 (2004) 71-80 [Access article in PDF] The Arts and the Creation of Mind: Eisner's Contributions to the Arts in Education Arthur Efland Professor Emeritus, Department of Art Education The Ohio State University In the last four years at least three books in arts education have dealt with the subject of cognition in relation to the arts. I refer to Charles Dorn's Mind in (...) Art, my book Art and Cognition, and Elliot Eisner's The Arts and the Creation of Mind, with the publication of the latter providing the occasion for this article.1 Each of these texts makes its case for the arts in education on somewhat similar grounds. All three share the view that the creation and understanding of works of art, though endowed with feeling and emotion, are nevertheless cognitive endeavors. But why have so many books appeared on the topic of cognition at this time? To answer this question it becomes necessary to describe the changes in our understanding of cognition and the problems these have created for the arts in education.Once cognition was the term used to designate propositional thinking with verbal and numerical symbols, whereas the current sense of the term embraces all forms of thought including mental images obtained through perception. In short it includes all forms of sentience by which the human organism comes to know itself and its environment. This change was to have a major impact upon curriculum reform initiatives in all studies but it was to have a revolutionary impact upon education in the arts for reasons explained later in this essay. However, an adequate story of cognition in the arts cannot be told without a discussion of Eisner's contributions to this discourse. The Waning of Behaviorism For the first half of the twentieth century the psychology that dominated educational practice was behaviorism. Its proponents included psychologists like Edward L. Thorndike, James B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner.2 Each strove to create a science of psychology that would match the rigor of physics or chemistry, where causes in relation to effects would be carefully observed and measured, making the explanation, prediction, and control of phenomena possible, especially those behaviors that fall under the control of the classroom teacher. The formation of connections called stimulus-response (S-R) bonds had become the molar unit to explain learning, much [End Page 71] like the way that differences in the structure of the atom was used to explain the behavior of the chemical elements of the Periodic Table. This bond between environmental stimuli and the organism's response was seen as the elementary unit of behavior while the IQ had become its measure. Invisible notions like mind and imagination were banished to metaphysical philosophy, outside the legitimate bounds of science.Though behaviorists never denied the existence of higher order thinking that is, abstract, sense-free thinking as found in pure mathematics, they were unable to explain how these human capacities emerge through the accumulation of such rudimentary stimulus-response events. Nevertheless, they recognized that humans do have a capacity for thinking that relies heavily upon symbols like words, numbers and the like. Moreover, certain subjects that require reason and logic, like math and theoretical physics, would be inconceivable without such symbols and the rules by which these are manipulated. By contrast it was assumed that the arts, which relied on sensory images, either did not employ this type of propositional thought, or did so to a far lesser degree. Thus the arts could be dispatched to the noncognitive or affective domains with little or no reduction in the learner's cognitive capacities. Indeed, these noncognitive realms, which gave play to feelings and emotions, were often seen as inimical to the acquisition of rational powers of thought. Intellectual power as it was then understood, required that feelings and emotions be brought under the control of reason.As long as behaviorism served as the dominant paradigm, the school curriculum could be divided into two or three broad divisions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cancel Culture and the Trope of the ScapegoatA Girardian Defense of the Importance of Contemplative ReadingJoakim Wrethed (bio)What unfolds in this article encompasses violence, language/reading, and ethics. René Girard addresses these topics primarily in terms of mimesis, its potential violence, and the trope of the scapegoat. Still, toward the end of his career and life, he relentlessly pointed out the dangers implicated in the dynamism of these forces. He (...) addressed it clearly in his "apocalyptic book" Battling to the End (2010):I have been accused of repeating myself too often, of turning my theory into a fetish, of using it to explain everything. Yet it has described mechanisms that recent discoveries in neuroscience confirm: imitation is the initial and essential means of learning; it is not something acquired later on. We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it. Only by understanding the dangers of imitation can we conceive of authentic identification with the Other. However, we are becoming aware of the primacy of moral relationship at the very time when the atomization of humanity is being realized, and when violence has increased in intensity and unpredictability.1[End Page 15] It is this thin line between necessary/harmless imitation and its dangerous versions that will be the central theme in the analysis. As Girard states, a vast amount of established research confirms that the mimetic impulse is innate.2 We should pay specific attention to "the atomization of humanity," since it zooms in on our contemporary epoch's paradoxical "mass-individualism," evidently tremendously enhanced by information and communication technology (ICT). In order to contribute to Girard's lifework and to extend it beyond his own writing, we outline a few contemporary phenomena that clearly exhibit the primordial dangers of human violence that Girard draws attention to. These phenomena are initially only roughly sketched, but subsequent sections give them sharper relief. The central phenomena are cancel culture, speed, and the reading of literature. Just to be clear, the intended mode of reading should be construed in a broad sense, thus potentially including philosophy and theology, if one is inclined to emphasize the differences between these disciplines and the reading of literature.3Cancel culture in certain ways makes manifest a social welfare society version of escalating violence, indicating that "violence has increased in intensity and unpredictability."4 A succinct definition of cancel culture will initially suffice:Cancel culture refers to ending (or attempting to end) an individual's career or prominence to hold them accountable for immoral behavior. Driven primarily by young progressives, often through social media, cancel culture has attracted controversy since it swept into the national conversation.5This definition can easily be extended into larger historical patterns in which, for instance, colonial crimes are highlighted and demands are raised for contemporary acts of atonement. As Rob Henderson points out, the obvious flip side is that "the swift and decisive nature of cancel culture can stifle debate, and some believe that dialogue is a more productive way to foster change."6 The "swiftness" and the immediate collectable consequences are decisive in their functions as social punishment and exclusion; in other words, digitalized speed accomplishes verdict and punishment in a very short time span, which is a reflection of desire pure and simple. The rapidity from intention to anticipated effect rather resembles an instinctive and violent action more than the forwarding of a carefully thought through argument or statement. The present becomes an invincible ivory tower bristling with power to finally mete out the justice that the erroneous ethics of earlier times were incapable of conceiving and achieving. An always already accelerating modernity speeded up immensely through [End Page 16] the fast growth of information and communication technology (ICT). To be sure, the whole evolution of computer technology is defined primarily in terms of processing speed, together with the quantity of information that can be contained in as small a spatial entity as possible. The present-day reality of having almost everything only one or a few clicks away on a screen—as a modern day realization of the library in Alexandria—enhances the relevance of a phenomenon historians have referred to... (shrink)

Consequentialist cosmopolitanism, Peter Higgins argues, enables closed border liberals to evade charges of moral hypocrisy despite their commitment to moral equality of individuals, once we recognize that open border arguments rely on cosmopolitanism’s individualism requirement, which ignores social realities relevant to a realistic assessment of the social consequences of an open immigration policy. Higgins is mistaken, however, in contending that cosmopolitan individualism entails attention to people only in their capacity as the abstract atomic individuals populating Charles Mills’ idealized social ontologies. (...) Conversely, if cosmopolitan individualism does compel us to think of people as abstract atomic individuals, we are not obliged to think of them as relatively privileged. Under liberal cosmopolitanism, however, which prohibits state discrimination between citizens and non-citizens, open border policies are subject to no such consequentialist objections. (shrink)