Overweight individuals often struggle to lose weight. While previous studies established goal setting as an effective strategy for weight loss, little is known about the effects of numeric goal precision. The present research investigated whether and how the precision of weight loss goals—the number of trailing zeros—impacts a goal’s effectiveness. In two preregistered, longitudinal experiments, we contrasted competing predictions as to whether precise or round goals are more effective compared to a waiting control condition. In Experiment 1, participants (...) in the two goal conditions lost more weight compared to the control condition—an effect that was mainly driven by precise goals. In Experiment 2, we sought to replicate this effect but found no significant weight loss differences. An individual participant data meta-analysis across both experiments revealed that the goal groups jointly lost more weight than the waiting control group and the precise and round goal groups did not differ in weight loss success. An IPD-based multiple mediation analysis showed that healthier eating, but not physical exercise accounted for goal-setting-induced weight loss. We discuss possible explanations for the null findings in Experiment 2 and highlight directions for future research. (shrink)

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

The early history of thermometry is most commonly described as the result of a continuous development rather than the product of a single brilliant mind, and yet scholars have often credited the Italian physician Santorio Santori with the invention of the first thermometers. The purpose of using such instruments within the traditional context of Galenic medicine, however, has not been investigated and scholars have consistently assumed that, being subject to the influence of atmospheric pressure and en­vironmental heat, Santorio’s instruments provided (...) unreliable measurements. The discovery that, as early as 1612, Santorio describes all vacuum-related phenomena as effects of the atmospheric pressure of the air, provides ample room for reconsidering his role in the development of precision instruments and the early history of thermometry in particular. By drawing on a variety of written and visual sources, some unpublished, in the first part of this article I argue that Santorio’s appreciation of phenomena related to the weight of the air allowed him to construct the first thermometers working as sealed devices. Finally, in the second part, I consider Santorio’s use of the thermometer as related to the seventeenth-century medical practice and his way to measure the temperature as based on a wide sample of individuals. (shrink)

The predictive coding (PC) theory of attention identifies attention with the optimization of the precision weighting of prediction error. Here we provide some challenges for this identification. On the one hand, the precision weighting of prediction error is too broad a phenomenon to be identified with attention because such weighting plays a central role in multimodal integration. Cases of crossmodal illusions such as the rubber hand illusion and the McGurk effect involve the differential precision (...) weighting of prediction error, yet attention does not shift as one would predict. On the other hand, the precision weighting of prediction error is too narrow a phenomenon to be identified with attention, because it cannot accommodate the full range of attentional phenomena. We review criticisms that PC cannot account for volitional attention and affect-biased attention, and we propose that it may not be able to account for feature-based and intellectual attention. (shrink)

In causal inference, a variety of causal effect estimands have been studied, including the sample, uncensored, target, conditional, optimal subpopulation, and optimal weighted average treatment effects. Ad hoc methods have been developed for each estimand based on inverse probability weighting and on outcome regression modeling, but these may be sensitive to model misspecification, practical violations of positivity, or both. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, we formulate the generalized average treatment effect to unify these causal estimands as (...) well as their IPW estimates. Second, we develop a method based on Kernel optimal matching to optimally estimate GATE and to find the GATE most easily estimable by KOM, which we term the Kernel optimal weighted average treatment effect. KOM provides uniform control on the conditional mean squared error of a weighted estimator over a class of models while simultaneously controlling for precision. We study its theoretical properties and evaluate its comparative performance in a simulation study. We illustrate the use of KOM for GATE estimation in two case studies: comparing spine surgical interventions and studying the effect of peer support on people living with HIV. (shrink)

This paper presents a new method to recognize human activities based on weighted classification for the features extracted by human body. Towards this end, new features depend on weight taken from image or video used in proposed descriptor. Human pose plays an important role in extracted features; then these features are used as the weight input with classifier. We use machine learning during two steps of training and testing images of standard dataset that can be used during benchmarking the system. (...) Unlike previous methods that need size or length of shapes mainly to represent the cues when machine learning is used to recognize human activities, accurate experimental results coming from appropriate segments of the human body proved the worthiness of proposed method. Twelve activities are used in challenging of availability comparison with dataset to demonstrate our method. The results show that we achieved 87.3% in training set, while in testing set, we achieved 94% in terms of precision. (shrink)

Weight of evidence continues to be a powerful metaphor within formal approaches to epistemology. But attempts to construe the metaphor in precise and useful ways have encountered formidable obstacles. This paper shows that two quite different understandings of evidential weight can be traced back to one 1878 article by C.S. Peirce. One conception, often associated with I.J. Good, measures the balance or net weight of evidence, while the other, generally associated with J.M. Keynes, measures the gross weight of evidence. Conflations (...) of these two notions have contributed to misunderstandings in the literature on weight. This paper shows why Peirce developed each conception of weight, why he distinguished them, and why they are easily mistaken for one another. (shrink)

The philosophical literature that tackles foundational questions about normativity often appeals to normative reasons—or considerations that count in favor of or against actions—and their interaction. The interaction between normative reasons is usually made sense of by appealing to the metaphor of (normative) weight scales. This paper substitutes an argumentation-theoretic model for this metaphor. The upshot is a general and precise model that is faithful to the philosophical ideas.

ABSTRACT The question that this paper seeks to answer is that of whether the resistance to change that characterizes the conservative temperament has any rational basis. More precisely, my question is whether we have good grounds for accepting any version of the principle that if something exists then we need a reason to change it but don’t need a reason to keep it. The paper defends a version of this principle whose scope is restricted to familiar traditions and customs on (...) the one hand, and aging artifactual objects (houses, cars, toasters, and the like) on the other. The argument for that principle is that our current traditions and artifacts stand in various relations to the purposive activities of past agents—a different relation in each case—that give rise to presumptive but easily overridden reasons for their preservation. (shrink)

It's common knowledge that published medical findings tell only part of the story, the other part consisting of unpublished records of negative trials, sometimes of the same agents. No one, of course, knows precisely how much lies below the waterline, but informed estimates suggest that as many as half of all trials undertaken remain unreported —a percentage sufficient to cast a shadow over the entire corpus of published medical research. The effect is incalculable. That negative findings of trials of cancer (...) chemotherapies would be withheld from publication seems inconceivable, but a paper documented that practice, and its slanting effect on the published literature, some 30 years ago.... (shrink)

We present an algorithm for concept combination inspired and informed by the research in cognitive and experimental psychology. Dealing with concept combination requires, from a symbolic AI perspective, to cope with competitive needs: the need for compositionality and the need to account for typicality effects. Building on our previous work on weighted logic, the proposed algorithm can be seen as a step towards the management of both these needs. More precisely, following a proposal of Hampton [1], it combines two weighted (...) Description Logic formulas, each defining a concept, using the following general strategy. First it selects all the features needed for the combination, based on the logical distinc- tion between necessary and impossible features. Second, it determines the threshold and assigns new weights to the features of the combined concept trying to preserve the relevance and the necessity of the features. We illustrate how the algorithm works exploiting some paradigmatic examples discussed in the cognitive literature. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that when epistemic peers disagree, each has an obligation to accord the other's assessment the same weight as her own. I first make the antecedent of this Equal-Weight View more precise, and then I motivate the View by describing cases in which it gives the intuitively correct verdict. Next I introduce some apparent counterexamples – cases of apparent peer disagreement in which, intuitively, one should not give equal weight to the other party's assessment. To defuse these apparent (...) counterexamples, an advocate of the View might try to explain how they are not genuine cases of peer disagreement. I examine David Christensen's and Adam Elga's explanations and find them wanting. I then offer a novel explanation, which turns on a distinction between knowledge from reports and knowledge from direct acquaintance. Finally, I extend my explanation to provide a handy and satisfying response to the charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

To what extent is any individual morally obligated to live environmentally sustainably? In answering this, I reject views I see as constituting two extremes. On one, it depends entirely on whether there exists a collective agreement; and if no such agreement exists, no one is obligated to reduce her/his consumption or pollution unilaterally. On the other, the lack of a collective agreement is morally irrelevant, and regardless of what others are doing, each person is obligated to limit her/his pollution and (...) consumption to a level that would be sustainable if everyone were to act in this way. I argue that the truth is somewhere between these, but that a very precise specification of the extent of one's responsibility is impossible. Roughly, what can be said is that each individual ought constantly to strive to do more than she/he does currently and to push her/himself into new, uncomfortable territory, though no one is obligated to martyr her/himself for an environmental cause. (shrink)

A link prediction model for weighted networks based on Dempster–Shafer evidence theory and the influence of common neighbours is proposed in this paper. First, three types of future common neighbours and their topological structures are proposed. Second, the concepts of endpoint weight influence, link weight influence, and high-strength node influence are introduced. Then, the similarity based on the impacts of current common neighbours and FCNs is defined, respectively. Finally, the two similarity indices are fused by the DS evidence theory. This (...) model effectively integrates multisource information and completely exploits the influence of all CCNs and FCNs on similarity. Experiments are performed on 9 real and 40 simulation-weighted datasets, and these findings are compared with several classic algorithms. Results show that the proposed method has higher precision than other methods, which can achieve good performance in link prediction in weighted networks. (shrink)

We explore the extent to which ancient Greek authors formulated concepts that approximate or encompass our modern notions of precision and accuracy. First, we focus on estimates and measurements of geographic features, astronomical times and positions, and weight. These raise further questions about whether the quantities reported were measured, estimated, or rounded. While ancient sources discuss the use of instruments, it is not always clear that the aim was to achieve what we would today regard as ‘precision’. Next, (...) we briefly consider round numbers, observing that they could carry symbolic meaning, while unrounded numbers could give an impression of hard-won achievement. Finally, we examine uses of the word akribeia. This is often translated as ‘precision’ or ‘exactness’, and Greek writers sometimes used akribeia to denote an ideal for their inquiries. A brief look at its uses by a number of Greek writers will on the one hand show the mismatch with our term ‘precision’, and on the other hand throw some light on the aims of Greek investigators. (shrink)

(Version 2.4) I have argued elsewhere for ascribing an error theory about all normative and evaluative judgements to Nietzsche. Such a nihilism brings with it a puzzle: how could we—or at least the select few of us being addressed by Nietzsche—continue in the face of this nihilism? This is a philosophical puzzle and so, defeasibly, an interpretive puzzle. If there is no theory it would make sense for Nietzsche to have about how the select few could go on, then this (...) is some evidence against the proposed interpretation of him as a nihilist. I defended the interpretation by arguing that Nietzsche’s declarations about creating values point to a practice of generating honest evaluative illusions. Such honest evaluative illusions are tricky things, though, and, precisely because they are honest, one might worry that they lack the motivational power of genuine evaluative belief. Can they truly play the role that evaluative beliefs play in our psychological economies? I suspect that Nietzsche does not want the honest illusions to play exactly the role that evaluative beliefs played. The cheerfulness, the playfulness, the lightness that Nietzsche hopes for are, I have suggested, a function of the shift from belief to pretence, from illusion to honest illusion. The question, nonetheless, is whether the resulting picture is too light. Can I go through life merely acting, as a critic might put it? My suggestion in this essay will be that the thought of eternal recurrence is meant to add weight to the lightness of acting—“acting”, obviously, in both the here relevant senses of the word. (shrink)

Metaheuristic algorithms are often applied to global function optimization problems. To overcome the poor real-time performance and low precision of the basic salp swarm algorithm, this paper introduces a novel hybrid algorithm inspired by the perturbation weight mechanism. The proposed perturbation weight salp swarm algorithm has the advantages of a broad search scope and a strong balance between exploration and exploitation and retains a relatively low computational complexity when dealing with numerous large-scale problems. A new coefficient factor is introduced (...) to the basic salp swarm algorithm, and new update strategies for the leader position and the followers are introduced in the search phase. The new leader position updating strategy has a specific bounded scope and strong search performance, thus accelerating the iteration process. The new follower updating strategy maintains the diversity of feasible solutions while reducing the computational load. This paper describes the application of the proposed algorithm to low-dimension and variable-dimension functions. This paper also presents iteration curves, box-plot charts, and search-path graphics to verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the perturbation weight salp swarm algorithm offers a better search speed and search balance than the basic salp swarm algorithm in different environments. (shrink)

Day-to-day lives are affected globally by the epidemic coronavirus 2019. With an increasing number of positive cases, India has now become a highly affected country. Chronic diseases affect individuals with no time identification and impose a huge disease burden on society. In this article, an Efficient Recurrent Neural Network with Ensemble Classifier is built using VGG-16 and Alexnet with weighted model to predict disease and its level. The dataset is partitioned randomly into small subsets by utilizing mean-based splitting method. Various (...) models of classifier create a homogeneous ensemble by utilizing an accuracy-based weighted aging classifier ensemble, which is a weighted model’s modification. Two state of art methods such as Graph Sequence Recurrent Neural Network and Hybrid Rough-Block-Based Neural Network are used for comparison with respect to some parameters such as accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and relative absolute error. As a result, it is found that the proposed ERNN-EC method accomplishes accuracy of 95.2%, precision of 91%, recall of 85%, F1-score of 83.4%, and RAE of 41.6%. (shrink)

When I was preparing a paper about the problem Greek studies have with globalization of culture on the threshold of the twenty-first century, I was asked who the Greek man was, considered as a separate entity, and how future decades would see him. The question had all the appearance of a trap. The very idea of ‘the Greek man’ is disturbing, even though it is so commonplace that it is hard to trace it back to its origins. Of course it (...) contains a well-established but ill-defined consensus around the Greeks as the first free, rational human beings to found a free polity, who furthermore presided over the creation of a literature without equal in Antiquity and an exceptional and innovative body of art. A more precise answer could also echo the prestigious and much discussed title of Werner Jaeger's indispensable and troubling volume: Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (1934), and even become, rather insidiously because of its date and the last few words of the sub-title, a parasitic echo of the period when a mythical discourse evoked Aryans and non-Aryans. But we must take care not to place the thesis of Werner Jaeger, to whom I will return, in that company, since the title is less a reflection of a suspect mode of thought than a simple coincidence of choice of language. And the reason it turns up here is that Jaeger and Dodds, whom we shall meet later, are the two opposite poles of this paper, standing in Greek studies on either side of the bloodstained struggle that transformed Europe and the West's relationship with the rest of the world for ever. (shrink)

A dynamic learning method is developed for an uncertain n-link robot with unknown system dynamics, achieving predefined performance attributes on the link angular position and velocity tracking errors. For a known nonsingular initial robotic condition, performance functions and unconstrained transformation errors are employed to prevent the violation of the full-state tracking error constraints. By combining two independent Lyapunov functions and radial basis function neural network approximator, a novel and simple adaptive neural control scheme is proposed for the dynamics of the (...) unconstrained transformation errors, which guarantees uniformly ultimate boundedness of all the signals in the closed-loop system. In the steady-state control process, RBF NNs are verified to satisfy the partial persistent excitation condition. Subsequently, an appropriate state transformation is adopted to achieve the accurate convergence of neural weight estimates. The corresponding experienced knowledge on unknown robotic dynamics is stored in NNs with constant neural weight values. Using the stored knowledge, a static neural learning controller is developed to improve the full-state tracking performance. A comparative simulation study on a 2-link robot illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. (shrink)

According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit :127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world ever be motivated to seek out novelty? Novelty for such an agent would arrive in the form of sensory and physiological (...) states that are unexpected. Such an agent ought therefore to avoid novel and surprising interactions with the world one might think. Yet humans and many other animals find play and other forms of novelty-seeking and exploration hugely rewarding. How can this be understood in frameworks for studying the mind that emphasise prediction error minimisation? This problem has been taken up in recent research concerned with epistemic action—actions an agent engages in to reduce uncertainty. However that work leaves two questions unanswered, which it is the aim of our paper to address. First, no account has been given yet of why it should feel good to the agent to engage the world playfully and with curiosity. Second an appeal is made to precision-estimation to explain epistemic action, yet it remains unclear how precision-weighting works in action more generally, or active inference. We argue that an answer to both questions may lie in the bodily states of an agent that track the rate at which free energy is being reduced. The recent literature on the predictive brain has connected the valence of emotional experiences to the rate of change in the reduction of prediction error :e1003094, 2013. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094; Van de Cruys, in Metzinger and Wiese Philosophy and predictive processing, vol 24, MIND Group, Frankfurt am Main, 2017. doi: 10.15502/9783958573253). In this literature valenced emotional experiences are hypothesised to be identical with changes in the rate at which prediction error is reduced. Experiences are negatively valenced when overall prediction error increases and are positively valenced when the sum of prediction errors decrease. We offer an ecological-enactive interpretation of the concept of valence and its connection to rate of change of prediction error. We show how rate of change should be understood in terms of embodied states of affordance-related action readiness. We then go on to apply this ecological-enactive account of error dynamics to provide an answer to the first question we have raised: It may explain why it should feel good to an agent to be curious and playful. Our ecological-enactive account also allows us to show how error dynamics may provide an answer to the second question we have raised regarding how precision-weighting works in active inference. An agent that is sensitive to rates of error reduction can tune precision on the fly. We show how this ability to tune precision on the go can allow agents to develop skills for adapting better and better to the unexpected, and search out opportunities for resolving uncertainty and progressing in its learning. (shrink)

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, (...) effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise. This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution. (shrink)

Whilst the topic of representations is one of the key topics in philosophy of mind, it has only occasionally been noted that representations and representational features may be gradual. Apart from vague allusions, little has been said on what representational gradation amounts to and why it could be explanatorily useful. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel take on gradation of representational features within the neuroscientific framework of predictive processing. More specifically, we provide a gradual account of (...) two features of structural representations: structural similarity and decoupling. We argue that structural similarity can be analysed in terms of two dimensions: number of preserved relations and state space granularity. Both dimensions can take on different values and hence render structural similarity gradual. We further argue that decoupling is gradual in two ways. First, we show that different brain areas are involved in decoupled cognitive processes to a greater or lesser degree depending on the cause (internal or external) of their activity. Second, and more importantly, we show that the degree of decoupling can be further regulated in some brain areas through precision weighting of prediction error. We lastly argue that gradation of decoupling (via precision weighting) and gradation of structural similarity (via state space granularity) are conducive to behavioural success. (shrink)

Over the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the “atypical” brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the “typical” brain does not generate, either due to a systematic top-down processing bias or more general precision weighting breakdown. Strong at explaining common individual symptoms of psychosis, (...) such approaches face some issues when we look at a more general clinical picture. In this paper, we propose an update on the current accounts of psychosis based on the realization that a neurotypical brain constantly generates non-actual, de-coupled, counterfactual hypotheses as part of healthy cognition. We suggest that what is going on in psychosis, at least in some cases, is not so much a generation of erroneous hypotheses, but rather an inability to correctly use the counterfactual ones. This updated view casts “accurate” cognition as more fragile and delicate, but also closes the gap between psychosis and typical cognition. (shrink)

Concept contextualism is the view that the information associated with a concept is dependent on the context in which it is tokened. This view is gaining support in recent years. The received and c...

While Conviction Narrative Theory correctly criticizes utility-based accounts of decision-making, it unfairly reduces probabilistic models to point estimates and treats affect and narrative as mechanistically opaque yet explanatorily sufficient modules. Hierarchically nested Bayesian accounts offer a mechanistically explicit and parsimonious alternative incorporating affect into a single biologically plausible precision-weighted mechanism that tunes decision-making toward narrative versus sensory dependence under varying uncertainty levels.

Recurrent, unvarying, and seemingly purposeless patterns of action and cognition are part of normal development, but also feature prominently in several neuropsychiatric conditions. Repetitive stereotyped behaviors can be viewed as exaggerated forms of learned habits and frequently correlate with alterations in motor, limbic, and associative basal ganglia circuits. However, it is still unclear how altered basal ganglia feedback signals actually relate to the phenomenological variability of RSBs. Why do behaviorally overlapping phenomena sometimes require different treatment approaches−for example, sensory shielding strategies (...) versus exposure therapy for autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively? Certain clues may be found in recent models of basal ganglia function that extend well beyond action selection and motivational control, and have implications for sensorimotor integration, prediction, learning under uncertainty, as well as aesthetic learning. In this paper, we systematically compare three exemplary conditions with basal ganglia involvement, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and autism spectrum conditions, to gain a new understanding of RSBs. We integrate clinical observations and neuroanatomical and neurophysiological alterations with accounts employing the predictive processing framework. Based on this review, we suggest that basal ganglia feedback plays a central role in preconditioning cortical networks to anticipate self-generated, movement-related perception. In this way, basal ganglia feedback appears ideally situated to adjust the salience of sensory signals through precision weighting of new sensory information, relative to the precision of predictions based on prior generated models. Accordingly, behavioral policies may preferentially rely on new data versus existing knowledge, in a spectrum spanning between novelty and stability. RSBs may then represent compensatory or reactive responses, respectively, at the opposite ends of this spectrum. This view places an important role of aesthetic learning on basal ganglia feedback, may account for observed changes in creativity and aesthetic experience in basal ganglia disorders, is empirically testable, and may inform creative art therapies in conditions characterized by stereotyped behaviors. (shrink)

While many philosophers have agreed that evidence of disagreement is a kind of higher-order evidence, this has not yet resulted in formally precise higher-order approaches to the problem of disagreement. In this paper, we outline a simple formal framework for determining the epistemic significance of a body of higher-order evidence, and use this framework to motivate a novel interpretation of the popular “equal weight view” of peer disagreement—we call it the Variably Equal Weight View (VEW). We show that VEW differs (...) from the standard Split the Difference (SD) interpretation of the equal weight view in almost all cases of peer disagreement, and use our formal framework to explain why SD has seemed attractive but is in fact misguided. A desirable feature of VEW, we argue, is that it gives rise to plausible instances of synergy—an effect whereby the parties to a disagreement should become more (or less) confident in the disputed proposition than any of them were prior to disagreement. Lastly, we show how VEW may be generalized to cases of non-peer disagreement. (shrink)

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly (...) why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella". Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die : when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. (shrink)

Two theses figure centrally in work on the epistemology of disagreement: Equal Weight (‘EW’) and Uniqueness (‘U’). According to EW, you should give precisely as much weight to the attitude of a disagreeing epistemic peer as you give to your own attitude. U has it that, for any given proposition and total body of evidence, some doxastic attitude is the one the evidence makes rational (justifies) toward that proposition. Although EW has received considerable discussion, the case for U has not (...) been critically evaluated. Endorsing U, we argue, commits one to the highly controversial thesis that whatever fixes your rational attitudes can do so only by fixing what evidence you have. This commitment imposes a relatively demanding requirement on justified belief in U, one that we argue is not satisfied by what is currently the strongest available case for U, due to Roger White [2005]. Our challenge to U makes more trouble for its proponents than do the worries about U expressed by Gideon Rosen [2001] and Thomas Kelly [2010]. Moreover, if Kelly [2010] is correct in thinking that EW “carries with it a commitment to” U—a claim which we accept for reasons similar to Kelly’s but is beyond this paper’s scope (but see Ballantyne and Coffman [forthcoming])—then our challenge to U bears importantly on EW: to the extent that our challenge to U succeeds, EW also suffers. (shrink)

Minds are said to be systematic: the capacity to entertain certain thoughts confers to other related thoughts. Although an important property of human cognition, its implication for cognitive architecture has been less than clear. In part, the uncertainty is due to lack of precise accounts on the degree to which cognition is systematic. However, a recent study on learning transfer provides one clear example. This study is used here to compare transfer in humans and feedforward networks. Simulations and analysis show, (...) that while feedforward networks with shared weights are capable of exhibiting transfer, they cannot support the same degree of transfer as humans. One interpretation of these results is that common connectionist models lack explicit internal representations permitting rapid learning. (shrink)

This paper aims to precisely characterize the theoretical significance of the notion of truthmakers. First, the closeness of the alleged principle of truthmaker theory and the realistic intuition on which it rests is assessed, thereby determining to what extent a certain kind of general objection against truthmaker theory carries weight. Second, the principle of truthmaker theory is reformulated on the basis of this assessment, and truthmaker theory is argued to offer a methodological role for identifying fundamental entities that ground metaphysically (...) nonfundamental truths. The discussion suggests a sophisticated nonQuinean criterion of ontological commitment. (shrink)

When physicist Alan Sokal recently submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text, the periodical's editors were happy to publish it--for here was a respected scientist offering support for the journal's view that science is a subjective, socially constructed discipline. But as Sokal himself soon revealed in Lingua Franca magazine, the essay was a spectacular hoax--filled with scientific gibberish anyone with a basic knowledge of physics should have caught--and the academic world suddenly awoke to the vast gap that has (...) opened between the scientific community and their mould-be critics. But the truth is that not only postmodern critics but Americans in general have a weak grasp on scientific principles and facts. In Connected Knowledge, physicist Alan Cromer offers a way to bridge the chasm, with a lively, lucid account of scientific thinking and a provocative new agenda for American education. Science, Cromer argues, is anything but common sense: It requires a particular habit of mind that does not come naturally. For example, something as simple as buoyancy can only be explained through Archimedes' principle--that a body in a fluid is subject to an upward force equal to the weight of fluid it displaces--yet few scientists could arrive at this ancient concept by trial and error. School children, however, are often given a ball and a tank of water, and asked to explain buoyancy any way they can. Today's de emphasis on teaching pupils necessary facts and principles, he argues, "far from empowering them, makes them slaves of their own subjective opinions." This movement in education, known as Constructivism, has close ties to postmodern critics (such as the editors of Social Text) who question the objectivity of science, and with it the existence of an objective reality. Cromer offers a ringing defense of the knowability of the world, both as an objective reality and as a finite landscape of discovery. The advance of scientific knowledge, he argues, is not unlike the mapping of the continents; at this point, we have found them all. He shows how the advent of quantum mechanics, rather than making knowledge less certain, actually offers a more precise understanding of the behavior of atoms and electrons. Turning from philosophy to education, he argues that instead of allowing students to flounder, however creatively, schools should follow a progressive curriculum that returns theoretical knowledge to the classroom. Connected Knowledge, however, goes much farther. As a discipline that insists upon connecting theory with measurable reality, physical science offers a new direction for reforming the social sciences. Cromer also shows how some of the hottest issues in public policy--including the debates over special education and group variations in I.Q., can be resolved through clear, hard headed thinking. For example, he argues for use of the G.E.D. as a national educational standard, with a new "politics of intelligence" to guide the distribution of school resources. Always forthright and articulate, Alan Cromer offers a startling new vision for integrating science, philosophy, and education. (shrink)

Colors, shapes, size, weight, etc., are not floating qualities. They adhere in beings which are usually more persistent and effective than those features could be. Only unattached items are what they are and nothing more, but it is precisely such items which have, but are not qualities.

Implicit biases involve associations outside conscious awareness that lead to a negative evaluation of a person on the basis of irrelevant characteristics such as race or gender. This review examines the evidence that healthcare professionals display implicit biases towards patients. PubMed, PsychINFO, PsychARTICLE and CINAHL were searched for peer-reviewed articles published between 1st March 2003 and 31st March 2013. Two reviewers assessed the eligibility of the identified papers based on precise content and quality criteria. The references of eligible papers were (...) examined to identify further eligible studies. Forty two articles were identified as eligible. Seventeen used an implicit measure, to test the biases of healthcare professionals. Twenty five articles employed a between-subjects design, using vignettes to examine the influence of patient characteristics on healthcare professionals’ attitudes, diagnoses, and treatment decisions. The second method was included although it does not isolate implicit attitudes because it is recognised by psychologists who specialise in implicit cognition as a way of detecting the possible presence of implicit bias. Twenty seven studies examined racial/ethnic biases; ten other biases were investigated, including gender, age and weight. Thirty five articles found evidence of implicit bias in healthcare professionals; all the studies that investigated correlations found a significant positive relationship between level of implicit bias and lower quality of care. The evidence indicates that healthcare professionals exhibit the same levels of implicit bias as the wider population. The interactions between multiple patient characteristics and between healthcare professional and patient characteristics reveal the complexity of the phenomenon of implicit bias and its influence on clinician-patient interaction. The most convincing studies from our review are those that combine the IAT and a method measuring the quality of treatment in the actual world. Correlational evidence indicates that biases are likely to influence diagnosis and treatment decisions and levels of care in some circumstances and need to be further investigated. Our review also indicates that there may sometimes be a gap between the norm of impartiality and the extent to which it is embraced by healthcare professionals for some of the tested characteristics. Our findings highlight the need for the healthcare profession to address the role of implicit biases in disparities in healthcare. More research in actual care settings and a greater homogeneity in methods employed to test implicit biases in healthcare is needed. (shrink)

Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decision-making. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomes—or at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as (...) wide as possible and weight citizens’ votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how voters’ competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters. (shrink)

A new approach to Hume's problem of induction that justifies the optimality of induction at the level of meta-induction. Hume's problem of justifying induction has been among epistemology's greatest challenges for centuries. In this book, Gerhard Schurz proposes a new approach to Hume's problem. Acknowledging the force of Hume's arguments against the possibility of a noncircular justification of the reliability of induction, Schurz demonstrates instead the possibility of a noncircular justification of the optimality of induction, or, more precisely, of meta-induction (...) (the application of induction to competing prediction models). Drawing on discoveries in computational learning theory, Schurz demonstrates that a regret-based learning strategy, attractivity-weighted meta-induction, is predictively optimal in all possible worlds among all prediction methods accessible to the epistemic agent. Moreover, the a priori justification of meta-induction generates a noncircular a posteriori justification of object induction. Taken together, these two results provide a noncircular solution to Hume's problem. Schurz discusses the philosophical debate on the problem of induction, addressing all major attempts at a solution to Hume's problem and describing their shortcomings; presents a series of theorems, accompanied by a description of computer simulations illustrating the content of these theorems (with proofs presented in a mathematical appendix); and defends, refines, and applies core insights regarding the optimality of meta-induction, explaining applications in neighboring disciplines including forecasting sciences, cognitive science, social epistemology, and generalized evolution theory. Finally, Schurz generalizes the method of optimality-based justification to a new strategy of justification in epistemology, arguing that optimality justifications can avoid the problems of justificatory circularity and regress. (shrink)

In Veritas, Gerald Vision defends the correspondence theory of truth -- the theory that truth has a direct relationship to reality -- against recent attacks, and critically examines its most influential alternatives. The correspondence theory, if successful, explains one way in which we are cognitively connected to the world; thus, it is claimed, truth -- while relevant to semantics, epistemology, and other studies -- also has significant metaphysical consequences. Although the correspondence theory is widely held today, Vision points to an (...) emerging orthodoxy in philosophy that claims that truth as such carries no significant weight in philosophical explanations. He devotes much of the book to a criticism of that outlook and to a less vulnerable formulation of the correspondence theory.Vision defends the correspondence theory by both presenting evidence for correspondence and examining the claims made by such alternative theories as deflationism, minimalism, and pluralism. The techniques of the argument are thoroughly analytic, but the problem confronted is broadly humanistic. The question examined -- how we, as thinking beings, are connected to and manage to cope in a world that was not designed for our comfort or convenience -- is more likely to be raised by continentalists, but is approached here with the tools of clarity and precision more highly prized in analytic philosophy. The book seeks to avoid both the obscurantism that infects much continental thought and the overly technical concerns and methodology that limit the interest of much work in analytic philosophy. It thus provides a rigorous but largely nontechnical treatment of the topic that will be of interest not only to readers familiar with philosophy but also to those with a background in literary theory and linguistics. (shrink)

The exploration of chemical periodicity over the past 250 years led to the development of the Periodic System of Elements and demonstrates the value of vague ideas that ignored early scientific anomalies and instead allowed for extended periods of normal science where new methodologies and concepts are developed. The basic chemical element provides this exploration with direction and explanation and has shown to be a central and historically adaptable concept for a theory of matter far from the reductionist frontier. This (...) is explored in the histories of Prout’s hypothesis, Döbereiner Triads, element inversions necessary when ordering chemical elements by atomic weights, and van den Broeck’s ad-hoc proposal to switch to nuclear charges instead. The development of more accurate methods to determine atomic weights, Rayleigh and Ramsey’s gas separation and analytical techniques, Moseley’s X-ray spectroscopy to identify chemical elements, and more recent accelerator-based cold fusion methods to create new elements at the end of the Periodic Table point to the importance of methodological development complementing conceptual advances. I propose to frame the crossover from physics to chemistry not as a loss of accuracy and precision but as an increased application of vague concepts such as similarity which permit classification. This approach provides epistemic flexibility to adapt to scientific anomalies and the continued growth of chemical compound space and rejects the Procrustean philosophy of reductionist physics. Furthermore, it establishes chemistry with its explanatory and operational autonomy epitomized by the periodic system of elements as a gateway to other experimental sciences. (shrink)

Recent accounts of actual causation are stated in terms of extended causal models. These extended causal models contain two elements representing two seemingly distinct modalities. The first element are structural equations which represent the or mechanisms of the model, just as ordinary causal models do. The second element are ranking functions which represent normality or typicality. The aim of this paper is to show that these two modalities can be unified. I do so by formulating two constraints under which extended (...) causal models with their two modalities can be subsumed under so called which contain just one modality. These two constraints will be formally precise versions of Lewissystem of weights or priorities” governing overall similarity between possible worlds. (shrink)

This article focuses on the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev's assessment of certain representations of various aspects of the periodic system that employed more mathematical methodology. The equations of interest were created by E. J. Mills, B. N. Chicherin, and J. H. Vincent. The English chemist Mills tried to find a firmer numerical basis for the periodicity of the elements. The Russian lawyer and political philosopher Chicherin was convinced of the existence of a mathematical law underlying the periodic system. The (...) English physicist Vincent explored the connection between atomic weights and the elements' order in listings based on atomic weights—a project which he associated with the periodic system of elements. Although, for Mendeleev, the equations of Mills, Chicherin, and Vincent promised a more precise expression of the law of periodicity, he continued to invoke his earlier standards. In particular, Mendeleev wanted the equations to respect the individuality of the elements, and called for completeness in conveying the complexities of chemical phenomena. Thus, the very qualities that he had valued while developing his periodic system in 1869–1871 also characterised his evaluation of the new means of representing aspects of that system. (shrink)