This article presents original empirical data generated from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Pilot Evaluation of pre-trial witness interviewing (PTWI) in England and Wales. Section 1 introduces the PTWI Pilot and describes the methodological strengths and limitations of our qualitative socio-legal study. Forming the richly documented empirical core of the article, Sections 2–5 identify the principal considerations which seemed to influence case selection for Pilot interviews. An overlapping collection of evidentiary, strategic and circumstantial factors encouraged prosecutors to resort to PTWI, (...) whilst other, countervailing considerations were apprehended as disincentives. Assessments of witness credibility were central to prosecutors’ attempts to balance these competing factors. Section 6 concludes by underlining the potential of qualitative socio-legal studies to promote more nuanced understandings of criminal process, and by extension to make practical contributions to evidence-based criminal procedure reform. (shrink)

It is shown that the Hilbert-Bernays-Quine principle of identity of indiscernibles applies uniformly to all the contentious cases of symmetries in physics, including permutation symmetry in classical and quantum mechanics. It follows that there is no special problem with the notion of objecthood in physics. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason is considered as well; this too applies uniformly. But given the new principle of identity, it no longer implies that space, or atoms, are unreal.

But this picture of a ‘block universe’, composed of a timeless web of ‘world-lines’ in a four-dimensional space, however strongly suggested by the theory of relativity, is a piece of gratuitous metaphysics. Since the concept of change, of something happening, is an inseparable component of the common-sense concept of time and a necessary component of the scientist's view of reality, it is quite out of the question that theoretical physics should require us to hold the Eleatic view that nothing happens (...) in ‘the objective world’. Here, as so often in the philosophy of science, a useful limitation in the form of representation is mistaken for a deficiency of the universe. (shrink)

This paper summarizes the results of 11 separate studies of deaf children’s performance on standard tests of false belief understanding, the results of which combine to show that deaf children from hearing families are likely to be delayed in acquiring a theory of mind. Indeed, these children generally perform no better than autistic individuals of similar mental age. Conversational and neurological explanations for deficits in mental state understanding are considered in relation to recent evidence from studies of deaf, autistic, and (...) normally developing children with varied levels of access to talk about mental states at home with family members during the preschool years. (shrink)

The globalized nature of modern organizations presents new and intimidating challenges for effective relationship building. Organizations and their employees are increasingly being asked to manage unfamiliar relationships with unfamiliar parties. These relationships not only involve working across different national cultures, but also dealing with different organizational cultures, different professional cultures and even different internal constituencies. Managing such differences demands trust. This book brings together research findings on organizational trust-building across cultures. Established trust scholars from around the world consider the development (...) and maintenance of trust between, for example, management consultants and their clients, senior international managers from different nationalities, different internal organizational groupings during times of change, international joint ventures, and service suppliers and the local communities they serve. These studies, set in a wide variety of national settings, are an important resource for academics, students and practitioners who wish to know more about the nature of cross-cultural trust-building in organizations"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Category Theory has developed rapidly. This book aims to present those ideas and methods which can now be effectively used by Mathe­ maticians working in a variety of other fields of Mathematical research. This occurs at several levels. On the first level, categories provide a convenient conceptual language, based on the notions of category, functor, natural transformation, contravariance, and functor category. These notions are presented, with appropriate examples, in Chapters I and II. Next comes the fundamental idea of an adjoint (...) pair of functors. This appears in many substantially equivalent forms: That of universal construction, that of direct and inverse limit, and that of pairs offunctors with a natural isomorphism between corresponding sets of arrows. All these forms, with their interrelations, are examined in Chapters III to V. The slogan is "Adjoint functors arise everywhere". Alternatively, the fundamental notion of category theory is that of a monoid -a set with a binary operation of multiplication which is associative and which has a unit; a category itself can be regarded as a sort of general­ ized monoid. Chapters VI and VII explore this notion and its generaliza­ tions. Its close connection to pairs of adjoint functors illuminates the ideas of universal algebra and culminates in Beck's theorem characterizing categories of algebras; on the other hand, categories with a monoidal structure lead inter alia to the study of more convenient categories of topological spaces. (shrink)

The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organized and governed. The work of one of the world's greatest philosophers, it draws on Aristotle's own great knowledge of the political and constitutional affairs of the Greek cities. By examining the way societies are run - from households to city states - Aristotle establishes (...) how successful constitutions can best be initiated and upheld. For this edition Sir Ernest Barker's fine translation, which has been widely used for nearly half a century, has been extensively revised to meet the needs of the modern reader. The accessible introduction and clear notes by R F Stalley examine the historical and philosophical background of the work and discuss its significance for modern political thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy's Role in Psychopathology Back to Jaspers and an Appeal to Grow PracticalThe author reports no conflicts of interest.In "Philosophy's role in theorizing psychopathology," Gibson presents a defense of the continued relevance of philosophy to psychopathology, and a non-exhaustive framework for the role of philosophy in this domain (Gibson, 2024). I find it hard to disagree that psychopathology is soaked in philosophy from its origins, and that to try (...) and dry it out would be both unwise and impossible.In this commentary, I go back to Karl Jaspers' account of the role of philosophy in his General Psychopathology. In doing so, I do not find that Gibson adds anything new, but instead gives us a well-illustrated reminder that philosophy "is operative within every living science" (Jaspers, 1997, p. 770).Situated Psychopathological TheorizingGibson addresses a broad 'we' who might be engaged with psychopathological theorizing. This seems to encompass three main settings, from which examples are drawn.1. Everyday and regulative social practices (ordinary and legal setting).2. Empirically driven disciplines which work with psychopathological constructs (academic setting).3. Psychiatry and psychotherapy (clinical setting).In my view, it is a mistake not to map the terrain where psychopathological theorizing is situated. In each setting psychopathological theorizing has its own set of aims and constraints. In the ordinary setting, the aim might be to know whether to blame a loved one for their action. In the legal setting it might be to decide whether treatment or punishment is appropriate. In the clinical setting, the aim is usually a therapeutic assessment, and moral stance taking is often best kept at bay. In the academic setting, we might want to ensure our concepts are reliable and valid, opening them up to investigation using objective scientific methods. [End Page 13]Beyond what can be said in the most general terms, the role of philosophy will look different in these different situations.Understanding Is Not (Just) a Philosophical ToolUnderstanding is a mode of knowing that is concerned with the particular, rather than the general, and accessed inter-relationally, relying on tacit knowledge and empathetic imagination. Gibson introduces the concept as an elementary form of social intuition, used in ordinary life to make sense of social relations and other people's behaviors and reactions. I agree with Gibson, drawing on Strawson, that Understanding is a mode of knowledge that involves the subject of enquiry as a participant (Strawson, 1982). There is a moral imperative to take this stance, which drives us to value the expansion of what we are able to understand of other people's mental states. This at least partly motivates the agenda when we theorize about psychopathology.At times throughout his argument, Gibson seems to be arguing for the role of Understanding in psychopathological theorizing, in place of his explicit aim of arguing for the role of philosophy. However it is not at all clear that this replacement can be made. Accepting the picture drawn, Understanding is not any more the expertise or domain of the philosopher than the author, police officer, or sociologist. We are surely not meant to take Understanding as a uniquely philosophical tool, but rather a mode of knowing available to all social agents, integral to social reasoning in ordinary life and in the human studies.What philosophy can distinctively do is point to and defend the existence of forms of intersubjective and tacit knowledge within human studies such as psychopathology. For Jaspers, Understanding can be a scientific tool, albeit one that reminds us that knowledge in psychopathology is not all of one kind. One role for philosophy therefore is to help us to "distinguish the different modes of knowing," so that we might "order knowledge into a comprehensive whole" (Jaspers, 1997, p. 769). This is akin to the 'synthetic' role that Gibson proposes.Philosophy and ScienceJaspers defines scientific knowledge broadly as knowledge with "general validity, convincing insights (which can be proved), clarity of method, and the possibility for a meaningful discussion" (Jaspers, 1997, p. 768).We do not get such a definition from Gibson, but in the sections of... (shrink)

Transformer-based language models (TLMs) have widely been recognized to be a cutting-edge technology for the successful development of deep-learning-based solutions to problems and applications that require natural language processing and understanding. Like for other textual domains, TLMs have indeed pushed the state-of-the-art of AI approaches for many tasks of interest in the legal domain. Despite the first Transformer model being proposed about six years ago, there has been a rapid progress of this technology at an unprecedented rate, whereby BERT and (...) related models represent a major reference, also in the legal domain. This article provides the first systematic overview of TLM-based methods for AI-driven problems and tasks in the legal sphere. A major goal is to highlight research advances in this field so as to understand, on the one hand, how the Transformers have contributed to the success of AI in supporting legal processes, and on the other hand, what are the current limitations and opportunities for further research development. (shrink)

Let's learn about the things all around us, with this fun, bright book of first concepts.

In this chapter, we compare Kant and James’ accounts of freedom. Despite both thinkers’ rejecting compatibilism for the sake of practical reason, there are two striking differences in their stances. The first concerns whether or not freedom requires the possibility of an open future. James holds that morality hinges on the real possibility that the future can be affected by our actions. Kant, on the other hand, seems to maintain that we can still be free in the crucial sense, even (...) if none of our actions can have any effect on the future. The second difference between them is related, and concerns the location of freedom. Kant views experience as determined by natural necessity, and locates freedom outside of it, in things-in-themselves. James, on the other hand, has a richer conception of experience than Kant, and holds that we can locate our freedom within experience alone. In the end, we contend that James has a better account of how freedom relates to our experience, but this comes at a cost. For while Kant's account struggles with the relationship between freedom and experience, it has the advantage of insulating our freedom from potential empirical challenges. (shrink)

La resiliencia, o adaptación exitosa lograda por un individuo a pesar de haber pasado por situaciones muy adversas o traumáticas durante su infancia, se ha convertido en los últimos años en un concepto de gran importancia tanto en el campo de la salud mental como en el de las drogodependencias. Comprender cómo estas personas logran un nivel de funcionamiento normal, sin desarrollar problemas personales o psicopatológicos en su adolescencia o adultez, es de gran relevancia para la prevención como para el (...) tratamiento de distintos trastornos. (shrink)

Training citizens capable of guiding their lives and at the same time being socially active seems to be one of the primary objectives that, from the different educational stages, they want to achieve. Learning some principles that guide the behavior of students is not an easy task and requires taking into account different aspects, both personal and social, however, achieving this goal is a fundamental achievement for the subject that will have an impact on their professional future. An educational proposal (...) is made to work on values, understanding that it is a model that we consider favors the training of students in all its dimensions. (shrink)

Freedom after Kant situates Kant's concept of freedom in relation to leading philosophers of the period to trace a detailed history of philosophical thinking on freedom from the 18th to the 20th century. Beginning with German Idealism, the volume presents Kant's writings on freedom and their reception by contemporaries, successors, followers and critics. From exchanges of philosophical ideas on freedom between Kant and his contemporaries, Reinhold and Fichte, through to Kant's ideas on rational self-determination in Hegel and Schelling, we see (...) Kant's original arguments transformed through concepts of autonomy, freedom and absolutes. The political aspect of Kant's freedom finds further articulation in chapters on Marx and Mill who developed their own notions of political freedom after Kant. Revealing how Kant's concept of freedom shaped the history of philosophy in the broadest sense, contributors chart the development of an ethics of freedom in the 20th century which brings Kant into conversation with Heidegger, Beauvoir, Sartre, Levinas and Murdoch. This line of thinking on freedom signals a new departure for Kantian studies which brings his ideas into the present day and traverses major schools of thought including Idealism, Marxism, existentialism and moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this review of the Korean cloning scandal involving Woo-Suk Hwang, the nature of the disaster is documented and reasons why it occurred are suggested. The general problems it raises for scientific research are highlighted and six possible ways of improving practice are offered in the light of this case: better education of science students; independent monitoring and validation; guidelines for tissue donation for research; fostering of debate about ethically contentious research in science journals; development of an international code of (...) ethical research practice; fostering of public involvement in ethical review and debate through the web. (shrink)

The paper defends a view of structural realism similar to that of French and Ladyman, although it differs from theirs in an important respect: I do not take indistinguishabiity of particles in quantum mechanics to have the significance they think it has. It also differs from Cao's view of structural realism, criticized in my "Critical Notice: Cao's `The Conceptual Development of 20th Century Field Theories".

Drawing on compelling material from research interviews with former hostages and political prisoners, Guy Saunders reworks three classic thought experiment stories: Parfit's 'Teleporter', Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?' and Jackson's 'Mary the colour scientist' to form a fresh look at the study of consciousness. By examining consciousness from a social psychology perspective, Saunders develops a 'cubist psychology of consciousness' through which he challenges the accepted wisdom of mainstream approaches by arguing that people can act (...) freely. What makes 'cubist psychology' is both the many examples taken from different viewpoints and the multiple ways of looking at the key issues of person, mind and world. This is a unique and engaging book that will appeal to students and academics in the field of consciousness studies and other readers with an interest in consciousness. (shrink)

Hyperscanning studies using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy have been performed to understand the neural mechanisms underlying human-human interactions. In this study, we propose a novel methodological approach that is developed for fNIRS multi-brain analysis. Our method uses support vector regression to predict one brain activity time series using another as the predictor. We applied the proposed methodology to explore the teacher-student interaction, which plays a critical role in the formal learning process. In an illustrative application, we collected fNIRS data of the (...) teacher and preschoolers’ dyads performing an interaction task. The teacher explained to the child how to add two numbers in the context of a game. The Prefrontal cortex and temporal-parietal junction of both teacher and student were recorded. A multivariate regression model was built for each channel in each dyad, with the student’s signal as the response variable and the teacher’s ones as the predictors. We compared the predictions of SVR with the conventional ordinary least square predictor. The results predicted by the SVR model were statistically significantly correlated with the actual test data at least one channel-pair for all dyads. Overall, 29/90 channel-pairs across the five dyads presented significant signal predictions withthe SVR approach. The conventional OLS resulted in only 4 out of 90 valid predictions. These results demonstrated that the SVR could be used to perform channel-wise predictions across individuals, and the teachers’ cortical activity can be used to predict the student brain hemodynamic response. (shrink)

Ces études débordent le problème du temps chez les Stoïciens et se proposent d’établir que cette question, en apparence modeste, permet d’éclairer, et en même temps commande l’ensemble du système.Au premier abord en effet, la théorie du temps se présente comme une simple section d’un chapitre de la Physique, celui qui traite des Incorporels. Mais déjà la simple interprétation des textes transmis fait voir que cette théorie tient étroitement à d’autres théories, comme celle des incorporels en général, des catégories, de (...) la substance. Abordant ensuite les thèses majeures de la logique et de l’éthique, on s’aperçoit qu’à leur tour elles sont solidaires de la conception du temps qui, dans bien des cas, fait évanouir leur apparence de paradoxe. A cela même, il n’y a rien d’étrange, si l’on se souvient que le stoïcisme, plus que tout autre philosophie antique, constitue un système cohérent. Mais plus particulièrement, le problème du temps a dû former comme le noeud de la réflexion stoïcienne qui vise, contre les lourdes autorités de Platon et d’Aristote, à rétablir dans sa réalité et dans sa dignité, le concret, le sensible, disqualifié comme « sujet à la génération et à la corruption », c’est-à-dire, en un mot, comme « l’être dans le temps ». (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive achievement that enables us to report our propositional attitudes, to attribute such attitudes to others, and to use such postulated or observed mental states in the prediction and explanation of behavior. Most normally developing children acquire ToM between the ages of 3 and 5 years, but serious delays beyond this chronological and mental age have been observed in children with autism, as well as in those with severe sensory impairments. We examine data from (...) studies of ToM in normally developing children and those with deafness, blindness, autism and Williams syndrome, as well as data from lower primates, in a search for answers to key theoretical questions concerning the origins, nature and representation of knowledge about the mind. In answer to these, we offer a framework according to which ToM is jointly dependent upon language and social experience, and is produced by a conjunction of language acquisition with children's growing social understanding, acquired through conversation and interaction with others. We argue that adequate language and adequate social skills are jointly causally sufficient, and individually causally necessary, for producing ToM. Thus our account supports a social developmental theory of the genesis of human cognition, inspired by the work of Sellars and Vygotsky. How are we to decide whether to take reason to be an essentially private thing that can, however, turn on a public display when it chooses to do so, or, like conversing, to be an essentially social skill, which can, however, be retained a while through periods of solitary confinement? (Annette Baier, The Commons of the Mind, p. 5). The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well (Wittgenstein, On Certainty§ 287). The problem of thought and language thus extends beyond the limits of natural science and becomes the focal problem of historical human psychology, i.e. of social psychology. Consequently, it must be posed in a different way (Vygotsky, Thought and Language, p. 51). From the very first days of the child's development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behaviour and, being directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child's environment. The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. This complex human structure is the product of a developmental process deeply rooted in the links between individual and social history (Vygotsky, Mind in Society, p. 30). (shrink)

In this paper we use Hobby's duality for semi-De Morgan algebras, to characterize those algebras having only principal congruences in the classes of semi-De Morgan algebras, demi-pseudocomplemented lattices and almost pseudocomplemented lattices. This work extends some of the results reached by Beazer in [3] and [4].

The article considers structuralism as a philosophy of mathematics, as based on the commonly accepted explicit mathematical concept of a structure. Such a structure consists of a set with specified functions and relations satisfying specified axioms, which describe the type of the structure. Examples of such structures such as groups and spaces, are described. The viewpoint is now dominant in organizing much of mathematics, but does not cover all mathematics, in particular most applications. It does not explain why certain structures (...) are dominant, not why the same mathematical structure can have so many different and protean realizations. ‘structure’ is just one part of the full situation, which must somehow connect the ideal structures with their varied examples. (shrink)

Book Information Intercultural Philosophy. By Ram Adhar Mall. Rowman & Littlefield. 2000. Pp. xiii + 152. Hardback, US$62.00. Paperback, US$16.95.

Some health-care institutions have ethics committees. The experience of the Ethical Issues Committee at the Royal College of Physicians is described. Ethics committees in institutions may be reactive or creative, must determine an agenda and must deal with dissent.