I endorse the following claims in this paper. (1) Agnosticism is suspension of judgment on existence claims concerning gods and God. (2) Historical agnostics accepted (1) but unwisely insisted on further conditions best set aside. (3) Particular case agnosticism is less problematic than general principle-based agnosticism. (4) Agnostics should suspend judgment on—or, on occasion, reject—atomic claims of the form ‘God is F’.

Agnosticism has had some bad press in recent years. Nonetheless, I hope to show that agnosticism can be so formulated that it is no less philosophically respectable than theism and atheism. This is not a mere philosophical exercise; for, as it happens, the formulated position is--I think--the one to which I subscribe. I include a qualification here since it may be that the position to which I subscribe is better characterised as fallibilist atheism--but more of that anon.

What should the Buddhist attitude be to rebirth if it is believed to be inconsistent with current science? This chapter critically engages forms of Buddhist agnosticism that adopt a position of uncertainty about rebirth but nevertheless recommend ‘behaving as if’ it were true. What does it mean to behave as if rebirth were true, and are Buddhist agnostics justified in adopting this position? This chapter engages this question in dialogue with Mark Siderits’ reductionist analysis of the Buddhist doctrine of (...) the two truths, conventional and ultimate. Richard Hayes (1998) characterises talk of rebirth as a useful fiction. Siderits characterises talk of persons as a useful fiction and explains and justifies statements that involve it as conventionally true despite persons not featuring in our final or ultimate ontology. Does rebirth satisfy the same criteria to count as conventionally true, and does thinking of it in these terms help explain and justify what it might mean to behave as if rebirth were true? This chapter will defend a conditional yes to these questions. In the process, it will clarify what is distinctive about the traditional Buddhist approach to rebirth, provide an analysis of how the concept of rebirth might relate to practical outcomes, and address some limitations of this approach. (shrink)

I defend a proposition-directed, sui generis account of agnosticism, according to which being agnostic about some proposition, P, involves a sceptical or questioning mental stance towards both the truth and falsity of P. Call this the questioning-attitude account. The questioning-attitude account contrasts with the question-directed attitude account of Jane Friedman, which holds that the object of agnosticism is a question rather than a proposition. I argue that the questioning-attitude account not only avoids a major weakness of Friedman’s question-directed (...) attitude account, but it also displays the following three attractive features: (1) it offers an explanation of why ascriptions of agnosticism often take an interrogative compliment, (2) it offers a univocal account of the content of all three doxastic attitudes, and (3) it fleshes out the claim that agnosticism is sui generis by describing what makes agnosticism distinct from both belief and disbelief. (shrink)

Providing more human-like concept learning in machines has always been one of the most significant goals of machine learning paradigms and of human-machine interaction techniques. This article attempts to provide a logical specification of conceptual mappings from humans’ minds into machines’ knowledge bases. We will focus on the representation of the mappings (transformations) relying on First-Order Predicate Logic. Additionally, the structure of concepts in the common ground between humans and machines will be analysed. It seems quite necessary to pay attention (...) to the philosophy of constructivism and constructivist models of knowing. This research constructs a conceptual ground for expressing and analysing concepts in the common ground between humanistic and informatics sciences and in the context of human-machine interplays. (shrink)

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of formal knowledge representation formalisms and the most well-known formalisms in semantics-based systems. The central focus of this research is on logical-terminological characterisation/analysis of possibilistic and probabilistic descriptions of events in DLs. Based on a logical characterisation of the concept of `being', this paper conceptualises events within DLs world descriptions. Accordingly, it deals with the concepts of `possibility of events' and `probability of events'. The main goal of this research is to investigate (...) how possible and probable notations can, terminologically and logically, be interpreted and analysed within DLs world descriptions. In other words, the research logically-terminologically investigates how possibilistic and probabilistic descriptions of events can be expressed in DLs. (shrink)

Logic arguably plays a role in the normativity of reasoning. In particular, there are plausible norms of belief/disbelief whose antecedents are constituted by claims about what follows from what. But is logic also relevant to the normativity of agnostic attitudes? The question here is whether logical entailment also puts constraints on what kinds of things one can suspend judgment about. In this paper I address that question and I give a positive answer to it. In particular, I advance two logical (...) norms of agnosticism, where the first one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about the conclusion of a valid argument and the second one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about one of the premises of a valid argument. (shrink)

We provide a framework for understanding agnosticism. The framework accounts for the varieties of agnosticism while vindicating the unity of the phenomenon. This combination of unity and plurality is achieved by taking the varieties of agnosticism to be represented by several agnostic stances, all of which share a common core provided by what we call the minimal agnostic attitude. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the framework by showing how it can be applied to several philosophical debates. In (...) particular, several philosophical positions can be aptly conceived of as instances of agnosticism whilst retaining their differences and distinguishing features. (shrink)

We study probabilistic characterisation of a random model of a finite set of first order axioms. Given a set of first order axioms.

We often describe ourselves as agnostic on a wide range of questions, such as does God exist, is String Theory true, or will the President win re-election? But what does it mean to be agnostic and when is agnosticism justified? This monograph addresses these and related questions.

Irrespective of the short academic history of Christian spirituality, a vast number of academic and popular publications ensued and is still dynamically growing. Many definitions have been proposed to define (Christian) spirituality. Spirituality is also no longer connected only to religion, although in this research the focus will fall on Christian spirituality. This research intends to partake in the continuing academic dialogue to define Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is interpreted from the perspective of the divine-human conversation. This research consists of (...) three sections. In the first section, a working definition of Christian spirituality is formulated. In the second section, various aspects that constitute spiritualities are distinguished and discussed. In the last section, the constituents of Christian spirituality are pointed out and are reviewed from a conversational perspective. The focus will be on ‘the experience of the divine’ when living a life that resonates with the Christian life. (shrink)

We use nonstandard methods, based on iterated hyperextensions, to develop applications to Ramsey theory of the theory of monads of ultrafilters. This is performed by studying in detail arbitrary tensor products of ultrafilters, as well as by characterising their combinatorial properties by means of their monads. This extends to arbitrary sets and properties methods previously used to study partition regular Diophantine equations on. Several applications are described by means of multiple examples.

Background: The traditional approach to resolving ethics concerns may not address underlying organisational issues involved in the evolution of these concerns. This represents a missed opportunity to improve quality of care “upstream”. The purpose of this study was to understand better which organisational issues may contribute to ethics concerns. Methods: Directed content analysis was used to review ethics consultation notes from an academic children’s hospital from 1996 to 2006 (N = 71). The analysis utilised 18 categories of organisational issues derived (...) and modified from published quality improvement protocols. Results: Organisational issues were identified in 68 of the 71 (96%) ethics consult notes across a range of patient settings and reasons for consultation. Thirteen of the 18 categories of organisational issues were identified and there was a median of two organisational issues per consult note. The most frequently identified organisational issues were informal organisational culture (eg, collective practices and approaches to situations with ethical dimensions that are not guided by policy), policies and procedures (eg, staff knows policy and/or procedural guidelines for an ethical concern but do not follow it) and communication (eg, communication about critical information, orders, or hand-offs repeatedly does not occur among services). Conclusions: Organisational issues contribute to ethical concerns that result in clinical ethics consults. Identifying and addressing organisational issues such as informal culture and communication may help decrease the recurrence of future similar ethics concerns. (shrink)

In Béziau a logic \ was defined with the help of the modal logic \. In it, the negation operator is understood as meaning ‘it is not necessary that’. The strong soundness–completeness result for \ with respect to a version of Kripke semantics was also given there. Following the formulation of \ we can talk about \-like logics or Beziau-style logics if we consider other modal logics instead of \—such a possibility has been mentioned in [1]. The correspondence result between (...) modal logics and respective Beziau-style logics has been generalised for the case of normal logics naturally leading to soundness–completeness results [see Marcos :279–300, 2005) and Mruczek-Nasieniewska and Nasieniewski :229–248, 2005)]. In Mruczek-Nasieniewska and Nasieniewski :185–196, 2008), :189–203, 2009) some partial results for non-normal cases are given. In the present paper we try to give similar but more general correspondence results for the non-normal-worlds case. To achieve this aim we have to enrich original Beziau’s language with an additional negation operator understood as ‘it is necessary that not’. (shrink)

Most theists do not put a (subjective) probability of 1 (certainty) on God's existence. Most atheists do not put a probability of 0 on God's existence. I argue that these familiar positions are incoherent. On the assumption of S5 and the probability calculus it can be shown that the only coherent (subjective) probabilities an agent can assign to God's existence/non-existence are 0 or 1. Believers must be completely committed believers and non-believers must be completely committed non-believers. Agnosticism is not (...) a coherent position. (shrink)

The characterisation of normal stem cells and cancer stem cells uses the same paradigm. These cells are isolated by a fluorescence‐activated cell sorting step and their stemness is assayed following implantation into animals. However, differences exist between these two kinds of stem cells. Therefore, the translation of the experimental procedures used for normal stem cell isolation into the research field of cancer stem cells is a potential source of artefacts. In addition, normal stem cell therapy has the objective of (...) regenerating a tissue, while cancer stem cell‐centred therapy seeks the destruction of the cancer tissue. Taking these differences into account is critical for anticipating problems that might arise in cancer stem cell‐centred therapy and for upgrading the cancer stem cell paradigm accordingly. (shrink)

The central focus of this article is the epistemological assumption that knowledge could be generated based on human beings’ experiences and over their conceptions of the world. Logical characterisation of human inductive learning over their produced conceptions within terminological systems and providing a logical background for theorising over the Human Concept Learning Problem (HCLP) in terminological systems are the main contributions of this research. In order to make a linkage between ‘Logic’ and ‘Cognition’, Description Logics (DLs) will be employed (...) to provide a logical description and analysis of actual human inductive reasoning (and learning). This research connects with the topics ‘logic & learning’, ‘cognitive modelling’, and ‘terminological knowledge representation’. (shrink)

We describe the role of morphosyntactic categories and syntactic dependencies in the process of semantically interpreting composite expressions. Special attention will be paid to the combinatorial properties conveyed by morphosyntactic categories such as nominals and verbs, as well as by syntactic dependencies like subject, direct object, or nominal modification. The semantic characterisation of these grammatical structures is based on cognitive abilities and abstract conceptualisations. This will provide us with theoretical arguments to review and extend some basic assumptions of Cognitive (...) Grammar and related work. (shrink)

Irrespective of the short academic history of Christian spirituality, a vast number of academic and popular publications ensued and is still dynamically growing. Many definitions have been proposed to define (Christian) spirituality. Spirituality is also no longer connected only to religion, although in this research the focus will fall on Christian spirituality. This research intends to partake in the continuing academic dialogue to define Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is interpreted from the perspective of the divine-human conversation. This research consists of (...) three sections. In the first section, a working definition of Christian spirituality is formulated. In the second section, various aspects that constitute spiritualities are distinguished and discussed. In the last section, the constituents of Christian spirituality are pointed out and are reviewed from a conversational perspective. The focus will be on ‘the experience of the divine’ when living a life that resonates with the Christian life. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to point up the gap between, on the one hand, the methods currently available to the biologist in the laboratory and, on the other, the kind of data that he or she would need in order to characterise genetically engineered proteins of topical biological interest in such a way as to make use of the techniques of protein engineering.

One recent attempt to capture the content of physicalism involves characterising it negatively in terms of the non-mental. This thesis is criticised on the grounds that it fails to provide a sufficient condition for an adequate characterisation of physicalism, since, from a global physicalist perspective, it has both nothing to say about other so-called non-physical entities and fails to exclude them from the fundamental entities that such an account must posit. This latter problem is also faced by a more (...) local form of physicalism – one that restricts itself to just the mental domain. Some possible responses from the physicalist are briefly discussed and dismissed, and it is suggested that the physicalist must have some implicit idea of what she means by ‘the physical’, an idea which must amount to more than simply ‘the non-mental’. (shrink)

We describe the role of morphosyntactic categories and syntactic dependencies in the process of semantically interpreting composite expressions. Special attention will be paid to the combinatorial properties conveyed by morphosyntactic categories such as nominals and verbs, as well as by syntactic dependencies like subject, direct object, or nominal modification. The semantic characterisation of these grammatical structures is based on cognitive abilities and abstract conceptualisations. This will provide us with theoretical arguments to review and extend some basic assumptions of Cognitive (...) Grammar and related work. (shrink)

Thomas appears four times within the narrative framework of the Fourth Gospel. His presence in the Gospel introduces some of the strategic transitions within the macro-narrative structure. The following are some of the crucial moments that are introduced through the entry of Thomas: firstly, Thomas' character is brought to the foreground towards the end of Jesus' public ministry, where a transition is underway through Lazarus' death and raising to Jesus' death and resurrection ; secondly, he appears as a significant interlocutor (...) engaged in dialogue so that Jesus' identity as 'the way, the truth, and the life' may be revealed to the disciples during his private ministry ; thirdly, Thomas' character appears towards the climax of the Book of Glory as he is instrumental in revealing the identity of Jesus as 'Lord' and 'God' ; and fourthly, he appears as one of the seven disciples during the post-resurrection context in Galilee. The unique placement of Thomas communicates something significant about the character and his development within the narrative. (shrink)

Agnostics often hold that, since there is not a clear preponderance of evidence either in favour of theistic belief or against it, their position of suspended belief is more rational than either theism or atheism. I would like to examine an objection raised recently by Clement Dore against the agnostic's reasoning on this matter.

We generalise the concept of clique width to structures of arbitrary signature and cardinality. We present characterisations of clique width in terms of decompositions of a structure and via interpretations in trees. Several model-theoretic properties of clique width are investigated including VC-dimension and preservation of finite clique width under elementary extensions and compactness.

Russell espouses atheism; indeed he regards it as the default. However, he also lays claim to agnosticism, backing into it by way of the argument from ignorance. This essay asserts that in light of how he frames the relationship between atheism and agnosticism, the latter is not the available alternative that he and his assessors assume it is—not because its stance is indefensible, but because of what, given his point of origin, he has to hold in order for (...) it to be even a possibility. In a phrase, on Russell’s construal, agnosticism as an option is idle. (shrink)

John Benson; XIV—The Characterisation of Actions and the Virtuous Agent, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 251–266.

Numerous learning tasks can be described as the process of extrapolating patterns from observed data. One of the driving intuitions behind the theory of algorithmic randomness is that randomness amounts to the absence of any effectively detectable patterns: it is thus natural to regard randomness as antithetical to inductive learning. Osherson and Weinstein [11] draw upon the identification of randomness with unlearnability to introduce a learning-theoretic framework (in the spirit of formal learning theory) for modelling algorithmic randomness. They define two (...) success criteria—specifying under what conditions a pattern may be said to have been detected by a computable learning function—and prove that the collections of data sequences on which these criteria cannot be satisfied respectively correspond to the set of weak 1-randoms and the set of weak 2-randoms. This learning-theoretic approach affords an intuitive perspective on algorithmic randomness, and it invites the question of whether restricting attention to learning-theoretic success criteria comes at an expressivity cost. In other words, is the framework expressive enough to capture most core algorithmic randomness notions and, in particular, Martin-Löf randomness—arguably, the most prominent algorithmic randomness notion in the literature? In this paper, we answer the latter question in the affirmative by providing a learning-theoretic characterisation of Martin-Löf randomness. We then show that Schnorr randomness, another central algorithmic randomness notion, also admits a learning-theoretic characterisation in this setting. (shrink)