In voicing commitments to the principle that the adoption of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools by armed forces should be done responsibly, a growing number of states have referred to a concept of “Responsible AI.” As part of an effort to help develop the substantive contours of that concept in meaningful ways, this position paper introduces a notion of “responsible reliance.” It is submitted that this notion could help the policy conversation expand from its current relatively narrow focus on interactions between an (...) AI system and its end-user to also encompass the wider set of interdependencies involved in fulfilling legal obligations concerning the use of AI in armed conflicts. The authors argue that to respect international humanitarian law and ensure accountability, states ought to devise and maintain a framework that ensures that natural persons involved in the use an AI tool in an armed conflict could responsibly rely at least on: (1) the tool’s technical aspects, (2) the conduct of other people involved in development and use of that AI tool; and (3) the policies and processes implemented at the state level. According to the authors, the “responsible reliance” notion could serve, among other examples, as a basis on which to articulate legal requirements, prohibitions, and permissions across diverse areas, from the design of AI tools to human-machine interactions to configuration of responsible-command frameworks. (shrink)

Xenophon presents his perplexing account of the conspiracy of Kinadon and its suppression in the midst of his portrait of Spartan imperial power at its zenith in the Hellenika. While the political relevance of this conspiracy has long been assumed by scholars, the labyrinthine structure of Book III obscures the centrality of the account in Xenophon’s examination of Spartan imperialism and Spartan justice. Attention to the details in the conspiracy account and its place within the narrative reveals the source of (...) corruption and decline inherent in the Spartan regime: an unexamined, and fatally deficient, view of justice as a virtue. Imperialism is not the cause but a symptom of the corruption rooted in fundamental defects of the Spartan constitution. Thus understood, the account of Kinadon’s conspiracy in the Hellenika constitutes a compelling critique of Spartan justice and helps to establish the overarching Socratic character of Xenophon’s political thought. (shrink)

This volume, with contributions from scholars in political science, literature, and philosophy, examines the mutual influence of reason and religion at the time of the American Founding.

This volume, with contributions from scholars in political science, literature, and philosophy, examines the mutual influence of reason and religion at the time of the American Founding.

Introduction : opening reflections -- Situating the dialogue : Athenian competitions -- Setting the stage : sophistry versus philosophy -- The banquet begins : rule and the symposium -- Rival ways of life : kαλοκαγαθ̌̌̌̌̌̌iα and virtue -- Display speeches and the promise of wisdom -- Defense speeches and the Socratic way of life -- Socratic moderation in pursuit of the beautiful -- Refutations, accusations, and education -- Digression, reconciliation, and restoration -- Educating gentlemen and moderating erōs -- Performative rhetoric (...) and conjugal erotics -- Conclusion : Xenophon's Socrates and political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hypothesis is thus incompatible with the more common thesis that perception is cognitively impenetrable. It is of (...) importance to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and general philosophy of science. The plausibility of orectic perception can be motivated by some classic experimental studies, and some new experimental research inspired by those same studies. The general suggestion is that orectic penetration thus defined, and evidenced by the relevant studies, cannot be deflected by the standard strategies of the cognitive impenetrability theorist. (shrink)

A collaborative undertaking between an artist and a philosopher, this monograph attempts to deepen our understanding of "contemplative seeing" by addressing the works of Plato, Thoreau, Heidegger, and more. The authors explore what it means to "see" reality and contemplate how viewing reality philosophically and artfully is a form of spirituality. In this way, by developing a new conception of active visual engagement, the authors propose a way of seeing that unites both critical scrutiny and spiritual involvement, as opposed to (...) simple passive reception. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have recently taken renewed interest in cognitive penetration, in particular, in the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. The question is whether cognitive states like belief influence perceptual experience in some important way. Since the possible phenomenon is an empirical one, the strategy for analysis has, predictably, proceeded as follows: define the phenomenon and then, definition in hand, interpret various psychological data. However, different theorists offer different and apparently inconsistent definitions. And so in addition to (...) the usual problems (e.g., definitions being challenged by counterexample), an important result is that different theorists apply their definitions and accordingly get conflicting answers to the question “Is this a genuine case of cognitive penetration?”. This hurdle to philosophical and scientific progress can be remedied, I argue, by returning attention to the alleged consequences of the possible phenomenon. There are three: theory-ladenness of perception in contexts of scientific theory choice, a threat to the general epistemic role of perception, and implications for mental architecture. Any attempt to characterize or define, and then empirically test for, cognitive penetration should be constrained by these consequences. This is a method for interpreting and acquiring experimental data in a way that is agreeable to both sides of the cognitive penetration debate. Put crudely, the question shifts to “Is this a cognitive-perceptual relation that results in (or constitutes) one or more of the relevant consequences?” In answering this question, relative to various data, it may turn out that there is no single unified phenomenon of cognitive penetration. But this should be no matter, since it is the consequences that are of central importance to philosophers and scientists alike. (shrink)

Andrew Bacon, John Hawthorne, and Gabriel Uzquiano have recently argued that free logics—logics that reject or restrict Universal Instantiation—are ultimately not promising approaches to resolving a family of intensional paradoxes due to Arthur Prior. These logics encompass ramified and contextualist approaches to paradoxes, and broadly speaking, there are two kinds of criticism they face. First, they fail to address every version of the Priorean paradoxes. Second, the theoretical considerations behind the logics make absolutely general statements about all propositions, properties of (...) propositions, etc., but because this sort of intensional quantification is always restricted in the logics, they cannot even express those considerations. I present a novel sort of free logic, which rejects the standard Universal Instantiation but validates a restricted form of the rule, and which addresses both kinds of criticism by allowing some propositions to be unrestricted in their quantification. (shrink)

In a familiar passage from Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates points to a contrast between "matters of difference that cause hatred and anger," and matters where agreement is reached by seemingly rational means. Where a dispute concerns number, size or weight, we arrive at a decision by counting or measuring. But there are matters of disagreement where such convergence is not to be expected: "the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad" notorious among them. Socrates's (...) point, in drawing what a modern reader might take to be a contrast between facts and values, is not so easily understood. The Euthyphro passage elicits a concern-call it a concern about "objectivity"-which is often addressed in a characteristically narrow way. How we approach a given concern depends on how we articulate that concern, and this is what I propose to consider here. (shrink)

Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, (...) its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)

This paper attempts to answer two questions: What is epistemic agency? And what are the motivations for having this concept? In response to the first question, it is argued that epistemic agency is the agency one has over one’s belief-forming practices, or doxastic dispositions, which can directly affect the way one forms a belief and indirectly affect the beliefs one forms. In response to the second question, it is suggested that the above conception of epistemic agency is either implicitly endorsed (...) by those theorists sympathetic to epistemic normativity or, at minimum, this conception can make sense of the legitimacy of the normative notions applicable to how and what one should believe. It is further contended that belief formation in some respects is a skill that can be intentionally developed and refined. Accepting this contention and the existence of certain epistemic norms provide inconclusive yet good reasons to endorse this concept. Recent challenges to this concept by Hillary Kornblith and Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij are also considered. (shrink)

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information. They consider what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. They consider how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful. (...) They consider the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. They explore both the familiar five sense modalities and other candidate sense modalities, including a sense for flavour, inner senses (e.g., a sense for pain), and various senses that may result from using sensory substitution devices. Contributors often represent competing views, and the methods they deploy sometimes differ from one essay to the next—with some drawing upon the sciences and engineering and others relying upon conceptual analysis. All contributors agree, nonetheless, that traditional theorizing about the senses is hampered by a neglect of the senses other than vision, and by the misconception that vision is a passive receptacle for an image thrown by a lens. And many contributors believe that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities; they think that to understand perception properly, we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. The ambition of the volume is to begin to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses, and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception. (shrink)

This paper takes up the problem of correlationism from a phenomenological perspective. Speculative realists, such as Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, seek to establish new forms of Continental realism largely because, in their view, phenomenology cannot adequately account for the real. To counter these claims, I will use what I call a “critical phenomenological approach”, which critically delimits the real from the intentional relation, and thus makes possible a phenomenological theory of the real. This approach to realism establishes not only (...) that the real is independent from the intentional relation but also that the intentional relation itself is contingent with regard to the real. Furthermore, it also shows that the human being is exposed to the real in an originary way that calls into question the adequacy of Meillassoux’s and Harman’s forms of realism. (shrink)

Creativity has received, and continues to receive, comparatively little analysis in philosophy and the brain and behavioural sciences. This is in spite of the importance of creative thought and action, and the many and varied resources of theories of mind. Here an alternative approach to analyzing creativity is suggested: start from the bottom up with minimally creative thought. Minimally creative thought depends non-accidentally upon agency, is novel relative to the acting agent, and could not have been tokened before the time (...) it is in fact tokened, relative to the agent in question. Thoughts that meet these three conditions—agency, psychological novelty, and modal—are what may be called cognitive breakthroughs. Even if such breakthroughs are not necessary to or definitive of richer creativity, they are indeed central to much of creativity. The minimal analysis provides a more workable explanandum for theories of creativity of varied motivation and method. (shrink)

There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it (...) that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art. (shrink)

This chapter argues that we are irremediably ignorant about the identities of the fundamental properties that figure in the actual realization of the true final theory. Of the three published responses to Lewis’s work, each argues that even if Lewis’s metaphysical assumption, the thesis known as “quidditism,” is accepted, we need not accept his epistemic conclusion, the thesis of Humility. The aim of this chapter is to defend Lewis against these critics. Ann Whittle attempts to refute Humility by an appeal (...) to a more lenient account of identification. Following is a defense of Lewis carried by showing that his taxing account of identification is a perfectly good account of at least one perfectly legitimate sense of identification. (shrink)

Although the majority of literature has shown undistinguishable attentional effects when eye-gaze and arrows are used as cues, recent research has found that whereas eye-gaze selectively orient attention to the specific location or part of the object looked at, arrows unselectively direct attention towards parts of the environment. However, it is unclear whether this dissociation between gaze and arrow cues is related to social cognitive mechanisms such as the attribution of mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM). We aimed at replicating (...) the dissociation between gaze and arrow cues and investigating sex differences in attentional object selection triggered by these two types of stimuli. While we replicated the arrow-gaze dissociation, this was equivalent in the male and female population. This finding seems to run counter the intuition that theory of mind abilities can account for the dissociation observed between gaze and arrow cues since greater ToM abilities have been generally shown in females. However, this conclusion it must be interpreted with caution since no differences in ToM abilities and autistic quotient scores were observed between male and female in our sample. Further research is needed to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

Background: The regulation of muscle force is a vital aspect of sensorimotor control, requiring intricate neural processes. While neural activity associated with upper extremity force control has been documented, extrapolation to lower extremity force control is limited. Knowledge of how the brain regulates force control for knee extension and flexion may provide insights as to how pathology or intervention impacts central control of movement.Objectives: To develop and implement a neuroimaging-compatible force control paradigm for knee extension and flexion.Methods: A magnetic resonance (...) imaging safe load cell was used in a customized apparatus to quantify force during neuroimaging. Visual biofeedback and a target sinusoidal wave that fluctuated between 0 and 5 N was provided via an MRI-safe virtual reality display. Fifteen right leg dominant female participants completed a knee extension and flexion force matching paradigm during neuroimaging. The force-matching error was calculated based on the difference between the visual target and actual performance. Brain activation patterns were calculated and associated with force-matching error and the difference between quadriceps and hamstring force-matching tasks were evaluated with a mixed-effects model.Results: Knee extension and flexion force-matching tasks increased BOLD signal among cerebellar, sensorimotor, and visual-processing regions. Increased knee extension force-matching error was associated with greater right frontal cortex and left parietal cortex activity and reduced left lingual gyrus activity. Increased knee flexion force-matching error was associated with reduced left frontal and right parietal region activity. Knee flexion force control increased bilateral premotor, secondary somatosensory, and right anterior temporal activity relative to knee extension. The force-matching error was not statistically different between tasks.Conclusion: Lower extremity force control results in unique activation strategies depending on if engaging knee extension or flexion, with knee flexion requiring increased neural activity for the same level of force and no difference in relative error. These fMRI compatible force control paradigms allow precise behavioral quantification of motor performance concurrent with brain activity for lower extremity sensorimotor function and may serve as a method for future research to investigate how pathologies affect lower extremity neuromuscular function. (shrink)

The paper provides a critical discussion of the Super-Humean view of spacetime and the “minimalist ontology” in terms of Leibnizian relations and primitive matter points, recently developed by Esfeld et al. It investigates, in particular, the empirical adequacy of the proposed metaphysics, arguing that Super-Humeanism cannot provide a plausible account of space and time without committing to bona fide geometric structure in the fundamental relations. Against this backdrop, I propose a moderate version of Super-Humeanism and discuss its possible application to (...) Euclidean space and General Relativity. (shrink)

A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead (...) on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways. (shrink)

Computer programs are generating artworks of astonishing novelty and aesthetic value. By the standard definition of creativity, these programs would count as being creative. But if you still hesitate to call a program creative, that's for good reason, we argue. It's because real creativity requires AGENTS who are responsible for what they make, and it's not at all clear that these programs are agents. -/- (The title was imposed by the editor. It was supposed to be called, "ARE COMPUTERS CREATIVE?").

Structuralism and quidditism are competing views of the metaphysics of property individuation: structuralists claim that properties are individuated by their nomological roles; quidditists claim that they are individuated by something else. This paper (1) refutes what many see as the best reason to accept structuralism over quidditism and (2) offers a methodological argument in favor of a quidditism. The standard charge against quidditism is that it commits us to something ontologically otiose: intrinsic aspects of properties, so-called ‘quiddities’. Here I grant (...) that quiddities are ontologically otiose, but deny that quidditism requires them. According to a view I call ‘austere quidditism’, properties are individuated by bare numerical identity. I argue that, as far as ontological parsimony is concerned, austere quidditism and structuralism are on a par. But is austere quidditism a coherent alternative to structuralism? To see that it is, we must get clear on what exactly we mean by ‘property individuation’. What we discover is that structuralism is a counterpart theory for properties, and that austere quidditism is simply the rejection of counterpart theory. I conclude with a methodological argument to the effect that counterpart theory for properties ought to be rejected. This paper begins by situating the debate between structuralists and quidditists within the context of a debate over the epistemic limits of fundamental science. At the center of this debate is David Lewis’s posthumously published ‘Ramseyan Humility’ (2008). In the appendix I explain the precise role of austere quidditism in Lewis’s argument. (shrink)

When we engage in practical deliberation, we sometimes engage in careful probabilistic reasoning. At other times, we simply make flat out assumptions about how the world is or will be. A question thus arises: when, if ever, is it rationally permissible to engage in the latter, less sophisticated kind of practical deliberation? Recently, a number of authors have argued that the answer concerns whether one knows that p. Others have argued that the answer concerns whether one is justified in believing (...) that one knows that p. Against both of these, this paper argues that the answer concerns whether p is ‘practically certain’—that is, whether the actual epistemic probability that p differs from epistemic certainty that p only in ways that are irrelevant to the decision one currently faces. (shrink)

Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can (...) maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist's scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity. (shrink)

This chapter has four parts. I distinguishes some types of perceptual skills and highlights their importance in everyday perception. II identifies a well-studied class of perceptual skills: cases of perceptual expertise. III discusses a less studied possible instance of perceptual skill: picture perception. Finally, IV outlines some important mechanisms underlying perceptual skills, with special emphasis on attention and mental imagery.

We identify a class of paradoxes that is neither set-theoretical nor semantical, but that seems to depend on intensionality. In particular, these paradoxes arise out of plausible properties of propositional attitudes and their objects. We try to explain why logicians have neglected these paradoxes, and to show that, like the Russell Paradox and the direct discourse Liar Paradox, these intensional paradoxes are recalcitrant and challenge logical analysis. Indeed, when we take these paradoxes seriously, we may need to rethink the commonly (...) accepted methods for dealing with the logical paradoxes. (shrink)

Vision often dominates other perceptual modalities both at the level of experience and at the level of judgment. In the well-known McGurk effect, for example, one’s auditory experience is consistent with the visual stimuli but not the auditory stimuli, and naïve subjects’ judgments follow their experience. Structurally similar effects occur for other modalities (e.g. rubber hand illusions). Given the robustness of this visual dominance, one might not be surprised that visual imagery often dominates imagery in other modalities. One might be (...) surprised, however, that visual imagery often dominates perception in other modalities. This more controversial claim is motivated both by empirical data and by introspection. Some think of perception-perception visual dominance as epistemically good, holding that cases in which visual dominance misleads us (e.g. McGurk and rubber hand illusions) are cases in which the perceptual system resolves conflicts according to principles that are generally reliable. Here, we explore support for the more controversial claim that imagery-perception visual dominance is epistemically good. We suggest that, when the task is richly spatial, requiring for optimal performance the all-at-once identification of macro-spatial and allocentric properties (e.g. identifying the shape or location of a felt or heard object), the visual, whether perception or imagination, should dominate other modalities. Put another way, when identifying objects, one should go and look or, short of that, visually imagine candidate objects, and then follow the visual, even against conflicting perceptions from other modalities. For this broadly-typed category of of cognitive-perceptual task, vision does dominate and it should. (shrink)

The paper discusses recent proposals by Carroll and Chen, as well as Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati to explain the arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e. the assumption of a special initial state of the universe. After discussing the role of the Past Hypothesis and the controversy about its status, we explain why Carroll's model - which establishes an arrow of time as typical - can ground sensible predictions and retrodictions without assuming something akin to a Past Hypothesis. We (...) then propose a definition of a Boltzmann entropy for a classical N-particle system with gravity, suggesting that a Newtonian gravitating universe might provide a relevant example of Carroll's entropy model. This invites comparison with the work of Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati that identifies typical arrows of time in a relational formulation of classical gravity on shape space. We clarify the difference between this gravitational arrow in terms of shape complexity and the entropic arrow in absolute spacetime, and work out the key advantages of the relationalist theory. We end by pointing out why the entropy concept relies on absolute scales and is thus not relational. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ original ‘impairment argument’ against abortion relied on ‘the impairment principle’ (TIP): ‘if it is immoral to impair an organism O to the nth degree, then,ceteris paribus, it is immoral to impair O to the n+1 degree.’ Since death is a bigger impairment than fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), Hendricks reasons that, by TIP, if causing FAS is immoral, then,ceteris paribus, abortion is immoral. Several authors have argued that this conclusion is uninteresting, since theceteris paribusclause is not satisfied in actual (...) cases of abortion: women have reasons for wanting abortions which do not apply to drinking during pregnancy, so all else is not equal, and the conclusion is irrelevant to the morality of actual abortions. In a recent article in this journal, Hendricks and Bruce Blackshaw try to evade this criticism by replacing TIP with the ‘modified impairment principle’ (MIP): ‘if it is immoral to impair an organism O to the nth degree for reason R, then, provided R continues to hold (or is present), it is immoral to impair O to the n+1 degree.’ MIP allows us to derive theultima faciewrongness of abortion (not just itsceteris paribuswrongness) because MIP lacks aceteris paribusclause. But I argue that this lack also renders MIP false: MIP faces counterexamples and implausibly produces genuine moral dilemmas. Since the moral principle on which it relies is false, the modified impairment argument fails. I close by considering what a principle would need to do for the impairment argument to succeed. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered (...) substantially. Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered (...) substantially.Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)

Jörg Hansen, John Horty, and Xavier Parent and Leendert van der Torre have all recently described some sort of nonmonotonic logic to model reasons and their interactions. Horty’s framework is broader in scope than the other two, encompassing both reasoning about the relative strengths of reasons and reasoning about which reasons to consider in the first place. Hansen discusses a plethora of approaches and examples, including Horty’s, arguing that his preferred system best captures our intuitions. And Parent and van der (...) Torre present a family of systems of input/output logic, which are in some ways the most flexible. In this paper, I aim to combine these features. Without attempting to answer the question of which intuitions are the best to capture, I first argue that there are good reasons to explore systems that behave more like Hansen’s than Horty’s. I then show that Parent and van der Torre’s framework of input/output logic can exactly duplicate Hansen’s system but is flexible enough to produce other results as well. Finally, I extend their framework to include the additional kinds of reasoning Horty discusses, showing that the resulting theory can handle a wider range of cases than Horty’s. (shrink)

Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the informational encapsulation of modules, as it (...) is the case for modularity theories of perception, then modules are on this account impenetrable. However, we argue that there are genuine cases of the cognitive penetrability of perception and that these cases challenge any strong, encapsulated modular architecture of perception. Second, many recent massive modularity theories weaken the strength of the notion of module, while broadening the scope of modularity. These theories do not require any robust informational encapsulation, and thus avoid the incompatibility with cognitive penetrability. However, the weakened commitment to informational encapsulation greatly weakens the explanatory force of the theory and, ultimately, is conceptually at odds with the core of modularity. (shrink)

IntroductionStress is associated with disease and reduced leukocyte telomere length. The objective of this research is to determine if self-perceived stress is associated with telomere length in Costa Rican adults and the gender differences in this association. Findings may help explain how some populations in apparent socioeconomic disadvantage and with limited access to specialized medical services have a remarkably high life expectancy.MethodologyData come from the pre-retirement cohort of the Costa Rican Longevity and Healthy Aging Study, a population based survey conducted (...) in the households to 2,327 adults aged 53 to 66 years. The DNA to measure LTL was extracted from blood cells in laboratories of the University of Costa Rica whereas the Blackburn laboratory at the University of California performed the telomere length measurement applying the quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The relationship between telomere length and perceived stress was measured using least-squares multiple regression. Perceived stress was measured by a set of questions about family, job, finances and, health reasons to be stressed. Models included the control variables: age and sex of the participant, whether he or she resides in the Nicoya area, a “blue zone” known for its high longevity, and the aforementioned sociodemographic, health and lifestyles characteristics.ResultsStress perception and LTL are significantly different by sex. Women perceived higher stress levels than men in almost all aspects studied, except work. Women have significantly longer telomeres. Shorter telomeres are significantly associated with caregiving stress in men and with parental health concerns in women. Counter-intuitive telomere lengthenings were observed among women who feel stressed about caring for family members; and among men who feel stressed due to their family relationships as well as concerns about their own health.DiscussionResults confirm that people with self-perceived stress due to caregiving or health issues have shorter telomeres. The relationship between stress and telomere length differs between men and women. Gender relations exert a strong modifier effect on the relationship between stress and LTL: gender is related to perceived stress, telomere length, and apparently also to the way stress and LTL are related. (shrink)