In recent work MacPherson argues that the standard method of modeling belief logically, as a necessity operator in a modal logic, is doomed to fail. The problem with normal modal logics as logics of belief is that they treat believers as "ideal" in unrealistic ways (i.e., as omnidoxastic); however, similar problems re-emerge for candidate non-normal logics. The authors argue that logics used to model belief in artificial intelligence (AI) are also flawed in this way. But for AI systems, omnidoxasticity is (...) impossible because of their finite nature, and this fact can be exploited to produce operational models of fallible belief. The relevance of this point to various philosophical views about belief is discussed. (shrink)

Discussions of the theory and practice of systematics and evolutionary biology have heretofore revolved around the views of philosophers of science. I reexamine these issues from the different perspective of the philosophy of history. Just as philosophers of history distinguish between chronicle (non-interpretive or non-explanatory writing) and narrative history (interpretive or explanatory writing), I distinguish between evolutionary chronicle (cladograms, broadly construed) and narrative evolutionary history. Systematics is the discipline which estimates the evolutionary chronicle. ¶ Explanations of the events described in (...) the evolutionary chronicle are not of the covering-law type described by philosophers of science, but rather of the how-possibly, continuous series, and integrating types described by philosophers of history. Pre-evolutionary explanations of states (in contrast to chroniclar events) are still widespread in "evolutionary" biology, however, because evolutionary chronicles are in general poorly known. To the extent that chronicles are known, the narrative evolutionary histories based on them are structured like conventional historical narratives, in that they treat their central subjects as ontological individuals. This conventional treatment is incorrect. The central subjects of evolutionary narratives are clades, branched entities which have some of the properties of individuals and some of the properties of classes. Our unconscious treatment of the subjects of evolutionary narratives as individuals has been the cause of erroneous notions of progress in evolution, and of views that taxa "develop" ontogenetically in ways analogous to individual organisms. We must rewrite our narrative evolutionary histories so that they properly represent the branching nature of evolution, and we must reframe our evolutionary philosophies so that they properly reflect the historical nature of our subject. (shrink)

The species problem is one of the oldest controversies in natural history. Its persistence suggests that it is something more than a problem of fact or definition. Considerable light is shed on the species problem when it is viewed as a problem in the representation of the natural system (sensu Griffiths, 1974, Acta Biotheor. 23: 85–131; de Queiroz, 1998, Philos. Sci. 55: 238–259). Just as maps are representations of the earth, and are subject to what is called cartographic generalization, so (...) diagrams of the natural system (evolutionary trees) are representations of the evolutionary chronicle, and are subject to a temporal version of cartographic generalization which may be termed systematic generalization. Cartographic generalization is based on judgements of geographical importance, and systematic generalization is based on judgements of historical importance, judgements expressed in narrative sentences (sensu Danto, 1985, Narration and knowledge, Columbia Univ. Press, New York). At higher systematic levels these narrative sentences are conventional and retrospective, but near the "species" level they become prospective, that is, dependent upon expectations of the future. The truth of prospective narrative sentences is logically indeterminable in the present, and since all the common species concepts depend upon prospective narration, it is impossible for any of them to be applied with precision. (shrink)

Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view (...) had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. (shrink)

This chapter compares the social behaviour of human hunter-gatherers with that of the better-studied chimpanzee species, Pan troglodytes, in an attempt to pinpoint the unique features of human social evolution. Although hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees living in central Africa have similar body weights, humans live at much lower population densities due to their greater dependence on predation. Human foraging parties have longer duration than those of chimpanzees, lasting hours rather than minutes, and a higher level of mutual dependence, through the division (...) of labour between men and women ; which is in turn related to pair-bonding, and meat sharing to reduce the risk of individual hunters' failure on any particular day. The band appears to be a uniquely human social unit that resolves the tension between greater dispersion and greater interdependence. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

The same attitudes that allowed a significant increase in the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations that are causing climate change are the same attitudes that are retarding an adequate ethical response to the impact that climate change is having on both human populations and the rest of the planet. The industrialized nations of the West paid little attention during the past three centuries to the impacts that their economies and cultures were having on the environment, both locally and globally. There (...) was an underlying belief that the planet could indefinitely absorb the wastes of manufacturing, and the natural resources that were fuelling industrialization were seemingly endless if not actually .. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were two-dimensional, (...) and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century. (shrink)

The following theorems are proved about the Frattini-free componentG Φ of a soluble stable ℜ-group: a) If it has a normal subgroupN with nilpotent quotientG Φ/N, then there is a nilpotent subgroupH ofG Φ withG Φ=NH. b) It has Carter subgroups; if the group is small, they are all conjugate. c) Nilpotency modulo a suitable Frattini-subgroup (to be defined) implies nilpotency. The last result makes use of a new structure theorem for the centre of the derivative of the Frattini-free component (...) of a centreless soluble ℜ-group. (shrink)

We define an $\mathfrak{R}$-group to be a stable group with the property that a generic element can only be algebraic over a generic. We then derive some corollaries for $\mathfrak{R}$-groups and fields, and prove a decomposition theorem and a field theorem. As a nonsuperstable example, we prove that small stable groups are $\mathfrak{R}$-groups.

We shall define a general notion of dimension, and study groups and rings whose interpretable sets carry such a dimension. In particular, we deduce chain conditions for groups, definability results for fields and domains, and show that a pseudofinite $\widetilde {\mathfrak M}_c$ -group of finite positive dimension contains a finite-by-abelian subgroup of positive dimension, and a pseudofinite group of dimension 2 contains a soluble subgroup of dimension 2.

The joy of intimacy--with yourself, with others, and with the whole universe. The long-awaited first book from a prominent modern American Zen teacher. For Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, intimacy is what Zen practice is all about: the realization of the essential lack of distinction between self and other that inevitably leads to wisdom and compassionate action. She approaches the practice of intimacy beginning at its most basic level--the intimacy with ourselves that is the essential first step. She then shows (...) how to bring intimacy into our relationships with others, starting with those dearest to us and moving on to those who don't seem dear at all. She then shows how to grow in intimacy so that we include everyone around us, all of society, the whole world and all the beings it contains. Each chapter is accompanied by practices she uses with her students at the Village Zendo for manifesting intimacy in our lives. (shrink)

In the eighteenth century the category of the aesthetic sought to bridge the gap between the prevalent dualities of Cartesian thought: art and science, history and science, prejudice and truth. This special issue of _boundary 2_ addresses current debates about the status of art in the context of global modernity. The range of arguments represented here cover a broad historical scope—from Cartesianism to present-day global modernity—of cultural discourse on the aesthetic to bring a focus to contemporary discussions of the corollary (...) concepts of beauty, virtue, taste, and truth. These essays present a rich and provocative account of the place of the aesthetic in late-twentieth-century culture. Included in this volume are considerations of the relation between theories of art and the avant-garde; art’s relation to cognition; the aesthetic as history; the aesthetic as a unique access to modernity; and its impact on problems of identity formation, ideology, and resistances to the institutional powers inherent in dominant social formations. _Contributors. _Charles Altieri, Peter Burger, David Carroll, Anthony J. Cascardi, Howard Caygill, Allen Dunn, Eric Gans, Agnes Heller, Ronald A. T. Judy, Marie-Rose Logan, Daniel T. O’Hara, Donald E. Pease, Alan Singer. (shrink)

In this article, the rotational invariance of entangled quantum states is investigated as a possible cause of the Pauli exclusion principle. First, it is shown that a certain class of rotationally invariant states can only occur in pairs. This is referred to as the coupling principle. This in turn suggests a natural classification of quantum systems into those containing coupled states and those that do not. Surprisingly, it would seem that Fermi–Dirac statistics follows as a consequence of this coupling while (...) the Bose–Einstein follows by breaking it. In Sec. 5, the above approach is related to Pauli's original spin-statistics theorem and finally in the last two sections, a theoretical justification, based on Clebsch–Gordan coefficients and the experimental evidence respectively, is presented. (shrink)

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell's name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. "Miocene" and "Pliocene," "uniformitarian" and "catastrophist," "anode" and "cathode," even the word "scientist" itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another word (...) he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to pronounce. This word, "palaetiology," was the name Whewell gave to the class of sciences that are concerned with historical causation: the class we might today refer to as historical sciences. Although the disciplines Whewell included under the heading of palaetiology might seem to cut across conventional academic boundaries of his day and ours—his exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology—all these fields may be examined together, Whewell argued, because of their common interest in reconstructing the past. ¶ This paper is an essay in the palaetiological sciences, dedicated to Whewell on the bicentennial of his birth, an essay that examines some of the principles, maxims, and rules of procedure that these sciences have all in common. Its first purpose is to demonstrate the continuing validity of Whewell's classification of these sciences through a study of historical representation in three different palaetiological fields: systematics, historical linguistics, and textual transmission. Its second purpose is to continue the development of an extended analogy between historical representation and cartographic representation that I began in an earlier paper (O'Hara, 1993, Systematic Biology), an analogy that makes especially clear the common representational practices that are found throughout palaetiology. (shrink)

Models of scientific explanation derived from the physical sciences are often poorly suited to the historical sciences—to the fields William Whewell called the palaetiological sciences. A listing of 27 titles that explore the nature of narrative understanding across a range of scientific disciplines—from cosmology to paleontology to economics—attests to the importance of narrative epistemology in the sciences.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin has been one of the most wide-ranging scholars of the twentieth century. He has written extensively on the history and philosophy of the physical, biological, and historical sciences, as well as on logic, ethics, and rhetoric. This listing of more than 100 publications by and about Toulmin is intended to encourage those scholars who may have come to Toulmin's work from only one direction to explore the full range of his research and writing across many different disciplines.

Twenty-three years ago Robert Ayers noticed several brief and intriguing comments on miracles in the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Working with just those scraps of information from the CP, he stitched together a rough but helpful starting point for understanding this aspect of Peirce's religious and scientific thought. In the last few years several more articles on this subject have been written, each filling in a gap left by the others: Ayers' is a theological view, based solely on (...) the CP; later articles fill out Peirce's mathematics and his logic. This paper attempts to fill in a genealogical gap by showing how his thought on miracles is directly related to his dialogues with Plato, Hume, and Lutoslawski. My resources are largely unpublished manuscripts, many of which are fragmentary. I show the relationship between these manuscripts and two key published essays, "Philosophy and the Conduct of Life", and "On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, Especially from Testimonies", and then show how Peirce, in dialogue with Plato, exposes and overcomes the nominalistic and anti- miracle prejudices of historiography in his day. The resulting view of history is fallibilistic, realistic and evolutionary, in which miracles are not violations of laws of nature but are to be expected as evolutionary variations that form part of the ongoing self-revelation of the cosmos. Miracles, like all events in history, must not be viewed prejudicially by adherents or detractors, but must be taken into careful account in the grand induction of history and science. (shrink)

A one-to-one correspondence is established between linearized space-time metrics of general relativity and the wave equations of quantum mechanics. Also, the key role of boundary conditions in distinguishing quantum mechanics from classical mechanics, will emerge naturally from the procedure. Finally, we will find that the methodology will enable us to introduce not only test charges but also test masses by means of gauges.

In CQ n.s 32 , 237, Howard Jacobson comments on Lucretius' expression fingere somnia, for which he can find only two parallels, both later than Lucretius. He suggests that the phrase can best be understood as a reference to the actual practice of dream control, or oneiropompeia, for which he provides several useful references. A fragment of Luciiius, however, provides not only a parallel, but perhaps even a model, for Lucretius' phrase, and for his criticism in 1.102–35 of the lies (...) or fictions of both religious figures and poets. (shrink)

The art of reading as a way of life: an introduction to Nietzsche's truth -- Experiments in creative reading: the Cambridge Nietzsche -- Nietzsche's passion in The gay science: an experiment in creative reading -- Nietzsche's book for all and none: the singularity of Thus spoke Zarathustra -- Ecce homo: Nietzsche's two natures -- Nietzsche's critical vortex: on the global tragedy of theoretical man.

A conceptual analysis of trust in terms of trustworthiness is set out, where trustworthiness is the property of an agent that she does what she claims she will do, and trust is an attitude taken by an agent to another, that the former believes that the latter is trustworthy. This analysis is then used to explore issues in the deployment of trustworthy digital systems online. The ideas of a series of philosophers from the Enlightenment – Hobbes, Burke, Rousseau, Hume, Smith (...) and Kant – are examined in the light of this exploration to suggest how we might proceed in the Digital Enlightenment to ensure that systems are both trustworthy and trusted. (shrink)

Chauncey Wright (1830–1874) was one of the first American philosophers to explore the implications of Charles Darwin's work in evolutionary biology. Wright became a strong supporter of the idea of natural selection and a strong critic of the anti-selectionist and teleological arguments of St. George Jackson Mivart and Herbert Spencer, and he laid the groundwork for the field that is today called evolutionary epistemology. As the mentor of the original Cambridge "Metaphysical Club" (William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Oliver Wendell (...) Holmes, Jr.), Wright was also instrumental in the development of the American school of Pragmatism. Although his analytical brilliance was widely acknowledged, he never became professionally successful, and he died in 1874 in his 45th year. (shrink)

We define a generalized version of CM-triviality, and show that in the presence of enough regular types, or solubility, a stable CM-trivial group is nilpotent-by-finite. A torsion-free small CM-trivial stable group is abelian and connected. The first result makes use of a generalized version of the analysis of bad groups.

This brief notice records anecdotes about Wittgenstein gathered from Br. Herbert Kaden OSB.

We show that a stable groupG satisfying certain commutator conditions is nilpotent. Furthermore, a soluble stable group with generically splitting automorphism of prime order is nilpotent-by-finite. In particular, a soluble stable group with a generic element of prime order is nilpotent-by-finite.

We prove that a stable solvable group G which satisfies xn = 1 generically is of finite exponent dividing some power of n. Furthermore, G is nilpotent-by-finite. A second result is that in a stable group of finite exponent, involutions either have big centralisers, or invert a subgroup of finite index (which hence has to be abelian).

We define a reasonably well-behaved class of ultraimaginaries, i.e. classes modulo [Formula: see text]-invariant equivalence relations, called tame, and establish some basic simplicity-theoretic facts. We also show feeble elimination of supersimple ultraimaginaries: If [Formula: see text] is an ultraimaginary definable over a tuple [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text], then [Formula: see text] is eliminable up to rank [Formula: see text]. Finally, we prove some uniform versions of the weak canonical base property.