It is impossible to hold patently contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Why? Because we know that it is impossible for both to be true. This impossibility is a species of rational necessity, a phenomenon that uniquely characterizes the relation between one person's beliefs. Here, Eric Marcus argues that the unity of the rational mind--what makes it one mind--is what explains why, given what we already believe, we can't believe certain things and must believe certain others in this (...) special sense. What explains this is that beliefs, and the inferences by which we acquire them, are constituted by a particular kind of endorsement of those very states and acts. This, in turn, entails that belief and inference are essentially self-conscious: to hold a belief or to make an inference is at the same time to know that one does. An examination of the nature of belief and inference, in light of the phenomenon of rational necessity, reveals how the unity of the rational mind is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true. Rational self-consciousness is the form of mental togetherness. (shrink)

Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence. Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in (...) the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy! does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do? Taking inspiration from the human mind, Marcus and Davis explain what we need to advance AI to the next level, and suggest that if we are wise along the way, we won't need to worry about a future of machine overlords. If we focus on endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding, rather than simply focusing on statistical analysis and gatherine ever larger collections of data, we will be able to create an AI we can trust--in our homes, our cars, and our doctors' offices. Rebooting AI provides a lucid, clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how a new generation of AI can make our lives better. (shrink)

Why should music be of interest to cognitive scientists, and what role does it play in human cognition? We review three factors that make music an important topic for cognitive scientific research. First, music is a universal human trait fulfilling crucial roles in everyday life. Second, music has an important part to play in ontogenetic development and human evolution. Third, appreciating and producing music simultaneously engage many complex perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes, rendering music an ideal object for studying the (...) mind. We propose an integrated status for music cognition in the Cognitive Sciences and conclude by reviewing challenges and big questions in the field and the way in which these reflect recent developments. (shrink)

I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they _must_ involve first-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, _cannot_. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have unwittingly conflated imagining a creature who lacks consciousness with imagining a creature without also imagining the consciousness it may or may not (...) possess. (shrink)

The result of two key social developments in recent years are examined here: the partial dismantling of the welfare state and the progress of genetics. Genetic insights are increasingly valuable for risk assessment, and insurers would like to use these insights to help determine premiums. Combined with the fact that social welfare is being curtailed, this could potentially create an uninsured high-risk population. Along with considerations of autonomy and privacy, this is the basis for an ethical critique of insurer's access (...) to information. The result has often been regulation of such information; but the authors argues that due to adverse selection, regulation will not solve these problems, and this may jeopardize the survival of private personal insurance. Instead, we should look towards the resurrection of social insurance, a key component of the welfare state. This will interest academic researchers as well as professionals involved with genetics and insurance. (shrink)

The Golden Rule has received remarkably little philosophical discussion. No book has ever been written on it, and articles devoted to it have been exceedingly few, and usually not very searching. It is usually mentioned, where it is mentioned at all, only in passing, and most of these passing remarks have either been false, trite, or misleading, though some of them, as we shall see, have certainly been interesting enough. Considering its obvious importance and its almost universal acceptance, this dearth (...) of philosophical discussion is unfortunate, and also somewhat surprising. One of the things I hope to show about it, though only incidentally, is that there are problems connected with it of the utmost subtlety, worthy of the attention of even the most minute philosophers. (shrink)

Dans cet entretien, Marcus Rediker décrit comment certains combats d’hier (l’anti-esclavagisme) ou d’aujourd’hui (la lutte contre la peine de mort et les biais du système juridique contre les populations afro-américaines) sont parvenus à mobiliser des forces très hétérogènes autour de revendications unificatrices. Il souligne le besoin de pratiquer un certain travail d’agitation, parfois nourri par de sentiments de colère et dynamisé par des slogans qui ne simplifient la réalité que pour l’orienter vers sa nécessaire transformation.

Excerpt from De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum: Libri Quinque About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We (...) do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

It has been suggested that a substitutional semantics for quantification theory lends itself to nominalistic aims. I should like in this paper to explore that claim.

This article shows how the legacy of Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851), and his discovery of electromagnetism in 1820, was reconfigured and used by the H.C. english abstracts Ørsted Committee from 1914 before and during the centenary of 1920. Combining Somsen’s (2008) concept of olympic internationalism with uses of the past, I suggest understanding the 1920-centenary as an instance of olympic commemoration [olympisk historiebrug]. I argue that central actors from the committee, e.g. Martin Knudsen (1871-1949) and Kirstine Meyer, née Bjerrum (1861-1941), (...) used Ørsted's nationality to substantiate Denmark’s cultural and scientific achievements. By comparison to pre-twentieth century biographies, I show how the committee re-described Ørsted, i.e. from a scientist [Naturforsker] to being a Danish scientist [dansk Naturforsker]. The committee was deeply concerned with proving the big contributions by the small nation of Denmark, and I show how this relates to cultural politics of the early twentieth century Denmark. (shrink)

The indispensability argument is sometimes seen as weakened by its reliance on a controversial premise of confirmation holism. Recently, some philosophers working on the indispensability argument have developed versions of the argument which, they claim, do not rely on holism. Some of these writers even claim to have strengthened the argument by eliminating the controversial premise. I argue that the apparent removal of holism leaves a lacuna in the argument. Without the holistic premise, or some other premise which facilitates the (...) transfer of evidence to mathematical portions of scientific theories, the argument is implausible. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to examine the possible relationships between the different dimensions of aesthetics on the one hand, and medical practice and medical ethics on the other hand. Firstly, I consider whether the aesthetic perception of the human body is relevant for medical practice. Secondly, a possible analogy between the artistic process and medical action is examined. The third section concerns the comparison between medical ethical judgements and aesthetic judgement of taste. It is concluded that the mutual (...) relevance between the aesthetic sphere, moral judgement and medical practice can be understood only if we recognize these spheres as distinct. (shrink)

Two principles are central to Rational Causation. Causalism: Believing and acting for a reason are causal phenomena in the sense that there is in both domains a causal connection between ground and grounded. Equivalence: There is a necessary connection between something's being the reason why I believe or act and my taking it to favour the belief or action. Kieran Setiya argues that Causalism is false in the theoretical case and that Equivalence is false in the practical case. I reply (...) to these and other arguments. (shrink)

Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VII.

Originally published in 1984, this book broke new ground in assessing Freud as both an exemplary late-Victorian and as a pivotal figure in the creation of modern thought and culture. In his close reading of various of Freud’s theoretical and clinical texts, including two of the most famous case histories, Steven Marcus uncovers the steps in the development of Freud’s thought, the dynamics and contradictions and ‘the intellectual and emotional urgings, forces and conflicts that were at work… as the (...) first original insights and discoveries that constituted the inception of psychoanalysis as a theory, discipline of inquiry, and new kind of therapy, came suddenly, often unexpectedly and without being bidden, upon Freud’. Central to Professor Marcus’ inquiry is the relationship of Freud’s work to cultural change and to the very process of disclosure, formation and construction in the transition to modernity. Freud’s writings, and the psychoanalytic discipline of which they are the foundations, are placed in the context of their contribution to modern modes of thought, and of their influence on our notions of the centres of significance of each existence as a whole. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis is a major contribution to our understanding of how ideas and theories become internalized into the intellectual framework of our lives and affect the way we think about the world. By moving backward and forward from pre-Freudian to post-Freudian thinkers, Professor Marcus takes us on a journey through cultural transition that is also an exploration of how the individual interacts with his own moment in history to forge new modes of consciousness. (shrink)

The new explanatory or enhanced indispensability argument alleges that our mathematical beliefs are justified by their indispensable appearances in scientific explanations. This argument differs from the standard indispensability argument which focuses on the uses of mathematics in scientific theories. I argue that the new argument depends for its plausibility on an equivocation between two senses of explanation. On one sense the new argument is an oblique restatement of the standard argument. On the other sense, it is vulnerable to an instrumentalist (...) response. Either way, the explanatory indispensability argument is no improvement on the standard one. (shrink)

O presente artigo se propõe a uma análise das possibilidades de se alcançar a justiça no mundo pós-moderno, apresentando um estudo que dá suas noções iniciais, reflete sobre o itinerário a ser seguido para tal e alguns dos dilemas que impedem sua concretização.

Proof assistants are software-based tools that are used in the mechanization of proof construction and validation in mathematics and computer science, and also in certified program development. Different such tools are being increasingly used in order to accelerate and simplify proof checking, and the Coq proof assistant is one of the most well known and used in large-scale projects. Language and automata theory is a well-established area of mathematics, relevant to computer science foundations and information technology. In particular, context-free language (...) theory is of fundamental importance in the analysis, design, and implementation of computer programming languages. This work describes a formalization effort, using the Coq proof assistant, of fundamental results of the classical theory of contextfree grammars and languages. These include closure properties (union, concatenation, and Kleene star), grammar simplification (elimination of useless symbols, inaccessible symbols, empty rules, and unit rules), the existence of a Chomsky Normal Form for context-free grammars and the Pumping Lemma for context-free languages. The result is an important set of libraries covering the main results of context-free language theory, with more than 500 lemmas and theorems fully proved and checked. As it turns out, this is a comprehensive formalization of the classical context-free language theory in the Coq proof assistant and includes the formalization of the Pumping Lemma for context-free languages. The perspectives for the further development of this work are diverse and can be grouped in three different areas: inclusion of new devices and results, code extraction, and general enhancements of its libraries. (shrink)

Examines the social and ethical aspects of science and argues that research should incorporate social responsibility, democratic principles, and ethical standards.

The debate over whether we should believe that mathematical objects exist quickly leads to the question of how to determine what we should believe. Indispensabilists claim that we should believe in the existence of mathematical objects because of their ineliminable roles in scientific theory. Eleatics argue that only objects with causal properties exist. Mark Colyvan’s recent defenses of Quine’s indispensability argument against some contemporary eleatics attempt to provide reasons to favor the indispensabilist’s criterion. I show that Colyvan’s argument is not (...) decisive against the eleatic and sketch a way to capture the important intuitions behind both views. (shrink)

Electoral representation is a cornerstone of contemporary democracy. Democracy today is widely interpreted to mean that the people governs itself through electing officials of government. But while...

The author, who lived in Berkeley, California during the disruptions of 1968, remembers the year as one of bad faith, though also of a sense of making history. He recalls the events of that year (and of 1964) in Berkeley, where he still lives, then moves out into related events in the rest of the world, but also into more lastingly important events in popular culture, especially popular music. He concludes by memorializing what now appears to him the most important (...) event of all, certain records broken that year in sports. (shrink)

Inspired by a mathematical ecology of thearre (M. Dinu) and the eco-grammar systems (E. Csuhaj-Varju et al.), this paper gives a brief analysis of simple cellular automata games in order to demonstrate their primary semiotic features. In particular, the behaviour of configurations in Conway's game of life is compared to several general features of Uexküll's concept of Umwelt. It is concluded that ecological processes have a fundamental semiotic dimension.

Relational Grammar (RG) was introduced in the 1970s as a theory of grammatical relations and relation change, for example, passivization, dative shift, and raising. Furthermore, the idea behind RG was that transformations as originally designed in generative grammar were unable to capture the common kernel of, e.g., passivization across languages. The researchconducted within RG has uncovered a wealth of phenomena for which it could produce a satisfactory analysis. Although the theory of Government and Binding has answered some of the complaints, (...) still it left many phenomena unaccounted for. Referent Systems (RSs) have been introduced by Vermeulen (1995) to overcome certain weaknesses of Dynamic Semantics. Their usefulness has not yet been realized in semantical theory. We shall show here that their significance cannot be overestimated. Namely, we will show in this paper that there exists a fundamental affinity to RG. Both handle the relation between an argument and a functor by means of a shared relational sign, which is unique for each argument. This assignment can be changed. What is interesting is that the notion of a chômeur, which is central to RG, finds a natural treatment in RSs. This coincidence is in our view not accidental but reveals some fundamental properties of the human language faculty. (shrink)