We model scientific theories as Bayesian networks. Nodes carry credences and function as abstract representations of propositions within the structure. Directed links carry conditional probabilities and represent connections between those propositions. Updating is Bayesian across the network as a whole. The impact of evidence at one point within a scientific theory can have a very different impact on the network than does evidence of the same strength at a different point. A Bayesian model allows us to envisage and analyze the (...) differential impact of evidence and credence change at different points within a single network and across different theoretical structures. (shrink)

Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont—excursions informed by the worldview he's imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and ...

A new translation of one of the great koan collections--by the premier translator of the Chinese classics--that reveals it to be a literary and philosophical masterwork beyond its association with Chan/Zen. Zen is famous for its koans, those seemingly confounding statements, questions, or stories that masters use to gauge their students' practice. Here, the lauded modern master of Chinese poetry translation asks us to reimagine one of the greatest of the koan collections in a new way: as a classic of (...) Chinese philosophical literature in the tradition of the Tao Te Ching or the Chuang Tzu. He presents the No-Gate Gateway (variously also familiar to readers as the Mumonkan, Wu-men Kuan, Gateless Gate, or Gateless Barrier), in a "bare bones" version, without the usual additional commentary, not intended to be studied in the usual case-by-case method, but to be read as a complete work in itself, one that leads the reader carefully on a path to the discovery of the deep nature of reality--an unconventional way of reading it that can be truly revelatory. (shrink)

Background. Responsible clinical research drives the advancement of healthcare. Despite tremendous improvements in the globalresearch and development environment since the 1950s, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often left behind. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, operational, social, ethical and regulatory challenges in LMICs make it difficult for researchers to conduct clinical studies in those settings in line with international requirements. Secondly, many people living in low-resource settings distrust research because some past studies have not benefited the participants or (...) the communities involved.Objectives. To present the consensus recommendations by a Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) Working Group on how to advance good-quality, ethical clinical research in resource-limited settings.Methods. CIOMS convened a Working Group of senior scientists from drug regulatory authorities, the pharmaceutical industry, publicprivate partnerships for product development, and academia.Results. This article summarises the Working Group’s report.Conclusion. The report recommendations can foster the creation of a more enabling ecosystem for clinical research and promotecollaboration between policymakers, regulators, researchers and funders. (shrink)

Michael Otsuka sets out to vindicate left-libertarianism, a political philosophy which combines stringent rights of control over one's own mind, body, and life with egalitarian rights of ownership of the world. Otsuka reclaims the ideas of John Locke from the libertarian Right, and shows how his Second Treatise of Government provides the theoretical foundations for a left-libertarianism which is both more libertarian and more egalitarian than the Kantian liberal theories of John Rawls and Thomas Nagel. Otsuka's libertarianism is founded on (...) a right of self-ownership. Here he is at one with 'right-wing' libertarians, such as Robert Nozick, in endorsing the highly anti-paternalistic and anti-moralistic implications of this right. But he parts company with these libertarians in so far as he argues that such a right is compatible with a fully egalitarian principle of equal opportunity for welfare. In embracing this principle, his own version of left-libertarianism is more strongly egalitarian than others which are currently well known. Otsuka argues that an account of legitimate political authority based upon the free consent of each is strengthened by the adoption of such an egalitarian principle. He defends a pluralistic, decentralized ideal of political society as a confederation of voluntary associations. Part I of Libertarianism without Inequality concerns the natural rights of property in oneself and the world. Part II considers the natural rights of punishment and self-defence that form the basis for the government's authority to legislate and punish. Part III explores the nature and limits of the powers of governments which are created by the consensual transfer of the natural rights of the governed. Libertarianism without Inequality is a book which everyone interested in political theory should read. (shrink)

Abstract Contemporary egalitarians often appeal to a distinction between inequalities issuing from choice as opposed to those stemming from brute luck. Inequalities of the second kind, they say, ought to be redressed, while those of the former may be allowed to stand. In this paper, I scrutinize the role played by the notion of brute luck in Ronald Dworkin's theory of equality. My intention is to show that Dworkin seeks to occupy what turns out to be an untenable middle position. (...) He is sandwiched unhappily between G. A. Cohen's radical brute luck egalitarianism, on the one side, and a non-egalitarian conception of justice that rejects entirely the appeal to brute luck, on the other. It follows from the untenable nature of Dworkin's position that egalitarians face a much starker choice than he realizes. They should either wholeheartedly embrace the brute luck story or else find another way of grounding their position. (shrink)

1. The benefits resulting from a combination of quantitative (e.g. probabilistic) and qualitative (e.g. logic-based) reasoning are widely acknowledged (e.g. see Domingos et al., 2006; Poole, 2011)....

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that attention to emotions around climate change can play for third sector climate change engagement initiatives, an area to which the literature on such initiatives has paid little attention. It focuses on Carbon Conversations, a programme that explicitly acknowledges the role of difficult emotions and underlying values in people's engagement with climate change. While there are limitations to this approach, results show that it can help certain audiences engage more deeply with issues around climate change (...) and carbon reduction. Important lessons can be drawn for other initiatives that aim to engage the public on climate change. (shrink)

À une époque où l'on constate la présence massive des femmes dans le monde public, féminisant la culture, Yvonne Knibiehler lance son défi provocant : comment les femmes peuvent-t-elles contribuer à faire avancer la réflexion sur les questions de la sexualité, notamment en ce qui concerne les relations entre les sexes et l'éducation sexuelle des jeunes, alors que la fête libératrice de la Révolution sexuelle est finie? Comment construire au présent une éducation des jeunes à la sexual...

Part I is about valuing fairness, II chiefly about not valuing it. Equally, I is about knowing fairness or taking yourself to know what it is, while II is chiefly about not knowing what it is: absolutely not knowing what it is, or not knowing what it is except when it is thought of in a narrow way. I want to know what all those states involve, e.g. whether knowing what fairness is involves valuing it, and most of all whether (...) those two aforesaid ways of not knowing what fairness is involve some knowably undesirable kind of ignorance; in that sense, incur a cognitive penal sanction. But I begin elsewhere. (shrink)

The statement, that these or those philosophers do not accept the distinction between what is, and what is not, ?given? in perception, has very little content; and should receive only a corresponding degree of emphasis.

An amazing value for digital photography beginners–Digital Cameras & Photography For Dummies, a full-color book, plus a 60-minute DVD! This value-priced bundle is the perfect how-to package for novice digital photographers who want to start taking great pictures right away. It features a 256-page, full-color guide that shows how to take great photos, edit them, and show them off–including special "makeover" chapters that explain how to turn bad photos into good ones. The 60-minute DVD demonstrates how to work with light, (...) focus, and exposure to get great photos when shooting sports action, in low light, or a panorama. It also offers tutorials on editing with Photoshop Elements and sharing photos using online services. (shrink)

Someone who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself: 'How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?' He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely common that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of (...) them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something 'inner', is one on which recent logico-linguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light. The relevant special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, 'an event of which one is the subject'. This book explores the concept of experiences, focusing on the disjunctions between perception and illusion. (shrink)

Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative (...) outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme. (shrink)

A visual imagery task is presented which is beyond the limits of normal human ability, and some of the factors contributing to its difficulty are isolated by comparing the difficulty of related tasks. It is argued that complex objects are assigned hierarchical structural descriptions by being parsed into parts, each of which has its own local system of significant directions. Two quite different schemas for a wire‐frame cube are used to illustrate this theory, and some striking perceptual differences to which (...) they give rise are described. The difficulty of certain mental imagery tasks is shown to depend on which of the alternative structural descriptions of an object is used, and this is interpreted as evidence that structural descriptions are an important component of mental images. Finally, it is argued that analog transformations like mental folding involve changing the values of continuous variables in a structural description. (shrink)

In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent (...) in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences. (shrink)