© 2016 Regents of the University of California.The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous (...) tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including those on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group. The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. (shrink)

A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream scepticism, (...) and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge. (shrink)

Humans routinely make inferences about both the contents and the workings of other minds based on observed actions. People consider what others want or know, but also how intelligent, rational, or attentive they might be. Here, we introduce a new methodology for quantitatively studying the mechanisms people use to attribute intelligence to others based on their behavior. We focus on two key judgments previously proposed in the literature: judgments based on observed outcomes (you're smart if you won the game) and (...) judgments based on evaluating the quality of an agent's planning that led to their outcomes (you're smart if you made the right choice, even if you didn't succeed). We present a novel task, the maze search task (MST), in which participants rate the intelligence of agents searching a maze for a hidden goal. We model outcome‐based attributions based on the observed utility of the agent upon achieving a goal, with higher utilities indicating higher intelligence, and model planning‐based attributions by measuring the proximity of the observed actions to an ideal planner, such that agents who produce closer approximations of optimal plans are seen as more intelligent. We examine human attributions of intelligence in three experiments that use MST and find that participants used both outcome and planning as indicators of intelligence. However, observing the outcome was not necessary, and participants still made planning‐based attributions of intelligence when the outcome was not observed. We also found that the weights individuals placed on plans and on outcome correlated with an individual's ability to engage in cognitive reflection. Our results suggest that people attribute intelligence based on plans given sufficient context and cognitive resources and rely on the outcome when computational resources or context are limited. (shrink)

This paper examines narrativism’s claim that the historical past cannot be known once and for all because it must be continuously re-described from the standpoint of the present. We argue that this claim is based on a non sequitur. We take narrativism’s claim that the past must be re-described continuously from the perspective of the present to be the result of the following train of thought: 1) “all knowledge is conceptually mediated”; 2) “the conceptual framework through which knowledge of reality (...) is mediated changes with every new generation of historians”; therefore (narrativism’s claim) “the historical past changes with every new generation of historians”. The idea of an unchanging past, for the narrativist, requires denying premise 1 (all knowledge is conceptually mediated”) and therefore rests on a problematic commitment to the chimerical notion of the past as it is in-itself, wie es eigentlich gewesen. We argue that the narrativist’s conclusion does not follow unless one adds a further premise, namely 3) “it is not possible to view reality through the categorial framework of historical agents”. If one asserts the possibility of grasping reality through the categorial framework of others, be they contemporary or past agents (as much philosophy of history written in an idealist key does), then one no longer has to accept the narrativist’s inference that since the past cannot be known in-itself or independently of conceptual mediation, then it cannot be known as it always was for the historical agents. Narrativism’s inference that the past cannot be known as it always was does not follow from premises 1 and 2 unless one smuggles in another problematic premise, premise 3. In this paper we defend the claim that the past can be known as it always was (not as it is in-itself) by invoking a different conception of the role of conceptual mediation in historical knowledge, one which assumes the possibility of viewing reality through the categorial framework of others. This notion of the role of conceptual mediation in historical knowledge is prevalent in the idealist tradition but, in the interest of brevity, we will defend this notion of mediacy by specific reference to the idealist philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. (shrink)

The Church of England By Law Established, in incidental payment for secular privilege, has submitted to the bonds of established clichá, in particular to the reproach that its rulers seem more concerned with the external or practical working of Anglican faith and ritual than with their intellectual definition and justification. This intellectual looseness remained unimportant in practice as long as a forceful anti–Roman spirit blew all waves of opinion in one practical direction. In time, however, that wind gradually lost force (...) and positive cross–currents of Anglican belief came to the public surface. The legislators of the sixteenth century had formulated the positive rules of the Thirty–Nine Articles and the Prayer Book in tolerantly broad language. They left no decisive teaching authority to explain their texts and to meet the challenge of shifting ritual and speculative doubt. Time has subjected both instruments to an everwidening range of individual interpretation especially since the early nineteenth century, when the Anglican monopoly of political, social and educational institutions was disputed by fresh tides of Protestant dissenters, renascent Catholics and nascent agnostics. To–day, as Mr. Cockshut wryly comments: “to throw doubt on the Anglican formularies is itself part of the Anglican tradition”. (shrink)

The meticulous printing at a moderate price of this remarkable work is a credit to the publisher. During the past thirty years M. Gilson has been the greatest single influence upon lay readers in reviving serious interest in the clerical speculation, which for twelve hundred years conscientiously spanned the gap between the collapse of Greek science and Roman law and the late sweep of modern sciences and their secular philosophies. Preoccupation with short-term apologetics after the Reformation increased clerical aloofness from (...) professional science and philosophy and probably increased the non-scholastic’s assumption that the Christian Era was merely a dark or middle age between ancient and modern intellectual life. In fact, early and medieval thinkers gradually confronted their Christian faith and pagan science and against the basso ostinato of secular warfare developed the varied themes of scientific theology and human philosophy, which crystallized into the mature Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. Hence the seventeenth century founders of modern philosophy, as M. Gilson first found à propos of Descartes, started to philosophize from a metaphysical inheritance much richer than the original Greek patrimony, especially in the light it cast upon the reality of God, the origin of the universe in which man lives, the nature and destiny of man himself. To overlook this linking inheritance, is to make modern philosophy less intelligible; while to personally judge its value, we must return to its historical sources. This is the task to which M. Gilson has devoted his pioneering judgment; this work is probably the final synthesis of his scholarship. (shrink)