Sketching is a powerful means of working out and communicating ideas. Sketch understanding involves a combination of visual, spatial, and conceptual knowledge and reasoning, which makes it both challenging to model and potentially illuminating for cognitive science. This paper describes CogSketch, an ongoing effort of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, which is being developed both as a research instrument for cognitive science and as a platform for sketch-based educational software. We describe the idea of open-domain sketch understanding, the (...) scientific hypotheses underlying CogSketch, and provide an overview of the models it employs, illustrated by simulation studies and ongoing experiments in creating sketch-based educational software. (shrink)

Evans’ 1968 ANALOGY system was the first computer model of analogy. This paper demonstrates that the structure mapping model of analogy, when combined with high‐level visual processing and qualitative representations, can solve the same kinds of geometric analogy problems as were solved by ANALOGY. Importantly, the bulk of the computations are not particular to the model of this task but are general purpose: We use our existing sketch understanding system, CogSketch, to compute visual structure that is used by our existing (...) analogical matcher, Structure Mapping Engine (SME). We show how SME can be used to facilitate high‐level visual matching, proposing a role for structural alignment in mental rotation. We show how second‐order analogies over differences computed via analogies between pictures provide a more elegant model of the geometric analogy task. We compare our model against human data on a set of problems, showing that the model aligns well with both the answers chosen by people and the reaction times required to choose the answers. (shrink)

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear an influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, raising their ideas to a new level (...) of sophistication, but ultimately he became their successor rather than remain a mere acolyte. (shrink)

Reliabilism—the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process—is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is (...) a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs. (shrink)

In the egoism philosophical framework, it is contended that when organizations focus on their long-term interests, they, without knowing it, advance the interests of society as a whole, which is perceived as ethical. In this research, this premise is challenged using data collected from the social media outlets of 29 randomly selected companies from the 2013 Fortune 500 list. Through qualitative comparative analysis, the exact opposite was found. In fact, the organizations that focused on striving for their long-term success are (...) perceived as unethical. It was also found that socially responsible organizations are perceived as ethical whereas those that misrepresent their positions and attempt to influence the decisions of others are perceived as unethical. Implications for managers are discussed, and future directions are suggested. (shrink)

We consider how cue-reading, sensory-manipulation, and signaling games may initially evolve from ritualized decisions and how more complex games may evolve from simpler games by polymerization, template transfer, and modular composition. Modular composition is a process that combines simpler games into more complex games. Template transfer, a process by which a game is appropriated to a context other than the one in which it initially evolved, is one mechanism for modular composition. And polymerization is a particularly salient example of modular (...) composition where simpler games evolve to form more complex chains. We also consider how the evolution of new capacities by modular composition may be more efficient than evolving those capacities from basic decisions. (shrink)

This article considers how a generalized signalling game may self-assemble as the saliences of the agents evolve by reinforcement on those sources of information that in fact lead to successful action. On the present account, generalized signalling games self-assemble even as the agents co-evolve meaningful representations and successful dispositions for using those representations. We will see how reinforcement on successful information sources also provides a mechanism whereby simpler games might compose to form more complex games. Along the way, I consider (...) how an old game might be appropriated to a new context by reinforcement on successful associations between old and new saliences. (shrink)

A fascinating study of moral languages and their discontents, Ethics after Babel explains the links that connect contemporary moral philosophy, religious ethics, and political thought in clear, cogent, even conversational prose. Princeton's paperback edition of this award-winning book includes a new postscript by the author that responds to the book's noted critics, Stanley Hauerwas and the late Alan Donagan. In answering his critics, Jeffrey Stout clarifies the book's arguments and offers fresh reasons for resisting despair over the prospects of (...) democratic discourse. (shrink)

Ryan Tonkens has issued a seemingly impossible challenge, to articulate a comprehensive ethical framework within which artificial moral agents satisfy a Kantian inspired recipe—"rational" and "free"—while also satisfying perceived prerogatives of machine ethicists to facilitate the creation of AMAs that are perfectly and not merely reliably ethical. This series of papers meets this challenge by landscaping traditional moral theory in resolution of a comprehensive account of moral agency. The first paper established the challenge and set out autonomy in Aristotelian terms. (...) The present paper interprets Kantian moral theory on the basis of the preceding introduction, argues contra Tonkens that an engineer does not violate the categorical imperative in creating Kantian AMAs, and proposes that a Kantian AMA is not only a possible goal for Machine ethics research, but a necessary one. (shrink)

Forty years ago, Bayesian philosophers were just catching a new wave of technical innovation, ushering in an era of scoring rules, imprecise credences, and infinitesimal probabilities. Meanwhile, down the hall, Gettier’s 1963 paper [28] was shaping a literature with little obvious interest in the formal programs of Reichenbach, Hempel, and Carnap, or their successors like Jeffrey, Levi, Skyrms, van Fraassen, and Lewis. And how Bayesians might accommodate the discourses of full belief and knowledge was but a glimmer in the (...) eye of Isaac Levi. Forty years later, scoring rules, imprecise credences, and infinitesimal probabilities are all the rage. And the formal and “informal” traditions are increasingly coming together as Bayesian arguments spill over into debates about the foundations of empirical knowledge, skepticism, and more. Relatedly, Bayesian interest in full belief and knowledge has never been greater. Much more besides has happened in the last forty years of Bayesian philosophy, .. (shrink)

Scholars have recently argued that Friedrich Schiller makes a signal contribution to republican political theory in his view of “aesthetic education,” which offers a means of elevating self-interest to virtue. However, though this education is lauded in theory, it has been denigrated as implausible, irresponsible, or dangerous in practice. This paper argues that the criticisms rest on a faulty assumption that artistic objects constitute the sole substance of this “aesthetic education.” Through a reading of Schiller’s work throughout the 1790s, I (...) make the case that this “education” occurs also through an encounter with the “moral beauty” of individual exemplars. This interpretation fits with Schiller’s republican allegiances, saves Schiller’s project from political irrelevance, and enriches Schiller’s contribution to contemporary republican political theory. However, I argue that Schiller was attentive to the dangers of this “aesthetic education” in his play Wallenstein, in which Schiller dramatizes the tragic relationship between individual exemplar and political order. (shrink)

We are concerned here with explaining how successful rule-following behavior might evolve and how an old evolved rule might come to be successfully used in a new context. Such rule-following behavior is illustrated in the transitive judgments of pinyon and scrub-jays (Bond et al., Anim Behav 65:479–487, 2003). We begin by considering how successful transitive rule-following behavior might evolve in the context of Skyrms–Lewis sender–receiver games (Lewis, Convention. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969; Skyrms, Philos Sci 75:489–500, 2006). We then consider (...) two ways that an agent might come to use an old evolved rule in a new context. The first involves the agent evolving successful dispositions for one concrete type of experience, then associating a new type of experience with the old evolved dispositions. The second involves the agent evolving dispositions that represent a general inferential schema, then composing these dispositions with others in a way that allows the agent to make inferences concerning a new concrete type of experience. (shrink)

This article argues that Buddhists can consistently support autonomy as an educational ideal. The article defines autonomy as a matter of thinking and acting according to principles that one has oneself endorsed, showing the relationship between this ideal and the possession of an enduring self. Three central Buddhist doctrines of conditioned arising, impermanence and anatman are examined, showing a prima facie conflict between autonomy and Buddhist philosophy. Drawing on the ‘two truths’ theory of Nagarjuna, it is then shown that the (...) prima facie conflict can be defused by noting that the self has reality at one level, but is a fiction at another level. This approach allows us a new way of seeing autonomy as an extrinsic value—as a step in the journey towards nirvana, but of no value once one has achieved nirvana. (shrink)

“The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm (...) the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate's (and subsidiary decision makers') ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse's findings. (shrink)

David Lewis ([1986b]) gives an attractive and familiar account of counterfactual dependence in the standard context. This account has recently been subject to a counterexample from Adam Elga ([2000]). In this article, I formulate a Lewisian response to Elga’s counterexample. The strategy is to add an extra criterion to Lewis’s similarity metric, which determines the comparative similarity of worlds. This extra criterion instructs us to take special science laws into consideration as well as fundamental laws. I argue that the Second (...) Law of Thermodynamics should be seen as a special science law, and give a brief account of what Lewisian special science laws should look like. If successful, this proposal blocks Elga’s counterexample. (shrink)

Suppose that beliefs come in degrees. How should we then measure the accuracy of these degrees of belief? Scoring rules are usually thought to be the mathematical tool appropriate for this job. But there are many scoring rules, which lead to different ordinal accuracy rankings. Recently, Fallis and Lewis [2016] have given an argument that, if sound, rules out many popular scoring rules, including the Brier score, as genuine measures of accuracy. I respond to this argument, in part by noting (...) that the argument fails to account for verisimilitude—that certain false hypotheses might be closer to the truth than other false hypotheses are. Oddie [forthcoming], however, has argued that no member of a very wide class of scoring rules (the so-called proper scores) can appropriately handle verisimilitude. I explain how to respond to Oddie's argument, and I recommend a class of weighted scoring rules that, I argue, genuinely measure accuracy while escaping the arguments of Fallis and Lewis as well as Oddie. (shrink)

Nearly 30 years ago, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons published a now- popular article that combines Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth scenario with G.E. Moore’s open question argument in an effort to show that moral naturalism – the view that moral facts are at bottom ordinary, natural facts of some sort – is probably false. Responses to Horgan and Timmons’s “revised open question argument” have been legion, but surprisingly, no one has attempted to test the core assumption upon which the argument (...) is based; namely, that competent language users univocally treat natural kind-terms as rigid designators. Here, I present evidence that the intuitions of competent English speakers are not as univocal as Horgan and Timmons need them to be to ground their argument against moral naturalism. I also briefly sketch a way that the moral naturalist can respond even if competent language speakers do treat natural-kind terms in the way that Horgan and Timmons suggest. (shrink)

This book reverses the fundamental tenet of phenomenology-that all consciousness is intentional . Mitscherling rehabilitates the pre-modern concepts of 'intentional being' and 'formal causality' in the construction of a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of embodiment, aesthetic experience, interpretation of texts, moral behavior, and cognition.

The modern practice of organ donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) emerged in the 1990s as a response to the alarmingly wide gap between the number of transplantable organs available through organ donation after neurological death and the urgent organ transplantation needs of persons in end-organ failure. Various important ethical dimensions of DCD have been considered and debated by prominent organ donation/transplantation theorists and clinicians.In this article, consideration of some of these ethical elements provides a foundation for a proposed set of (...) ethically informed, pragmatic conditions that could assist in the development of health policies to guide the practice of organ donation after cardiocirculatory death. (shrink)

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion Jeffrey L. Kosky Reveals the interplay of phenomenology and religion in Levinas’s thought. "Kosky examines Levinas’s thought from the perspective of the philosophy of religion and he does so in a way that is attentive to the philosophical nuances of Levinas’s argument.... an insightful, well written, and carefully documented study... that uniquely illuminates Levinas’s work." —John D. Caputo For readers who suspect there is no place for religion and morality in postmodern philosophy, (...) class='Hi'>Jeffrey L. Kosky suggests otherwise in this skillful interpretation of the ethical and religious dimensions of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought. Placing Levinas in relation to Hegel and Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida and Marion, Kosky develops religious themes found in Levinas’s work and offers a way to think and speak about ethics and morality within the horizons of contemporary philosophy of religion. Kosky embraces the entire scope of Levinas’s writings, from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being, contrasting Levinas’s early religious and moral thought with that of his later works while exploring the nature of phenomenological reduction, the relation of religion and philosophy, the question of whether Levinas can be considered a Jewish thinker, and the religious and theological import of Levinas’s phenomenology. Kosky stresses that Levinas is first and foremost a phenomenologist and that the relationship between religion and philosophy in his ethics should cast doubt on the assumption that a natural or inevitable link exists between deconstruction and atheism. Jeffrey L. Kosky is translator of On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought by Jean-Luc Marion. He has taught at Williams College. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor May 2001 272 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index, append. cloth 0-253-33925-1 $39.95 s / £30.50. (shrink)

On Bohm's formulation of quantum mechanics particles always have determinate positions and follow continuous trajectories. Bohm's theory, however, requires a postulate that says that particles are initially distributed in a special way: particles are randomly distributed so that the probability of their positions being represented by a point in any regionR in configuration space is equal to the square of the wave-function integrated overR. If the distribution postulate were false, then the theory would generally fail to make the right statistical (...) predictions. Further, if it were false, then there would at least in principle be situations where a particle would approach an eigenstate of having one position but in fact always be somewhere very different. Indeed, we will see how this might happen even if the distribution postulate were true. This will help to show how loose the connection is between the wave-function and the positions of particles in Bohm's theory and what the precise role of the distribution postulate is. Finally, we will briefly consider two attempts to formulate a version of Bohm's theory without the distribution postulate. (shrink)

Belief in free will is widespread. The present research considered one reason why people may believe that actions are freely chosen rather than determined: they attribute randomness in behavior to free will. Experiment 1 found that participants who were prompted to perform a random sequence of actions experienced their behavior as more freely chosen than those who were prompted to perform a deterministic sequence. Likewise, Experiment 2 found that, all else equal, the behavior of animated agents was perceived to be (...) more freely chosen if it consisted of a random sequence of actions than if it consisted of a deterministic sequence; this was true even when the degree of randomness in agents’ behavior was largely a product of their environments. Together, these findings suggest that randomness in behavior—one’s own or another’s—can be mistaken for free will. (shrink)

Consider: -/- The Evidence Question: When, and under what conditions does an agent have proposition E as evidence (at t)? -/- Timothy Williamson's (2000) answer to this question is the well-known E = K thesis: -/- E = K: E is a member of S's evidence set at t iff S knows E at t. -/- I will argue that this answer is inconsistent with the version of Bayesianism that Williamson advocates. This is because E = K allows an agent (...) to garner evidence via inductive inference whereas standard Bayesian views disallow such a thing. Since Williamson's version of Bayesianism shares the key features with the standard Bayesian view, there is an inconsistency. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the nature, varieties, causes and meanings of comebacks related to sport. I argue that comebacks have an axiological dimension, and that the best comebacks involve personal growth. I attempt to show that a major reason that comebacks connected to sport are often inspiring is that we are all in need of a comeback at some point in our lives. When improbable comebacks occur in the world of sport, they expand our sense of possibility.

The early Greek Stoics were the first philosophers to recognize the object of normal human perception as predicative or propositional in nature. Fundamentally we do not perceive qualities or things, but situations and things happening, facts. To mark their difference from Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics adopted phantasia as their word for perception.

Deontological (as opposed to consequentialist) liberals treat freedom of action as an end in itself, not a means to other ends. Yet logically, when one makes a deliberate choice, one treats freedom of action as if it were not an end in itself, for one uses this freedom as a means to the ends one hopes to achieve through one's action. The tension between deontology and the logic of choice is reflected in the paradoxical nature of the ?right to do (...) wrong?; and in Rawls's unsuccessful attempts to justify to acting agents their interest in such a right, embodied in his conception of agents as ?self-validating sources of claims.? A self-validating source of claims is akin to God as envisioned by voluntarist theologians such as Ockham. Leibniz's critique of voluntarism, then, is applicable to the Rawlsian subject: like the voluntarist God, she would be unable to act if it were indeed the case that her action validated itself. (shrink)

In recent decades, increased attention has been given to the place of the victim within criminal justice systems. Advocates have called for recognition and participation for victims of crime, and widespread political support throughout common law jurisdictions has resulted in a number of reforms. While some have proven uncontroversial, the question of victim input into sentencing decisions has emerged as a highly contentious issue within scholarship. Scholars have been concerned with the potentially corrupting influence of victims’ private preferences and dispositions (...) on otherwise principled public decision-making. Exacerbating these concerns has been conceptual and normative ambiguity regarding the relationship of victims to public sentencing processes. Such questions relate to the proper relationship between individuals and public decision-making, and are thus usefully dealt with through political theory and the lens of citizenship. The present article applies deliberative democratic theory and argues that it accounts for scholars’ concerns while also providing direction through conceptual and normative clarity, reconciling in theoretical terms victim input with a public sentencing process. Moreover, it also argues that the framework highlights ways in which victims can make active contributions to processes of public deliberation by introducing novel perspectives and information, thereby enhancing the quality of sentencing decisions. Lastly, the article anticipates potential objections regarding the capacity of victims to meet civic standards in practice, pointing to a growing body of empirical research which suggests victims’ potential and emphasizes the importance of being attentive to questions of procedural design to realize it. (shrink)

The role of mechanistic evidence tends to be under-appreciated in current evidencebased medicine (EBM), which focusses on clinical studies, tending to restrict attention to randomized controlled studies (RCTs) when they are available. The EBM+ programme seeks to redress this imbalance, by suggesting methods for evaluating mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. Drug approval is a problematic case for the view that mechanistic evidence should be taken into account, because RCTs are almost always available. Nevertheless, we argue that mechanistic evidence is central (...) to all the key tasks in the drug approval process: in drug discovery and development; assessing pharmaceutical quality; devising dosage regimens; assessing efficacy, harms, external validity, and cost-effectiveness; evaluating adherence; and extending product licences. We recommend that, when preparing for meetings in which any aspect of drug approval is to be discussed, mechanistic evidence should be systematically analysed and presented to the committee members alongside analyses of clinical studies. (shrink)

Finding disjunctivist versions of direct realism unexplanatory, Mark Johnston [(2004). Philosophical Studies, 120, 113–183] offers a non-disjunctive version of direct realism in its place and gives a defense of this view from the problem of hallucination. I will attempt to clarify the view that he presents and then argue that, once clarified, it either does not escape the problem of hallucination or does not look much like direct realism.