Co‐expression of two or more genes at the single‐cell level is usually associated with functional co‐regulation. While mRNA co‐expression—measured as the correlation in mRNA levels—can be influenced by both transcriptional and post‐transcriptional events, transcriptional regulation is typically considered dominant. We review and connect the literature describing transcriptional and post‐transcriptional regulation of co‐expression. To enhance our understanding, we integrate four datasets spanning single‐cell gene expression data, single‐cell promoter activity data and individual transcript half‐lives. Confirming expectations, we find that positive co‐expression necessitates (...) promoter coordination and similar mRNA half‐lives. Surprisingly, negative co‐expression is favored by differences in mRNA half‐lives, contrary to initial predictions from stochastic simulations. Notably, this association manifests specifically within clusters of genes. We further observe a striking compensation between promoter coordination and mRNA half‐lives, which additional stochastic simulations suggest might give rise to the observed co‐expression patterns. These findings raise intriguing questions about the functional advantages conferred by this compensation between distal kinetic steps. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Allegory and the Spaces of LoveOscar Martín (bio)Writing about Spanish sentimental fiction from 1450 to 1550 is not an easy task, as we are discussing a genre with a difficult theoretical configuration. The investigation of sentimental fiction, however, has been sorting out the classifications that applied to a hodgepodge of works previously labeled as “sentimental novel” (“novela sentimental”). This label, once attached uncritically to a bunch of heterogeneous texts (...) that shared such intangibles as “loving focus” or “prevalence of psychological description over narratives,” has been applied more consistently nowaday, thanks in part to the scholarly efforts started in the 1980s like those of Martínez Jiménez and Muñoz Marquina (1982), and Martínez Latre (1989).1 Using some of these research efforts, Alan Deyermond has codified the genre accurately:Brevity; focus on psychological interest over external action; a tragic vision of love; autobiography (first-person narration or a narrator as a character) and the insertion of letters or poems (or, often, both) into the narration.[77]2Within this scholarly categorization, Regula Rohland de Langbehn has been pivotal in offering—first in 1986, and more recently in 1999—a threefold scheme in the development of the genre she labels as “sentimental novel”: a first group chronologically of the genre would be represented by Siervo libre de amor and Sátira de felice e infelice vida, both works marked by the influence of cancionero poetry—specially in the allegorical structuring and in the characterization of love, and by other subjects being limited to an abstract and general analysis of emotions. Both works also present a debate over the moral value of love. A second group would gravitate around Triste deleytacion and the works of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores, works that show a wider range of topics and the impact of a broader generic textuality like cancionero poetry and such chivalric novels as Tirant. Finally, she distinguishes a third group whose main characteristic is the imprint of Celestina’s influence on both the narrative surface and its thematic approach. In the same vein, Vicenta Blay Manzanera has taken up this threefold scheme, dividing the genre into “the creation of the paradigm” (“la creación del paradigma”) the climactic stage, and the downfall and disarticulation of the narrative sentimental system” (“la fase climática” and “el tercero la fase de declive o desintegración del paradigma”) [“La conciencia genérica” 221]. [End Page 132]Just as Rohland de Langbehn’s works had at least settled down the arguments about the existence of a sentimental novelistic genre, however, medieval Hispanic scholarship has been shaken by an entrenched debate over not only the identification of this genre (novel or fiction) but whether the genre even existed at all. It was Antonio Cortijo Ocaña who, while editing a critical cluster in La Corónica on sentimental fiction, opened the door to some scholars such as Weissberger who voiced their skepticism over the generic nature of sentimental prose, a skepticism already present in an innovative volume published by Gwara and Gerli in 1997. This skeptical position was also supported by Cortijo Ocaña himself, who in 2001 published a monumental work in which, although using the generic term as a departure point, he ended up suggesting the difficulty of defining it, therefore jettisoning it. This position in turn was contested by Rohland de Langbehn, who in 2002 defended the validity of both the existence of a genre and its name novela sentimental, a position that has sparked a new round of replies in a La Corónica forum in 2003.In this debate, I would join today’s minority position on the existence of a sentimental genre, because, as I explained in my 2001 review of Rohland de Langbehn’s book and as I find convincingly argued in her 2002 contribution, there are internal traits within sentimental fictional texts that do not appear together in other sentimental generic texts [139]. In addition, once we take into account the obvious intertextuality of those sentimental texts, as Blay Manzanera has shown [“La conciencia genérica”], and the overutilization of central motifs in the configuration of love’s debate, we... (shrink)

On a toujours tendance à faire remonter les commencements de la science aux Grecs anciens. On tient pour acquis qu'elle relate un progrès en marche et se construit linéairement, de manière cumulative, chacun ajoutant une brique à l'édifice commun. La science serait universelle, surplombante, détachée de tout substrat idéologique et culturel, et les écrits de nos prédécesseurs ne seraient que des essais, souvent naïfs, pour nous permettre de devenir ce que nous sommes. Il n'en est rien. La science est une (...) construction culturelle à une époque donnée. Et la question du "progrès", dans ce cadre, n'a pas grande signification. En revanche, un chemin traverse la pensée occidentale depuis les Grecs : celui de l'ordre démonstratif, lancé par les Eléments d'Euclide, poursuivi en terre d'Islam, renforcé au XVIe siècle en Occident, où naissent les mathématiques comme nous les connaissons. Mais cet ordre démonstratif vaut pour sa forme, pas pour son contenu. En prenant une position résolument critique, en revisitant les approches historicisantes de l'histoire des sciences tout autant que celle portant sur l'homogénéisation idéologique des pensées de l'histoire globale, Michel Blay expose une nouvelle sensibilité aux constructions du passé comme à celles du présent, et ouvre une nouvelle voie pour l'avenir. (shrink)

Frédéric Le Blay René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec entreprit la traduction des Traités des maladies aiguës et des maladies chroniques du médecin romain Caelius Aurelianus. À partir de l’édition des manuscrits établie en 2009, je propose une analyse interprétative de la démarche du clinicien. Au-delà de la curiosité érudite d’un amoureux des classiques, je cherche à montrer que l’exercice de lecture et de traduction des textes constitutifs d’une histoire de la clinique s’intègre dans la méthode de Laennec et contribue à (...) fonder son épistémologie médicale, à une époque où les pratiques sont soumises à des redéfinitions majeures. Une telle entreprise, qui fait du texte, constituant d’une littérature, une donnée d’expérience en vue du diagnostic, n’est pas sans présenter quelque analogie avec certaines orientations contemporaines. (shrink)

Biologie de synthèse, nanotechnologies, liste sans fin de nouveaux gadgets électroniques, de nouveaux artefacts robotiques... La course permanente à l'innovation irresponsable impose au corps social de se soumettre aux développements de multiples nouveautés technologiques. Appauvrissement des ressources, accroissement de la pollution, surveillance toujours plus méticuleuse des Etats et des individus, solitude au travail, en sont le résultat. Surmonter ces problèmes exige de revenir sur l'idée de nature, en prenant conscience qu'il n'y a pas une nature en soi, à notre service, (...) dans laquelle nous pourrions puiser sans fin, mais que l'idée que nous nous faisons d'elle s'est constituée progressivement depuis la fin du XVIe siècle. C'est cette fabrique de l'idée de nature à l'époque moderne et de ses conséquences qui fait l'objet de ce livre. Pourquoi avons-nous abandonné notre existence et notre responsabilité pour la fascination du détour technologique? Résolument à contre-courant, l'auteur rend possible une critique et un dépassement de l'emprise " inéluctable " de l'innovation, de l'économie libérale utilitariste et de la technique sur notre avenir. (shrink)

Peut-on cerner la vie que nous vivons, l'ici et le maintenant d'une vie, a vif sans qu'elle soit obscurcie par le concept comme l'a fait la science de Galilee a nos jours? Peut-on penser la vie sans risquer de la perdre? Michel Blay tente ici de montrer, faisant reference a la parole evangelique de Jean - en deca de la tradition theologique dogmatique qui la devoie -, a la mystique (Nicolas de Cues), a l'architecture de Suger qui tente de (...) magnifier la lumiere dans la construction des cathedrales, comment la vie peut s'exprimer sans la mediation du concept qui la prive de sa vitalite. Ne nous desolons pas, n'esperons pas une autre vie, la vie est la, dans toute sa pregnance, et il suffit de se laisser envahir pour battre avec elle a l'unisson. C'est sans doute en se mettant a l'ecoute des poetes que nous pouvons entendre cette vie que nous vivons, toute puissante, jaillissante, charnelle, et ainsi sentir a nouveau en soi son epiphanie: Prendre chair de l'oiseau, pour savoir le bonheur [...] Trouver toujours le monde entre son cri de peur et son ravissement. (shrink)

Etrange parcours que celui du Logos qui, de Heraclite a nos jours, tend a s'effacer, dans ce monde actuel, tout entier voue a la science, au tout numerique. Cette vision heracliteenne de la totalite s'est estompee, transformee qu'elle fut deja des les premiers siecles de notre ere dans sa postulation religieuse, puis dans la modernite, et s'est perdue dans un monde ou, science et technique prenant leur envol, l'homme avait comme horizon de " devenir comme maitre et possesseur de la (...) Nature ". Michel Blay analyse cet etat qui nous laisse de plus en plus en desherence ; et dans un monde ou " Dieu est mort, et c'est nous qui l'avons tue ", comment ne pas sombrer dans cette illusion d'un homme tout-puissant, dans lequel meme le psychique est traite a l'aune des neuro-sciences ou l'homme a perdu sa completude et ne pense meme plus a la chercher? Ne serait-ce pas la poesie, elle seule, " dans ces temps de detresse " qui offrirait une voie pour retrouver sa voix? Certes " Il n'y a pas de paradis " nous dit Andre Frenaud. " Etait-ce l'aube, ou le soir deja perce? Qu'avions-nous espere que nous allons cherchant? ". (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe 70. This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective on Heidegger's (...) thinking of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning - an inception - and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways. (shrink)

The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social, and political change. The population of a modernizing Europe began demanding more freedom, which in turn propelled the ongoing discussion on the philosophy of nature. This spurred on Central European sheep breeders to debate the deepest secrets of nature: the transmission of traits from one generation to another. Scholarly questions of heredity were profoundly entwined with philosophy and politics when particular awareness of “the genetic laws of nature” claimed natural equality. (...) The realization that the same rules of inheritance may apply to all living beings frightened both the absolutist political power and the divided society of the day. Many were not prepared to separate religious questions from novel natural phenomena. Open-minded breeders put their knowledge into practice right away to create sheep with better wool traits through inbreeding and artificial selection. This was viewed, however, as the artificial modification of nature operating against the cultural and religious norms of the day. Liberal attempts caught the attention of the secret police and, consequently, the aspirations of scholars were suppressed by political will during approximately 1820–1850. (shrink)

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with (...) the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development. (shrink)

The upheavals of late eighteenth century Europe encouraged people to demand greater liberties, including the freedom to explore the natural world, individually or as part of investigative associations. The Moravian Agricultural and Natural Science Society, organized by Christian Carl André, was one such group of keen practitioners of theoretical and applied scientific disciplines. Headquartered in the “Moravian Manchester” Brünn, the centre of the textile industry, society members debated the improvement of sheep wool to fulfil the needs of the Habsburg armies (...) fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Wool, as the raw material of soldiers' clothing, could influence the war’s outcome. During the early nineteenth century, wool united politics, economics, and science in Brno, where breeders and natural scientists investigated the possibilities of increasing wool production. They regularly discussed how “climate” or “seed” characteristics influenced wool quality and quantity. Breeders and academics put their knowledge into immediate practice to create sheep with better wool traits through consanguineous matching of animals and artificial selection. This apparent disregard for the incest taboo, however, was viewed as violating natural laws and cultural norms. The debate intensified between 1817 and 1820, when a Hungarian veteran soldier, sheep breeder, and self-taught natural scientist, Imre Festetics, displayed his inbred Mimush sheep, which yielded wool extremely well suited for the fabrication of light but strong garments. Members of the Society questioned whether such “bastard sheep” would be prone to climatic degeneration, should be regarded as freaks of nature, or could be explained by natural laws. The exploration of inbreeding in sheep began to be distilled into hereditary principles that culminated in 1819 with Festetics’s “laws of organic functions” and “genetic laws of nature,” four decades before Gregor Johann Mendel’s seminal work on heredity in peas. (shrink)

There is increased recognition of a common suite of global challenges that hamper food system sustainability at the community scale. Food price volatility, shortages of basic commodities, increased global rates of obesity and non-communicable food-related diseases, and land grabbing are among the impediments to socially just, economically robust, ecologically regenerative and politically inclusive food systems. While international political initiatives taken in response to these challenges and the groundswell of local alternatives emerging in response to challenges are well documented, more attention (...) is needed to the analysis of similarities between community approaches to global pressures. While we are not suggesting the application of a template set of good practices, the research reported in this paper point to the benefits of both sharing good practices and enabling communities to adopt good practices that are suited to their place-based capacities. The work also suggests that sharing community-derived good practices can support and reinforce global networks of sustainable community food systems, foster knowledge co-creation and ultimately cement collective action to global pressures. In turn these networks could enhance the sustainability and resilience of community food systems and facilitate wide scale food system transformation. (shrink)

In response to recent calls to extend the underlying theories used in the literature :375–413, 2005; Craft in J Bus Ethics 117:221–259, 2013), we review the usefulness of social norm theory in empirical business ethics research. We begin by identifying the seeds of social norm theory in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Glasgow Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1759/1790) seminal work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Next, we introduce recent theory in social norm activation by Bicchieri and (...) compare the new theory to two theoretical frameworks found in the literature: Kohlberg’s Handbook of socialization theory and research, Rand McNally, Chicago, IL, 1969; in: Lickona Moral development and behavior, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1976) theory of moral development and Cialdini and Trost’s The handbook of social psychology, Oxford University Press, Boston, 1998) taxonomy of social norms. We argue that the new theory provides useful insights by emphasizing the ability of situational cues and information to generate common expectations for social/moral norms. The theory is particularly useful for empirical research in business ethics because it gives both organizational and individual factors a role in motivating norm-based behavior. To demonstrate this usefulness, we present examples where the theory has been effectively applied in experimental accounting research to generate new insights. We conclude by citing specific examples where the theory may prove useful in empirical business ethics research. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, the philosophy of biology has emerged from the shadow of the philosophy of physics to become a respectable and thriving philosophical subdiscipline. The authors take a fresh look at the life sciences and the philosophy of biology from a strictly realist and emergentist-naturalist perspective. They outline a unified and science-oriented philosophical framework that enables the clarification of many foundational and philosophical issues in biology. This book will be of interest both to life scientists and philosophers.

In this paper, we take moral agency to be that context in which a particular agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. In order to understand moral agency, we will discuss what it would take for an artifact to be a moral agent. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the paper, we take the artifactual question to be a useful way into discussion but ultimately misleading. We set out a number of (...) conceptual pre-conditions for being a moral agent and then outline how one should — and should not — go about attributing moral agency. In place of a litmus test for such an agency — such as Allen et al.'s Moral Turing Test — we suggest some tools from the conceptual spaces theory and the unified conceptual space theory for mapping out the nature and extent of that agency. (shrink)

We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second factor in the (...) aetiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows. But we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event.

This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As...

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical (...) conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th Century. A major figure in the development of phenomenology, his work also profoundly influenced many of the intellectual movements that followed in his wake, from Sartre's Existentialism to Derrida's deconstructionism. Towards the Definition of Philosophy brings together two seminal lectures that mark a breakthrough moment in Heidegger's thought and introduces the major themes that he would develop in his opus Being and Time.

Eric Martin and Daniel N. Osherson present a theory of inductive logic built on model theory. Their aim is to extend the mathematics of Formal Learning Theory to a more general setting and to provide a more accurate image of empirical inquiry. The formal results of their study illuminate aspects of scientific inquiry that are not covered by the commonly applied Bayesian approach.

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

A ‘lottery belief’ is a belief that a particular ticket has lost a large, fair lottery, based on nothing more than the odds against it winning. The lottery paradox brings out a tension between the idea that lottery beliefs are justified and the idea that that one can always justifiably believe the deductive consequences of things that one justifiably believes – what is sometimes called the principle of closure. Many philosophers have treated the lottery paradox as an argument against the (...) second idea – but I make a case here that it is the first idea that should be given up. As I shall show, there are a number of independent arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified. (shrink)

This paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that (...) passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage. (shrink)

Yearly pediatric cardiac surgery missions to Ghana are of tremendous benefit to local children, but may create thorny ethical dilemmas for local clinicians who refer and screen children for the mission and who provide care to the children after the mission concludes for the year. This article presents the experiences and concerns of a pediatrician who is a local member of the Hearts and Minds of Ghana project.

This paper serves as introduction to a significantly longer paper in progress. It argues that, within the ethics community, the wider philosophical establishment and society in general, people have been far too lax about what to accept as morally “right” behaviour – far too quick to let themselves and, all too often, each other off the hook. By drawing comparisons to artefactual behaviour and the objections people raise to calling that behaviour the morally acceptable behaviour of authentic moral agents, this (...) paper lays out a framework by which human ethics and meta-ethics can more fruitfully be approached. An earlier paper of ours argued that, for an action to be morally right, one must have a convergence of the right motivations, the right means, and the right consequences. The underlying insight is that deontological, virtue-ethics-based, and consequentialist accounts all have their necessary role to play, but each tends to get too focused on itself and its merits to the loss of the bigger picture; while utilitarian accounts, as perhaps the most prominent division within consequentialism, face the further problem of failing to allow for those occasions where the needs of the few, or the one, outweigh the needs of the many, as Ursula K. LeGuin so devastatingly addressed. Although the requirement to align motivations, means, and consequences may seem impossibly onerous, it need not be, provided one is prepared to allow that moral behaviour is far more difficult to achieve, either for artefacts or human beings, than it might seem at first glance. Mistakes will be made. Perhaps it matters more to take responsibility for those mistakes than to assure oneself, despite reasonable argument to the contrary, that one has avoided them. It is time to hold artefactual and natural agent alike to a higher standard. (shrink)

International Journal of Machine Consciousness, Volume 06, Issue 02, Page 141-161, December 2014. This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As before, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can appropriately be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. We set a number of stringent conditions on moral agency. A (...) moral agent must be embedded in a cultural and specifically moral context and embodied in a suitable physical form. It must be, in some substantive sense, alive. It must exhibit self-conscious awareness. It must exhibit sophisticated conceptual abilities, going well beyond what the likely majority of conceptual agents possess: not least that it must possess a well-developed moral space of reasons. Finally, it must be able to communicate its moral agency through some system of signs: A "private" moral world is not enough. After reviewing these conditions and pouring cold water on recent claims for having achieved "minimal" machine consciousness, we turn our attention to a number of existing and, in some cases, commonplace artifacts that lack moral agency yet nevertheless require one to take a moral stance toward them, as if they were moral agents. Finally, we address another class of agents raising a related set of issues: autonomous military robots. (shrink)

An essential all-in-one introduction, Ethics for Engineers provides in-depth coverage of major ethical theories, professional codes of ethics, and case studies in a single volume. Incorporating numerous practical examples and about 100 review questions, it helps students better understand and address ethical issues that they may face in their future careers. Topics covered include whistle-blowing, the problem of many hands, gifts, bribes, conflicts of interest, engineering and environmental ethics, privacy and computer ethics, ethical technology assessment, and the ethics of cost-benefit (...) analysis and risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

"One of Michael Blay's many fine achievements in Reasoning with the Infinite is to make us realize how velocity, and later instantaneous velocity, came to play a vital part in the development of a rigorous mathematical science of motion. ...

The Liar paradox arises when we consider a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. If such self-referential sentences exist? and examples like?This sentence is not true? certainly suggest this?, then our logic and standard notion of truth allow to infer a contradiction: The Liar sentence is true and not true. What has gone wrong? Must we revise our notion of truth and our logic? Or can we dispel the common conviction that there are such self-referential sentences? (...) The present study explores the second path.0After comparing the Liar reasoning in formal and informal logic and showing that there are no Gödelian Liar sentences, the study moves on from the semantics of self-reference to the metaphysics of expressions and proposes a novel solution to the Liar paradox: Meaningful expressions are distinct from their syntactic bases and exist only relative to contexts. Detailed semantico-metaphysical arguments show that in this dynamic setting, an object can be referred to only after it has started to exist. Hence the circular reference needed in the Liar paradox cannot occur, after all. As this solution is contextualist, it evades the expressibility problems of other proposals. (shrink)

We assert that audit quality can be improved to the extent that social norms for honesty and responsibility are activated in the auditor. To test this assertion, we use an experimental audit market setting found in the literature and manipulate factors expected to activate honesty and responsibility norms in the auditor. We find that auditor misreporting is reduced when the investor is another participant in the experiment rather than computer simulated, and thus, the interests of third-party investors are salient to (...) the auditor. We also find that auditor misreporting is reduced when the auditor is required to sign-off on the audit report, but only when the investor is another participant in the experiment. Consistent with our underlying theory, we find that pre-experimental measures of sensitivity to honesty and responsibility norms help explain the effects of our manipulated variables. Finally, we find that these measures of social norm sensitivity are associated with the moral judgment that auditor misreporting is unethical. Our study helps explain previous anomalous findings in the literature and answers the call in Blay et al. for empirical researchers to use social norm theory to develop stronger tests of moral reasoning in the market for auditing services. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 120 - 142 This paper aims to contribute to the debate over epistemic versus non-epistemic readings of the ‘hinges’ in Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_. I follow Marie McGinn’s and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s lead in developing an analogy between mathematical sentences and certainties, and using the former as a model for the latter. However, I disagree with McGinn’s and Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretations concerning Wittgenstein’s views of both relata. I argue that mathematical sentences as well as certainties are (...) true and are propositions; that some of them can be epistemically justified; that in some senses they are not prior to empirical knowledge; that they are not ineffable; and that their primary function is epistemic as much as it is semantic. (shrink)

Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes--good and bad--are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity's prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow. The future of humanity is bound to the (...) future of science and hinges on how successfully we harness technological advances to address our challenges. If we are to use science to solve our problems while avoiding its dystopian risks, we must think rationally, globally, collectively, and optimistically about the long term. Advances in biotechnology, cybertechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence--if pursued and applied wisely--could empower us to boost the developing and developed world and overcome the threats humanity faces on Earth, from climate change to nuclear war. At the same time, further advances in space science will allow humans to explore the solar system and beyond with robots and AI. But there is no "Plan B" for Earth--no viable alternative within reach if we do not care for our home planet. Rich with fascinating insights into cutting-edge science and technology, this accessible book will captivate anyone who wants to understand the critical issues that will define the future of humanity on Earth and beyond."-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology widely used to support human decision-making. Current areas of application include financial services, engineering, and management. A number of attempts to introduce AI decision support systems into areas which more obviously include moral judgement have been made. These include systems that give advice on patient care, on social benefit entitlement, and even ethical advice for medical professionals. Responding to these developments raises a complex set of moral questions. This paper proposes a clearer replacement question (...) to them. The replacement question asks under what circumstances, if any, people would accept a moral judgement made by some sort of machine. Since, it is argued, the answer to this replacement question is positive, urgent practical moral problems are raised. (shrink)