Contemporary philosophers interested in value theory appear to be largely concerned with questions of the following sort:What is value?What is the meaning of the word ‘good’?Does the attribution of value to an object have a cognitive, or merely an emotive, significance?The first question is metaphysical; to ask it is analogous to asking in physics:What is matter?What is electricity?The others are generally treated as semantical questions; to ask them is analogous to asking in statistics:What is the meaning of the word ‘probable’?Does (...) an attribution of probability express an objective fact, or merely a subjective attitude? (shrink)

ELEMENTARY LOGIC GR. C. MOISIL Institute of Mathematics, Rumanian Academy, Bucharest, Rumania 1. We shall consider a typified logic of propositions. ...

This is a volume containing papers honoring Patrick Suppes (1922-2014). All contributors have worked directly with Suppes or/and with his ideas. The book also contains one of the last papers by Suppes (co-authored by two of his collaborators). -/- The work of Suppes touches many different areas, ranging from meteorology to physics, through logic, mathematics, psychology, neuroscience, education, painting, but he was first of all and above all a philosopher, always questioning, but not in vain. (...) There are not many philosophers who can be proud of having written influential math textbooks, contributed decisively to the philosophical foundations of science, helped to develop research in real labs, promoted new forms o education (computer-assisted learning and the EGPY – Education Program for Gifted Youth). -/- Since the range of interest of Suppes was very broad, so is the variety of topics dealt with in this volume. The work of a researcher is certainly not limited to his own writings, but also has to be appreciated through the work of the people he has been working with and influenced. From this point of view the work of Suppes is very impressive, and the present book contributes to show that. -/- This is a follow up of a special issue of the journal Synthese, New Directions in the Foundations of Science, edited by Béziau and Krause, after a meeting they organized with Suppes in Florianópolis (Brazil) in 2002 for his 80th birthday. -/- Jean-Yves Béziau worked with Suppes at Stanford University for two years (2000 and 2001) and has been continuously working in the Suppes tradition of logic, methodology and philosophy of science, which emphasizes structures and models. -/- Décio Krause has used Suppes’ approach to the axiomatization of scientific theories in many fields. With J.C.M. Magalhães, he presented a ``Suppes predicate” for genetics and natural selection and with S. French he developed a Suppes predicate for quantum field theories via Fock spaces. (shrink)

Provides a critical analysis and comparison of the theories of probabilistic causality offered by Hans Reichenbach I.J. Good and Patrick Suppes. Each of these theories faces some fundamental difficulties. In the end, the author argues that probabilistic causality cannot be explicated in terms of statistical relations among discrete events alone. Instead, we must take into account the physical processes that provide causal connections among events. In the time since this essay was first written, the literature on probabilistic causality (...) has burgeoned, and the topic has become a major area of concern to many philosophers. (shrink)

Have Sober and Wilson salvaged a sophisticated and sound perspective for group selection from the rhetorical overkill of the selfish-gene’s-eye gang, or have they merely reinvented Hamilton’s and Maynard Smith’s alternative to group selection models, models that can do justice to all the observed and even imagined phenomena of cooperation in the biosphere? One of the main lessons I have learned in thinking about the issues raised by Unto Others over the last two years is that they are, at least (...) for me, mind-twistingly elusive and slippery. The appeal of the competing metaphors is such that there is unwitting sleight of hand in every direction, as the perspectives shift back and forth. One stern admonition might then be: eschew the metaphors, stick to the math! The problem is that the math doesn’t distinguish between the perspectives Sober and Wilson champion and those they oppose. By their own account, the mathematical models are equivalent in what they can predict—and hence equivalent in what they can, in one important sense, explain. But that is not the end of it: “When one theory achieves an insight by virtue of its perspective, the same insight can usually be explained in retrospect by the other theories. As long as the relationships among the theories are clearly understood, this kind of pluralism is a healthy part of science.”. Good point. Patrick Suppes used to delight in challenging cognitive psychologists to point to any “cognitive” phenomenon that he couldn’t model, retrospectively, in strict behaviorist terms. The wise response was to deflect the challenge. His behaviorist models were parasitic: they would never have been devised—the phenomena in question were all but invisible to the behaviorists—without the inspiration of the cognitive model they translated into behaviorese. And what Sober and Wilson say here echoes what one of their chief opponents, Richard Dawkins, had already claimed for his perspective: “The extended phenotype may not constitute a testable hypothesis in itself, but it so far changes the way we see animals and plants that it may cause us to think of testable hypotheses that we would otherwise never have dreamed of.” So what’s all the fuss about? If each side is just saying “Here’s a good way of thinking of things, a prolific generator of hypotheses to test!” they could both be right, with their different perspectives having rather different utilities in different circumstances. (shrink)

This essay attempts to show that Plato’s thought makes important contributions to libertarian theory. Plato diagnoses the state as essentially a state of mind, one in which irrational desires replace natural reason as a guide to ethical conduct. The statist mindset is therefore marked by profound self-deception about what is truly good. Importantly, Plato contends that this self-deception plagues the rulers of the state as much as, or more than, the subjects. They mistakenly believe that wielding unjust power will bring (...) them happiness, when in fact it brings them misery. The aim of Plato’s philosophy is to convince aspiring rulers of that truth. (shrink)

Researchers in the fields of sign language and gesture studies frequently present their participants with video stimuli showing actors performing linguistic signs or co-speech gestures. Up to now, such video stimuli have been mostly controlled only for some of the technical aspects of the video material, leaving open the possibility that systematic differences in video stimulus materials may be concealed in the actual motion properties of the actor’s movements. Computer vision methods such as OpenPose enable the fitting of body-pose models (...) to the consecutive frames of a video clip and thereby make it possible to recover the movements performed by the actor in a particular video clip without the use of a point-based or markerless motion-tracking system during recording. The OpenPoseR package provides a straightforward and reproducible way of working with these body-pose model data extracted from video clips using OpenPose, allowing researchers in the fields of sign language and gesture studies to quantify the amount of motion pertaining only to the movements performed by the actor in a video clip. These quantitative measures can be used for controlling differences in the movements of an actor in stimulus video clips or, for example, between different conditions of an experiment. In addition, the package also provides a set of functions for generating plots for data visualization, as well as an easy-to-use way of automatically extracting metadata from large sets of video files. (shrink)

Range and Cotton (1995) showed that many of the articles reviewed in their study did not include a line specifying institutional review board-approved procurement of informed parental permission and child assent for child research. Range and Cotton stated that the absence of the line suggests a lack of sensitivity to permission/assent issues, implied that many authors of the articles did not obtain permission/assent, and said those who did but did not report it were camouflaging those who did not. In this (...) article, the logic of these points is refuted, the ethics of the Range and Cotton study are questioned, and its potential divisiveness is lamented. (shrink)

A Catholic physician practices in a world that condones the use of contraception. In the effort to be morally consistent, Catholic physicians are faced with questions about the extent to which their participation in providing contraceptives constitutes immoral cooperation in evil. Particular challenges face resident physicians, who practice under attending physicians and within the constraints of local and specialty-wide training requirements. The author examines the nature of the moral act of referring for contraception and argues that, in limited cases, there (...) is a moral distinction between a referral and an intra-residency patient transfer, and the latter may be morally licit according to the principle of material cooperation. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 283–309. (shrink)

The study examines the ontological similarity between the concept of competitor orientation and questionable intelligence-gathering efforts. Respondents from the hotel industry were surveyed with self-administered questionnaires. Exploratory factor analysis was carried out to identify the structure underlying variables of market orientation and ethical judgment on questionable intelligence-gathering efforts. The results suggest that the surveyed hotel managers are unable to distinguish the legitimate tactics of competitor orientation from the questionable practice of industrial espionage.

The neuroscience of language studies the relationship between linguistic phenomena and the structure and functioning of the human brain. In this chapter, the authors focus on the neural basis supporting the remarkable human capacity to effortlessly assemble single words into more complex hierarchical structures, thus enabling the production and comprehension of unbounded arrays of different linguistic expressions. They begin with a brief discussion of language as a biological system that includes a historical sketch of the understanding of language in the (...) brain. The authors provide an overview of the early days of brain‐syntax research in neuropsychology, primarily on the basis of lesion studies. They end with a reflection on the impact that Noam Chomsky's ideas have had on the neuroscience of language. (shrink)