The book is a collection of essays on the history of science and mathematics, with especial emphasis on Newtonian themes.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore a particular philosophical underpinning for Information Systems (IS) research – critical systemic thinking (CST). Drawing upon previous work, the authors highlight the principal features of CST within the tradition of critical research and attempt to relate it to trends in the Italian school of IS research in recent years, as exemplified by the work of Claudio Ciborra but also evident in work by, e.g. Resca, Jacucci and D'Atri.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper which (...) explores CST, characterised by a focus on individual uniqueness, and socially‐constructed, individual worldviews as generators of human knowing.FindingsThe paper draws on work by Heinz Klein in which he elaborated three constitutive stages in critical research: interpretive, genealogical and constructive. The authors introduce a fourth, reflective stage and discuss five categories of critical research, reflecting different perspectives on emancipation, culminating in emergent expressionism, associated with Ciborra and the Italian school more generally.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper discusses approaches to CST and how they might have practical implications in IS development. The distinction between approaches founded in logical empiricism and those founded in hermeneutic dialectics are considered and the development of critical and systems strands are discussed.Practical implicationsThe paper addresses CST as an approach to development of information systems. Such approaches enable users to explore their individually unique understandings and create a constructive dialogue with one another, which emancipates and empowers users to own and control their own development processes and hence build more productive and usable systems.Social implicationsA focus on research which is oriented towards emancipation in the tradition of critical social theory.Originality/valueThe paper draws on extensive theoretical research carried out by the authors over a period of more than ten years in CST and synthesises the practical implications. (shrink)

In this paper recent work that attempts to link quantum entanglement to (i) thermodynamic energy, (ii) thermodynamic entropy and (iii) information is reviewed. With respect to the first two links the paper is essentially expository. The final link is elaborated on: it is argued that the value of the entanglement of a bipartite system in a pure state is equal to the value of the irreducible uncertainty (i.e. irreducibly missing information) about its subsystems and that this suggests that entanglement gives (...) rise to irreducible uncertainty. (The exact meaning of the phrase “irreducible uncertainty”, as used here, is explained in the body of the paper. Roughly speaking, it is the uncertainty about the post-measurement state of a system that cannot be removed at the pre-measurement stage.) This analysis is used to make a further connection between entanglement and statistical mechanical entropy: it is argued that these properties are indirectly linked, in so far as both give rise to forms of uncertainty (albeit rather different forms of uncertainty about rather different things). (shrink)

The focus of this small contribution to studies in the history of philosophy of American education falls upon the backside of the cultural upheaval between 1880 and 1920. The general purpose is to relate aspects of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of education to pedagogical principles in the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, a document of the National Education Association’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, published in 1918. An attempt is made to implement this purpose by analyzing the educational principles (...) in the NEA report, by clarifying Spencer’s educational principles in relationship to the report, and by explaining Spencer’s philosophical principles and relating them to the CRSE document. In addition to similarities between specific Spencerian principles and the 1918 report, especially noted is the ideological proximity of the “spirit” of Spencer’s evolutionary naturalism and empiricism to the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. (shrink)

The three intertwining careers of William Torrey Harris [1835-1909] in philosophy, philosophy of education, and educational administration converge in twelve of the Annual Reports of the board of directors of the St. Louis public schools, most of the essential features of which he formulated as the superintendent of schools from 1867-79. These twelve reports, comprising philosophical and educational principles, have been acclaimed nationally and internationally to be among the most valuable official publications in American educational literature. The major purpose of (...) this paper is to clarify the nature and scope of the philosophical principles of Harris expressed in his Annual Reports. The areas of philosophy represented are metaphysics, anthropology, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. While the motivation and context of these philosophical principles are pedagogical in orientation, it is evident that Harris produced here a philosophical synthesis worthy of consideration in a formal survey of the history of American philosophy. (shrink)

The most prevalent modes of philosophy, educational theory, and philosophy of education currently extant in the United States represent a pronounced departure from the fundamental patterns of the Greek-Jewish- Christian tradition. Among the noteworthy characteristics of the more popular trends is a tendency toward the denial of, or an indifference regarding, the existence of a Transcendent Being. This feature alone has effected a radical departure from the scholarly traditions which are characterized by investigations into the relationships between theology and philosophy. (...) This factor, in turn, bears potentially strong influence upon the theory and practice of education. Partially in order to promote the revivification of a heritage not unrelated to that of many early American intellectual leaders, the main purpose of this paper is to exemplify the structure and an aspect of the substance of a theology-philosophy of Catholic education in accord with a selected passage from A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults. The theological-philosophical dimension of this structure is represented by a developmental process entailing three stages of progression: from human love through an awareness of the “God of the philosophers” to belief in Christ. It is shown how theological and philosophical elements of this process bear upon the importance of early childhood religious education as well as of Catholic education somewhat more broadly conceived. It is noted that, although the theological-philosophical foundations allow for numerous options in education, there are bounds within which the direction of this education must be retained. The current importance of this kind of investigation lies in 1) the fundamentally empiricist approaches in philosophy of education so prominent today, 2) the inability of empiricist philosophies to confront prescriptive values in an authentically rational fashion, and 3) the necessity of a theological-philosophical approach for the Christian who wishes to think rationally about prescriptive values, and to formulate the kinds of educational plans which will prove to be effective in promoting authentic human happiness. Brief references to the practical efficacy of theoretical conceptions, and to teacher education, conclude the paper. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that Wittgenstein's conception of grammar and the role he allocated to grammar (in his sense of the term) in philosophy changed between the Big Typescript and the Philosophical Investigations. It is also held that some of the grammatical propositions Wittgenstein asserted prior to his writing of the Philosophical Investigations are theses, doctrines, opinions or dogmatism, which he abandoned by 1936/37. The purpose of this paper is to show these claims to be misunderstandings and misinterpretations. On all (...) important matters, his conception of grammar and of grammatical investigations, of grammatical statements or propositions and of grammatical clarification did not change between the Big Typescript and the Investigations. Grammatical propositions (e.g. the meaning of a word is its use; a sample in an ostensive definition belongs to the means of representation; belief is not a mental state) are no more theses, doctrines or opinions than is “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” Nor are they in any way dogmatic. (shrink)

The problem of simultaneous measurement of incompatible observables in quantum mechanics is studied on the one hand from the viewpoint of an axiomatic treatment of quantum mechanics and on the other hand starting from a theory of measurement. It is argued that it is precisely such a theory of measurement that should provide a meaning to the axiomatically introduced concepts, especially to the concept of observable. Defining an observable as a class of measurement procedures yielding a certain prescribed result for (...) the probability distribution of the set of values of some quantity (to be described by the set of eigenvalues of some Hermitian operator), this notion is extended to joint probability distributions of incompatible observables. It is shown that such an extension is possible on the basis of a theory of measurement, under the proviso that in simultaneously measuring such observables there is a disturbance of the measurement results of the one observable, caused by the presence of the measuring instrument of the other observable. This has as a consequence that the joint probability distribution cannot obey the marginal distribution laws usually imposed. This result is of great importance in exposing quantum mechanics as an axiomatized theory, since overlooking it seems to prohibit an axiomatic description of simultaneous measurement of incompatible observables by quantum mechanics. (shrink)

But logic as it stands, e.g. in Principia Mathematica, can quite well be applied to our ordinary propositions; e.g. from ‘All men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man’ there follows according to this logic ‘Socrates is mortal’, which is obviously correct, even though I equally obviously do not know what structure is possessed by the thing Socrates or the property of mortality. Here they just function as simple objects.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Badiou's Ethics Three Concerns about Badiou's Ethics Mainstream Approaches to the Ethics of Teaching The Ethics of Teaching Note References.

Although Brentano generally regarded himself as at heart a metaphysician, his work then and subsequently has always been dominated by the Psychology. He is rightly celebrated as the person who reintroduced the Aristotelian-Scholastic notion of intentio back into the study of the mind. Brentano's inspiration was Aristotle's theory of perception in De anima, though his terminology of intentional inexistence was medieval. For the history of the work and its position in his output may I refer to my Introduction to the (...) reprinted English translation. Alongside Aristotle the work shows influences of Descartes, Comte and the British empiricists. The theory of intentionality presented in the Psychology is much less modern and less plausible than almost all recent commentary would have it, and was in any case not where Brentano's main interest lay. Intentionality simply served to demarcate mental phenomena from physical, in Book One, but the main aim was a classification of the mental, outlined in Book Two. Books Three to Five were to have dealt in detail with the three main classes of presentations, judgements and feelings, with the final book considering the metaphysics: mind-body and the immortality of the soul. Brentano's shifting views, recently documented in English with Benito Muller's translation of Descriptive Psychology, a work from the transitional 1890s, made the original plan obsolete. The role of an a priori, philosophical or descriptive psychology, methodologically prior to empirical-experimental genetic psychology, foreshadowed and influenced Husserl's notion of phenomenology, and Brentano's Comtean methodological epoche of desisting from controversial metaphysical statements in favour of an examination of the phenomena likewise presaged Husserl's more ponderous phenomenological reductions. Brentano's other work covers most areas of philosophy, notably ethics, where he upheld a form of a priori intuitionism much admired by G. E. Moore, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, philosophy of language, deductive and inductive logic, and the history of philosophy. I shall mention just two areas. In his logic lectures from 1866 onwards (a compilation published 1956) Brentano rejected the subject-predicate analysis of simple judgements and proposed instead (for which he apparently secured written assent from Mill) that all judgements are logical compounds of positive and negative existential judgements. For example the universal judgement All men are mortal becomes the negative existential There are no immortal men. On this basis Brentano radically simplified the inference rules of deductive logic. While unlike de Morgan, Frege and others he does not go beyond logic's traditional scope by recognising relations, within its bounds his reformed-term logic is simple, elegant and easily teachable. Some of his ideas in logic influenced the young Husserl. Unfortunately Brentano took against mathematical logic, which he wrongly associated exclusively with Hamilton's confused doctrine of the quantification of the predicate. His inductive logic, which takes up by far the greater part of his logic lectures, remains unresearched to this day. (shrink)

Pāṇinīyavyākaraṇodāharaṇakośaḥ; La grammaire paninéenne par ses exemples; Paninian Grammar through Its Examples, vol. I: Udāharaṇasamāhāraḥ; L’ensemble des exemples; The Collection of Examples; saṁśodhitaprakāśanam, édition révisée, revised edition. Two parts. By F. Grimal, V. Venkataraja Sarma, S. Lakshminarasimham, K. V. Ramakrishnamacharyulu, and Jagadeesh Bhat. Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha Series, vols. 309, 310; Collection indologie 93.1.1, 2. Tirupati: Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha; Pondichéry: École française d’Extrème-Orient; Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2018. Pp. xiii + 757 + 481. Rs. 680, 450.

Terminally differentiating stratified squamous epithelial cells assemble a specialized protective barrier structure on their periphery termed the cornified cell envelope (CE). It is composed of numerous structural proteins that become cross‐linked by several transglutaminase enzymes into an insoluble macromolecular assembly. Several proteins are involved in the initial stages of CE assembly, but only certain proteins from a choice of more than 20 different proteins are used in the final stages of CE reinforcement, apparently to meet tissue‐specific requirements. In addition, a (...) variable selection of proteins may be upregulated in response to genetic defects of one of the CE proteins or tissue injury, in an effort to maintain an effective barrier. Additionally, in the epidermis and hair fiber cuticle, a layer of lipids is covalently attached to the proteins, which provides essential water barrier properties. Here we describe our current understanding of CE structure, a possible mechanism of its assembly, and various disorders that cause a defective barrier. BioEssays 24:789–800, 2002. Published 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

If someone commits the mereological fallacy, then he ascribes psychological predicates to parts of an animal that apply only to the (behaving) animal as a whole. This incoherence is not strictly speaking a fallacy, i.e. an invalid argument, since it is not an argument but an illicit predication. However, it leads to invalid inferences and arguments, and so can loosely be called a fallacy. However, discussions of this particular illicit predication, the mereological fallacy, show that it is often misunderstood. Many (...) misunderstandings concern the use of this illicit predication in the course of discussions of understanding the mind/body problem. Our aim here is to provide an accessible overview through discussing common misconceptions of the fallacy. We also discuss how conceptual investigations of the relation between living organisms and their parts fit within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, i.e. inclusive fitness theory. (shrink)

Combinatorial operations on sets are almost never well defined on Turing degrees, a fact so obvious that counterexamples are worth exhibiting. The case we focus on is the symmetric-difference operator; there are pairs of degrees for which the symmetric-difference operation is well defined. Some examples can be extracted from the literature, e.g. from the existence of nonzero degrees with strong minimal covers. We focus on the case of incomparable r.e. degrees for which the symmetric-difference operation is well defined.

Creativity is an important quality that has been linked with problem solving, achievement, and scientific advancement. It has previously been proposed that creative individuals pay greater attention to and are able to utilize information that others may consider irrelevant, in order to generate creative ideas (e.g., Eysenck, 1995). In this study we investigated whether there was a relationship between creativity and greater learning about irrelevant information. To answer this question, we used a self-report measure of creative ideation and a blocking (...) task, which involved learning about irrelevant stimuli. We failed to find evidence for this association, with a Bayes Factor indicating support for no relationship between these measures. While it is possible that a different measure of creative ideation, for example one which does not rely on self-report, may produce different results, a more lucrative research direction may be focusing on the link between creativity and cognitive flexibility, in line with suggestions by Zabelina and Robinson (2010). (shrink)

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

It has consistently been shown that agents judge the intervals between their actions and outcomes as compressed in time, an effect named intentional binding. In the present work, we investigated whether this effect is result of prior bias volunteers have about the timing of the consequences of their actions, or if it is due to learning that occurs during the experimental session. Volunteers made temporal estimates of the interval between their action and target onset , or between two events . (...) Our results show that temporal estimates become shorter throughout each experimental block in both conditions. Moreover, we found that observers judged intervals between action and outcomes as shorter even in very early trials of each block. To quantify the decrease of temporal judgments in experimental blocks, exponential functions were fitted to participants’ temporal judgments. The fitted parameters suggest that observers had different prior biases as to intervals between events in which action was involved. These findings suggest that prior bias might play a more important role in this effect than calibration-type learning processes. (shrink)

Increasingly, clinical research is evaluated on the quality of its statistical analysis. Traditionally, statistical analyses in clinical research have been carried out from a ‘frequentist’ perspective. The presence of an alternative paradigm – the Bayesian paradigm – has been relatively unknown in clinical research until recently. There is currently a growing interest in the use of Bayesian statistics in health care research. This is due both to a growing realization of the limitations of frequentist methods and to the ability of (...) Bayesian methods explicitly to incorporate prior expert knowledge and belief into the analyses. This is in contrast to frequentist methods, where prior experience and beliefs tend to be incorporated into the analyses in an ad hoc fashion. This paper outlines the frequentist and Bayesian paradigms. Acute myocardial infarction mortality data are then analysed from both a Bayesian and a frequentist perspective. In some analyses, the two methods are seen to produce comparable results; in others, they produce different results. It is noted that in this example, there are clinically relevant questions that are more easily addressed from a Bayesian perspective. Finally, areas in clinical research where Bayesian ideas are increasingly common are highlighted. (shrink)

How, and how well, do people switch between exploration and exploitation to search for and accumulate resources? We study the decision processes underlying such exploration/exploitation trade‐offs using a novel card selection task that captures the common situation of searching among multiple resources (e.g., jobs) that can be exploited without depleting. With experience, participants learn to switch appropriately between exploration and exploitation and approach optimal performance. We model participants' behavior on this task with random, threshold, and sampling strategies, and find that (...) a linear decreasing threshold rule best fits participants' results. Further evidence that participants use decreasing threshold‐based strategies comes from reaction time differences between exploration and exploitation; however, participants themselves report non‐decreasing thresholds. Decreasing threshold strategies that “front‐load” exploration and switch quickly to exploitation are particularly effective in resource accumulation tasks, in contrast to optimal stopping problems like the Secretary Problem requiring longer exploration. (shrink)

This study examined some ethical implications of two different individual competitive orientations. Winning is crucially important in hypercompetitiveness , whereas a personal development (PD) perspective considers competition as a means to self-discovery and self-improvement. In a sample of 263 senior-level undergraduate business students, survey results suggested that hypercompetitiveness was generally associated with “poor ethics” and PD competitiveness was linked with “high ethics”. For example, hypercompetitive individuals generally saw nothing wrong with self-interested gain at the expense of others, but PD competitors (...) viewed such activities as largely inappropriate. Hypercompetitive people also tended to be highly Machiavellian but not ethically idealistic. In contrast, PD competitors tended to be ethically idealistic but not Machiavellian. Managers that are interested in both high ethics and high functioning work groups may wish to consider the potential importance of attempting to channel hypercompetitive tendencies into PD directions. (shrink)

Animal ethicists have recently debated the ethical questions raised by disenhancing animals to improve their welfare. Here, we focus on the particular case of breeding hens for commercial egg-laying systems to become blind, in order to benefit their welfare. Many people find breeding blind hens intuitively repellent, yet ‘welfare-only’ positions appear to be committed to endorsing this possibility if it produces welfare gains. We call this the ‘Blind Hens’ Challenge’. In this paper, we argue that there are both empirical and (...) theoretical reasons why even those adopting ‘welfare-only’ views should be concerned about breeding blind hens. But we also argue that alternative views, which (for example) claim that it is important to respect the telos or rights of an animal, do not offer a more convincing solution to questions raised by the possibility of disenhancing animals for their own benefit. (shrink)

This article addresses the ability of Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) networks to generate stagewise cognitive development in accordance with Piaget's theory of cognitive epigenesis. We carried out a replication study of the simulation experiments by McClelland (1989) and McClelland and Jenkins (1991) in which a PDP network learns to solve balance scale problems. In objective tests motivated from catastrophe theory, a mathematical theory of transitions in epigenetical systems, no evidence for stage transitions in network performance was found. It is concluded (...) that PDP networks lack the ability to recover the positive outcomes of analogous catastrophe analyses of real cognitive developmental data. In an attempt to further characterize the learning behaviour of PDP networks, we carried out a second simulation study using the discrimination‐shift paradigm. The results thus obtained indicate that PDP learning is compatible with the learning of stimulus‐response relationships, not with the acquisition of mediating rules such as conceived in (neo‐)Piagetian theory. In closing, we speculate about the feasibility of simulating stagewise development with alternative network architectures. (shrink)

This study examined whether undergraduate students’ perceptions regarding the acceptability of cheating were influenced by the amount of ethics instruction the students had received and/or by their personality. The results, from a sample of 230 upper-level undergraduate students, indicated that simply taking a business ethics course did not have a significant influence on students’ views regarding cheating. On the other hand, Machiavellianism was positively related to perceiving that two forms of cheating were acceptable. Moreover, in testing for moderating relationships, the (...) results indicated that the extent to which taking a business ethics course influenced attitudes varied substantially across individuals. Specifically, taking a course in business ethics did result in students who scored lower on Machiavellianism holding even more negative views regarding certain forms of cheating. In addition, individuals with higher grade point averages (GPAs) who had taken a course in business ethics were also less accepting of certain forms of cheating than individuals with similar GPAs who had not taken the business ethics course. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)