What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon.

This is a collective study of the epistemic significance of disagreement: twelve contributors explore rival responses to the problems that it raises for philosophy. They develop our understanding of epistemic phenomena that are central to any thoughtful engagement with others' beliefs.

This chapter reflects on the readings and uses of Virgil in British imperial contexts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British interest in Virgil heightened during the middle of the eighteenth century, when Britain was establishing its Second Empire. In the age of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, Virgil was often deployed by writers in different imperial situations. Writers such as Edward Gibbon turned to Virgil not because of a desire to promote monarchical imperialism but with the aim of evaluating (...) the mechanism of the empire, to explore its limits and contradictions, and to question its durability. In Victoria’s reign, when the empire in India seemed to several Britons to be long lasting, many prominent figures highlighted the providential and prophetic interpretations of Virgil, and speculated about an empire that was divinely ordained and infinite. Among these prominent personages were Tennyson, Auden, Bryce, and so on. These themes of British Empire within the context of Virgil’s writings are examined from the time of Gibbon to the Victorians, in order to describe the interweaving relationships and patterns that link Virgil and the history of the empire. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)