Modal logic is one of the most widely applied logical formalisms. Systems of modal logic are being used in many disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence, computer science, mathematics, formal grammar and semantics to philosophy. This volume presents substantial recent advances in the relational and the algorithmic treatment of modal logics. It contains papers from the fifth conference on "Advances in Modal logic," held in Manchester (UK) in September 2004. Written by leading experts in the field, the present book is indispensable (...) for any advanced student and researcher in pure and applied modal logic. (shrink)

Dysfunctional body- and shape-related attentional biases are involved in the aetiology and maintenance of eating disorders (ED). Various studies suggest that women, particularly those with ED diagnoses, focus on negatively evaluated parts of their own body, which leads to an increase in body dissatisfaction. The present study aims to empirically test the hypothesis that non-ED women show an attentional bias towards negative body parts, and that the focus on positive and negative parts of one’s own body can be modified by (...) attentional bias modification training based on a dot-probe task. Although several studies have measured body-related attentional biases by using pictures of participants’ own bodies, the approach of investigating attentional bias via a dot-probe task while presenting pictures of the participants’ own body parts and modifying the biased attention using such pictures is novel. Women (n = 60) rank-ordered ten parts of their own body regarding their attractiveness. To examine and modify the attentional focus, pictures of the self-defined positive and negative parts of one’s own body were presented by means of a dot-probe task. A paired-sample t-test revealed no difference between reaction times to negative compared to positive body parts, indicating no attentional bias towards negative parts of one’s own body. A two-way ANOVA revealed a main effect of time for pictures of positive and negative parts of one’s own body, with a decrease in reaction times from pre- to post-training. However, there was no significant interaction between time and training condition concerning reaction times to positive and negative body parts. Our findings replicate previous evidence of a balanced attentional pattern regarding one’s own body in women without ED diagnoses. However, the dot-probe task failed to modify the attentional focus. As the modifiability of state body image increases with more pronounced body dissatisfaction, the next step would be to test this approach in clinical samples of women with ED diagnoses. (shrink)

The goal is to present how shared decision-making in paediatric oncology occurs from the viewpoints of parents and physicians. Eight Swiss Pediatric Oncology Group centres participated in this prospective study. The sample comprised a parent and physician of the minor patient. Surveys were statistically analysed by comparing physicians’ and parents’ perspectives and by evaluating factors associated with children’s actual involvement. Perspectives of ninety-one parents and twenty physicians were obtained for 151 children. Results indicate that for six aspects of information provision (...) examined, parents’ and physicians’ perceptions differed. Moreover, parents felt that the children were more competent to understand diagnosis and prognosis, assessed the disease of the children as worse, and reported higher satisfaction with decision-making on the part of the children. A patient’s age and gender predicted involvement. Older children and girls were more likely to be involved. In the decision-making process, parents held a less active role than they actually wanted. Physicians should take measures to ensure that provided information is understood correctly. Furthermore, they should work towards creating awareness for systematic differences between parents and physicians with respect to the perception of the child, the disease, and shared decision-making. (shrink)

This article is a historical narrative and philosophical evaluation of nicolai hartmann's articles and book "grundzuege einer metaphysik der erkenntnis" (1925) in which he gradually distanced himself from kant and from marburg neo-Kantianism.

It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitive science consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitive science is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism that produces the phenomenon to be (...) explained, the kind of unification afforded by the Bayesian framework to cognitive science does not necessarily reveal aspects of a mechanism. Bayesian unification, nonetheless, can place fruitful constraints on causal–mechanical explanation. 1 Introduction2 What a Great Many Phenomena Bayesian Decision Theory Can Model3 The Case of Information Integration4 How Do Bayesian Models Unify?5 Bayesian Unification: What Constraints Are There on Mechanistic Explanation?5.1 Unification constrains mechanism discovery5.2 Unification constrains the identification of relevant mechanistic factors5.3 Unification constrains confirmation of competitive mechanistic models6 ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

U radu se kritički osvjetljava pojam slobode u okviru filozofske misli Immanuela Kanta. Ovime se prvenstveno misli na njegov etički nauk, pa posredno i na epistemološki i estetički, koji na njega upućuju i kroz njega se utemeljuju. Cilj rada je pokazati da se sloboda, tumačena u oba svoja aspekta , dade izjednačiti s konceptima autonomije i spontaniteta. Ovim se pak putem, obzirom da je sloboda ratio essendi moralnoga zakona, može argumentirati i u korist teze o praktičkom jedinstvu slobode i moralnog (...) zakona. Dodatno, u radu se analiziraju interpretativne implikacije kao i teškoće koje se javljaju čak i u tumačenjima eminentnih poznavatelja Kantove misli, poput L. W. Becka i N. Hartmanna.This paper aims to critically examine and evaluate the whole of Kant’s philosophy from the perspective of the notion of freedom. Freedom, both in its negative and positive capacity, as well as in it’s purely practical sense, serves as a cornerstone of Kant’s philosophical enquiry and the one true medium of the mind both in the practical and theoretical sense. Along with the aforementioned negative-positive dichotomy, freedom can further be distinguished as being one with the concept of the autonomy of the mind. Through this connection, freedom becomes, as its ratio essendi, practically one with the moral law itself, the latter being a form of the former. From the idea of freedom, various implications emerge, which have been dealt with through the course of the essay. In this respect, particular attention is paid to Kant’s notion of will and some of the misunderstandings it managed to create among notable Kant scholars like L. W. Beck and N. Hartmann. (shrink)

The "myside bias'' in evaluating arguments is an empirically well-confirmed phenomenon that consists of overweighting arguments that endorse one's beliefs or attack alternative beliefs while underweighting arguments that attack one's beliefs or defend alternative beliefs. This paper makes two contributions: First, it proposes a probabilistic model that adequately captures three salient features of myside bias in argument evaluation. Second, it provides a Bayesian justification of this model, thus showing that myside bias has a rational Bayesian explanation under certain conditions.

This paper is an essay review of Steven French and Harmke Kamminga (eds.), Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics. Essays in Honour of Heinz Post (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). I distinguish a varity of correspondence relations between scientific theories (exemplified by cases from the book under review) and examine how one can make sense of the the prevailing continuity in scientific theorizing.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis" verfügbar.

This conception of natural kinds might be dubbed a 'structural kinds' view. It is the conception of kinds offered by ExtOSR within a Humean framework. To invoke structural kinds also means to invoke structural laws. For laws generalize over ...

concepts like numbers or time are thought to be represented in the more concrete domain of space and the sensorimotor system. For example, thinking of past or future events has a physical manifestation in backward or forward body sway, respectively. In the present study, we investigated the reverse effect: can passive whole-body motion influence the processing of temporal information? Participants were asked to categorize verbal stimuli to the concepts future or past while they were displaced forward and backward , or (...) upward and downward . The results showed that future related verbal stimuli were categorized faster during forward as compared to backward motion. This finding supports the view that temporal events are represented along a mental time line and that the sensorimotor system is linked to that representation. We showed that body motion is not just an epiphenomenon of temporal thoughts. Passive whole-body motion can influence higher-order temporal cognition. (shrink)

As companies increasingly communicate CSR initiatives through social media, viral message propagation has become a crucial prerequisite for CSR success. Evidence from two experimental studies, one based on a national representative online sample, shows that social media peers’ endorsement of a CSR message in terms of number of shares, likes and positive replies contributes to an individual’s intention to share it on the social network and thereby participate in message propagation, and that this process can be explained by normative influences (...) exerted by the social media community through the activation of injunctive and descriptive norms, as well as social identity motives. Findings further confirmed that the norm-activating effects of social media endorsement are moderated by the empowering qualities of the CSR message, the sharing source of the message by affecting CSR credibility, and the recipient’s interdependent self-construal. Corporate communication managers are advised to achieve a high degree of initial social media endorsement of their CSR message, for recipients of the message to perceive social pressure motivating message sharing with their social media peers. (shrink)

From a different perspective, “essential actuality” is related to logical actuality. It means plain existence in the ideal sphere of being. One is familiar with this, for example, in “mathematical existence.” This does not merge with validity, but implies ...

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) refers to technologies that track daily activities of persons in need of care to enhance their autonomy and minimise their need for assistance. New technological developments show an increasing effort to integrate automated emotion recognition and regulation (ERR) into AAL systems. These technologies aim to recognise emotions via different sensors and, eventually, to regulate emotions defined as “negative” via different forms of intervention. Although these technologies are already implemented in other areas, AAL stands out by its (...) tendency to enable an inconspicuous 24-hour surveillance in the private living space of users who rely on the technology to maintain a certain degree of independence in their daily activities. The combination of both technologies represents a new dimension of emotion recognition in a potentially vulnerable group of users. Our paper aims to provide an ethical contextualisation of the novel combination of both technologies. We discuss different concepts of emotions, namely Basic Emotion Theory (BET) and the Circumplex Model of Affect (CMA), that form the basis of ERR and provide an overview over the current technological developments in AAL. We highlight four ethical issues that specifically arise in the context of ERR in AAL systems, namely concerns regarding (1) the reductionist view of emotions, (2) solutionism as an underlying assumption of these technologies, (3) the privacy and autonomy of users and their emotions, (4) the tendency of machine learning techniques to normalise and generalise human behaviour and emotional reactions. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 47, Issue 9, Page 1088-1103, November 2021. Ethical naturalists such as Philippa Foot, John McDowell or Sabina Lovibond have critically distinguished their version of naturalism from the version ascribed to David Hume. This article defends Hume’s naturalism against this criticism in constructing a more plausible version of it. The article briefly delineates John McDowell’s reading of Hume in his well-known ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’. Based on Nietzsche, the article then offers the concept of ‘historical naturalism’ (...) as alternative to McDowell’s reading, concentrating in particular on the charge of Hume’s naturalism being narrowly empiricistic. The concept of historical naturalism will be contrasted with David Wiggins’ Humean variant of vindicatory naturalism. In conclusion, Annette Baier’s suggestion of reconstructing Hume’s naturalism as critical is taken up and elaborated upon. While the spirit of Baier’s approach is adopted, its application to the problem of deeply entrenched sexism will be treated as overly optimistic. (shrink)

Ethical naturalists such as Philippa Foot, John McDowell or Sabina Lovibond have critically distinguished their version of naturalism from the version ascribed to David Hume. This article defends H...

This paper sheds new light on Putnam's hypothesis that watching television, particularly entertainment programs, contributes to an erosion of social trust. Previous studies have been unable to reach convincing evidence regarding this claim. It is argued that this is a consequence of the neglect of indirect, interpersonally mediated TV effects which supplement the influence of direct exposure, and extend even to those who do not watch television. Using data from the 2002 and 2004 waves of the European Social Survey in (...) combination with aggregate data from telemetric audience research, we conduct a multilevel analysis of TV's impact on social trust. Investigating this macro-micro relationship, we find that patterns of general TV use in 25 European societies exert substantial effects on individual social trust that by far exceed those of individual TV use. In line with Putnam's hypothesis, there is a negative impact of total TV time; however, high market shares of public TV increase social trust. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis" verfügbar.

This paper presents methods and challenges attendant on the use of protocol analysis to develop a model of heuristic processing applied to research ethics. Participants are exposed to ethically complex scenarios and asked to verbalize their thoughts as they formulate a requested decision. The model identifies functional parts of the decision-making task: interpretation, retrieval, judgment and editing and seeks to reliably code participant verbalizations to those tasks as well as to a set of cognitive tools generally useful in such work. (...) Important difficulties in the reliability and external validity of measurement are evaluated and a small set of illustrative data is used in support of that discussion. Results indicate that both intuitive emotional but also more deliberative cognition is present which is consistent with work in related literatures in expertise and in neuropsychology. Finally, the theoretical and practical potential of the approach is elaborated, particularly through links to a framing in Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

Das Thema dieses Bandes ist die Frage, ob die Wissenschaftstheorie eine normative Disziplin ist. Zunächst überrascht die Frage, denn für viele Wissenschaftstheoretiker ist die Antwort ein klares „Ja“; sie halten es für einen Allgemeinplatz, dass die Wissenschaftstheorie ein normatives Unternehmen ist. Bei genauerem Hinsehen stellt sich jedoch heraus, dass die Frage unterschiedliche Interpretationen zulässt, die einzeln diskutiert werden müssen. Dies geschieht im ersten Abschnitt. Im zweiten Abschnitt suchen wir nach möglichen Erklärungen dafür, warum die Wissenschaftstheorie bisher bei dem Projekt, eine (...) allseits akzeptable Methodologie wissenschaftlichen Schließens zu formulieren und zu begründen, so wenig Erfolg hatte. Eine mögliche Erklärung für den ausbleibenden Erfolg ist der Partikularismus, wonach Methoden keine allgemeine, sondern nur eine lokale, bereichsabhängige Gültigkeit haben. Im dritten Abschnitt wollen wir an Hand des Bayesianismus zeigen, dass die Methodologie doch nicht so schlecht da steht, wie es zunächst den Anschein hat. Der Bayesianismus ist für viele Wissenschaftstheoretiker der aussichtsreichste Kandidat für eine allgemeine Theorie induktiven Räsonierens. Wir besprechen seine Vorzüge, stellen aber auch dar, welche Konzessionen er an den Partikularismus machen muss. (shrink)

AAL encompasses smart home technologies that are installed in the personal living environment in order to support older, disabled, as well as chronically ill people with the goal of delaying or reducing their need for nursing care in a care facility. Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as an important tool for assisting the target group in their daily lives. A literature search and qualitative content analysis of 255 articles from computer science and engineering was conducted to explore the usage of (...) ethical concepts. From an ethical point of view, the concept of independence and self-determination on the one hand and the possible loss of privacy on the other hand are widely discussed in the context of AAL. These concepts are adopted by the technical discourse in the sense that independence, self-determination and privacy are recognized as important values. Nevertheless, our research shows that these concepts have different usages and meanings in the ethical and the technical discourses. In the paper, we aim to map the different meanings of independence, self-determination and privacy as they can be found in the context of technological research on AI-based AAL systems. It investigates the interpretation of these ethical and social concepts which technicians try to build into AAL systems. In a second step, these interpretations are contextualized with concepts from the ethical discourse on AI-based assistive technologies. (shrink)

Bernard Williams Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy.

Hume’s concept of sympathy is often discussed in isolation from the concept of comparison, which plays an important role in his social and moral philosophy. If both concepts are discussed at all in...

We extend the earlier results on the equivalence between the Boolean and the multivalued dependencies in relational databases and fragments of the Boolean propositional logic. It is shown that these equivalences are still valid for the databases that store complex data elements obtained from the recursive nesting of record, list, set and multiset constructors. The major proof argument utilises properties of Brouwerian algebras.The equivalences have several consequences. Firstly, they provide new insights into databases that are not in first normal form. (...) Secondly, they characterise the implication of data dependencies in nested databases in purely logical terms. The database designer can take advantage of these equivalences to reduce database design problems to well-studied problems in Boolean propositional logic. Furthermore, relational database design solutions can be reused to solve problems for nested databases. (shrink)