Diminishing awareness is a consequence of the information explosion: disciplines are becoming increasingly specialized; individuals and groups are becoming ever more insular. This article considers how awareness can be enhanced via operational abductive systems. The goal is to generate and justify suggestions which can span disparate islands of knowledge. Knowledge representation is motivated from a cognitive perspective. Words and concepts are represented as vectors in a high dimensional semantic space automatically derived from a text corpus. Various mechanisms will be presented (...) for computing suggestions from semantic space: information flow, semantic similarity, pre-inductive generalization. The overall goal of this article is to introduce semantic space to the model-based reasoning and abduction community and to illustrate its potential for principled, operational abduction by semi-automatically replicating the Swanson Raynaud/fish oil discovery in medical text. (shrink)

CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHERS, when they think of cause and effect, are apt to think of events connected by law. That this is a specialized interpretation is clear from examples. Though one usually identifies an event as an effect, it is just on occasion that one identifies an event as a cause. For example, an eclipse of the moon is an event, but there is no key prior event that is selected as its cause. The reason given that explains this event is (...) a description of the motions of the earth and the sun, and if one goes deeper he adds something on the reasons for these motions. (shrink)

Unfortunately, an at least equally important and fundamental dispute among intensionalists themselves has tended to be blurred and/or ignored, with the result that many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers are either inconsistent or vague on the issue.