This article examines the development of Russell's treatment of propositions, in relation to the topic of psychologism. In the first section, we outline the concept of psychologism, and show how it can arise in relation to theories of the nature of propositions. Following this, we note the anti-psychologistic elements of Russell's thought dating back to his idealist roots. From there, we sketch the development of Russell's theory of the proposition through a number of its key transitions. We show that Russell, (...) in responding to a variety of different problems relating to the proposition, chose to resolve these problems in ways that continually made concessions to psychologism. (shrink)

Theories of language production have long been expressed as connectionist models. We outline the issues and challenges that must be addressed by connectionist models of lexical access and grammatical encoding, and review three recent models. The models illustrate the value of an interactive activation approach to lexical access in production, the need for sequential output in both phonological and grammatical encoding, and the potential for accounting for structural effects on errors and structural priming from learning.

There is already a copious literature comparing Claudius' oration on the admission of the primores Galliae into the Roman Senate with Tacitus’ account of the speech and of the opposition's case in Annals 11. 23–4. Yet the Emperor's own purpose in speaking as he did still needs some illumination. Scholarly concentration on technical points about the citizenship, on Claudius’ antiquarianism and on his debt to Livy has been fruitful, but it has often distracted attention from Claudius’ immediate aim. Meanwhile, Tacitus’ (...) interpretation has been insidious in colouring our view of what course of action the imperial orator was trying to defend before the Senate. (shrink)

There is already a copious literature comparing Claudius' oration on the admission of the primores Galliae into the Roman Senate with Tacitus’ account of the speech and of the opposition's case in Annals 11. 23–4. Yet the Emperor's own purpose in speaking as he did still needs some illumination. Scholarly concentration on technical points about the citizenship, on Claudius’ antiquarianism and on his debt to Livy has been fruitful, but it has often distracted attention from Claudius’ immediate aim. Meanwhile, Tacitus’ (...) interpretation has been insidious in colouring our view of what course of action the imperial orator was trying to defend before the Senate. (shrink)

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)

This study investigated grammatical gender processing in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children using a visual world paradigm with a 4-picture display where the target noun was heard with a gendered article that was either in a context where all distractor images were the same gender as the target noun or in a context where all distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun. We investigated 32 bilingual children who were exposed to Spanish since infancy and began learning English by (...) school entry. Along with the eye-tracking experiment, all children participated in a standardized language assessment and told narratives in English and Spanish, and parents reported on their child's current Spanish language use. The differential proportion fixations to target were analyzed in two time regions with linear mixed-effects models. Results show that prior to the target word being spoken, these bilingual children did not use the gendered articles to actively anticipate upcoming nouns. In the subsequent time region, it was shown that there are differences in the way they use feminine and masculine articles, with a lack of use of the masculine article and a potential facilitatory use of the feminine article for children who currently use more Spanish than English. This asymmetry in the use of gendered articles in processing is modulated by current Spanish language use and trends with results found for bilingual and second-language learning adults. (shrink)

The first section takes up some main details of American constitutional history. At the end of that section and in section two, we concentrate on one constitutional doctrine in particular, judicial review. We argue that this doctrine rests, traditionally, on the foundational idea of a permanent tension between democratic institutions and basic rights. In section three, we deal with the problem just raised, by suggesting an alternative view of the relationship that exists between these fundamental constitutional elements. Here we attempt (...) to show that there is an essential principled harmony between basic constitutional rights and democratic majority rule. And we try to locate judicial review within this alternative conception. Then in section four and in the conclusion we discuss the institutional arrangements for the practice of judicial review in the light of this alternative conception. (shrink)

Professional identity and competent ethical behaviors of nursing students are commonly developed through curricular inclusion of professional nursing values education. Despite the enactment of this approach, nursing students continue to express difficulty in managing ethical conflicts encountered in their practice. This descriptive correlational study explores the relationships between professional nursing values, self-esteem, and ethical decision making among senior baccalaureate nursing students. A convenience sample of 47 senior nursing students from the United States were surveyed for their level of internalized professional (...) nursing values (Revised Professional Nursing Values Scale), level of self-esteem (Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale), and perceived level of confidence in ethical decision making. A significant positive relationship (p < 0.05) was found between nursing students’ professional nursing values and levels of self-esteem. The results of this study can be useful to nursing educators whose efforts are focused on promoting professional identity development and competent ethical behaviors of future nurses. (shrink)

Working at The Hastings Center has been a tremendous professional stepping stone for me. I have long wanted to work in publishing, and I'm leaving the Center to work for America's oldest publisher, John Wiley and Sons. But I feel that my time here has been more than that‐that it has truly continued my education in ways I could not have anticipated. Thank you for letting me be part of your intellectual lives.

In this article, the author defends his claim that a subtle form of metaphysical dualism can be found in Alfred North Whitehead's central notion of the "actual occasion." Rosen contends that phenomenological philosophers such as Martin Heidegger go further than Whitehead in challenging traditional dualism.

Dennett, a philosopher, and Griffin, an ethologist, have recently presented influential arguments promoting the extended use of intentional language by students of animal behavior. This essay seeks to elucidate and to contrast the claims made by each of these authors, and to evaluate their proposals primarily from the perspective of a practicing comparative psychologist or ethologist. While Griffin regards intentional terms as explanatory, Dennett assigns them a descriptive function; the issue of animal consciousness is central to Griffin's (...) program and only tangentially related to Dennett's. The philosopher's arguments are founded upon a more coherent metaphysics, but Dennett neglects to substantiate his claim that animal competences can be most readily modelled by artificial intelligence specialists when they are described in intentional terms. Both authors assume that some examples of animal behavior should not be given an intentional characterization, but neither provides adequate guidelines for the identification of cases belonging to this negative set. (shrink)

The paper aims at studying, in full generality, logics defined by imposing a variable inclusion condition on a given logic \. We prove that the description of the algebraic counterpart of the left variable inclusion companion of a given logic \ is related to the construction of Płonka sums of the matrix models of \. This observation allows to obtain a Hilbert-style axiomatization of the logics of left variable inclusion, to describe the structure of their reduced models, and to locate (...) them in the Leibniz hierarchy. (shrink)

The fertilizing ability of spermatozoa is inhibited by certain substances present in the seminal fluid. Most of these antifertility factors are proteinaceous in nature and differ in their physical characteristics. They inhibit fertilization by inhibiting either motility, capacitation, acrosome reaction or penetration of the ovum investments by the spermatozoa. This review describes and discusses the properties of these factors and their possible role, individually and collectively, in the regulation of fertility.

This book discusses how rational choice theory grew out of RAND's work for the US Air Force. It concentrates on the work of William J. Riker, Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Russel Hardin, and John Rawls. It argues that within the context of the US Cold War with its intensive anti-communist and anti-collectivist sentiment, the foundations of capitalist democracy were grounded in the hyper individualist theory of non-cooperative games.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus ed. by Lloyd P. Gerson and James WilberdingBrandon ZimmermanGERSON, Lloyd P. and James Wilberding, editors. The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xxiv + 471 pp. Cloth, $105.00; paper, $34.99The original 1996 Cambridge Companion to Plotinus had the advantage of being one of the few systematic studies of Plotinus available and was able to recruit some of the (...) pioneers in the field to epitomize their research. In recent times, scholarship on Neoplatonism has exploded with new commentaries on and translations of Plotinus's works as well as significant studies of his Platonic predecessors and successors. Given the difficulty of following, let alone mastering, the burgeoning scholarship on late antique philosophy, The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus is a sample of the work of current, generally younger, scholars in the field, rather than a comprehensive study of Plotinus's sources, thought, and influence.Because they address philosophical questions from a comprehensive metaphysical framework, Plotinus's treatises are difficult to group systematically. The same is true of the contributions of this volume, which elude the editors' attempts to classify them into sections. The first three essays are on historical topics. Eric Perl presents examples of how Plotinus creatively reworks material from Plato and Aristotle. Sebastian Gertz explores Plotinus's knowledge of Gnosticism, outlines his criticism of it in II.9, and speculates on whether certain criticisms were meant to apply to Christianity as well. Marije Martijn summarizes the critical reception and development of Plotinus's ideas in later pagan Neoplatonism. Little connection is made between Plotinus and the preceding Platonic and Pythagorean revivals, and nothing more is said about his reception.The order of the remaining essays is generally the inverse of Porphyry's arrangement of the Enneads, insofar as they move from the first principle downward to conclude with humanity's place in the whole. In her interpretation of Plotinus's first principle, Gwenaëlle Aubry presents the power of the One as an intermediary between it and its effects. Unlike Perl, who depicts the One as pure activity, and Gatti, who in the 1996 volume said the One is self-creative freedom, Aubry denies both freedom and activity to the One. Mauro Bonazzi and Christian Tornau both cover Plotinus's account of the divine intellect that is identical with the Forms as a response to the challenge of skepticism. Bonazzi begins with the Middle Platonic debate over Plato's first principles, while Tornau works upward from how our participation in Intellect enables us to judge the truth of sense perceptions. Svelta Slaveva-Griffin tries to show how Number is a metaphysical principle for Plotinus, suggesting that there is participated One posterior to the transcendent One. Michael Griffin rediscovers Plotinus's important place in the late antique development of Aristotle's logic. Griffin summarizes his criticisms of Aristotle's categories as being inconsistent with Aristotle's own logical principles, and then presents Plotinus's own categories (really more like transcendentals) of intelligible being and then of sensibles. Similarly, D. M. Hutchinsin's summary of Plotinus on the composition of sensible bodies highlights [End Page 349] Plotinus's valid probing of the relation between the predicables and the categories, even if Plotinus himself would reduce bodies to heaps or bundles of qualities. Damian Caluori insightfully reconstructs Plotinus's account of body–soul relations and operations as a synthesis of Aristotelian principles, Galen's anatomical discoveries, and his own understanding of the soul as an active intelligible reality. Plotinus is far more concerned about the distinct nature of bodily reality than he is often given credit for. Transcending the narrow historical focus of this volume, Pauliina Remes meditates upon and praises Plotinus's contributions to the philosophical problem of self-knowledge. Riccardo Chiaradonna ably summarizes III.7 "On Eternity and Time," but with no comments on the significance of Plotinus's teachings. James Wilberding questions whether Nature, which is the aspect of the World-Soul at work in giving the cosmos its life and form, should be considered its own level of reality (hypostasis). Jan Opsomer summarizes Plotinus's idiosyncratic teaching that matter, despite ultimately originating from... (shrink)

BACKGROUND -/- The importance of ontologies in the biomedical domain is generally recognized. However, their quality is often too poor for large-scale use in critical applications, at least partially due to insufficient training of ontology developers. -/- OBJECTIVE -/- To show the efficacy of guideline-based ontology development training on the performance of ontology developers. The hypothesis was that students who received training on top-level ontologies and design patterns perform better than those who only received training in the basic principles of (...) formal ontology engineering. -/- METHODS -/- A curriculum was implemented based on a guideline for ontology design. A randomized controlled trial on the efficacy of this curriculum was performed with 24 students from bioinformatics and related fields. After joint training on the fundamentals of ontology development the students were randomly allocated to two groups. During the intervention, each group received training on different topics in ontology development. In the assessment phase, all students were asked to solve modeling problems on topics taught differentially in the intervention phase. Primary outcome was the similarity of the students’ ontology artefacts compared with gold standard ontologies developed by the authors before the experiment; secondary outcome was the intra-group similarity of group members’ ontologies. -/- RESULTS -/- The experiment showed no significant effect of the guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers (a) the ontologies developed after specific training were only slightly but not significantly closer to the gold standard ontologies than the ontologies developed without prior specific training; (b) although significant differences for certain ontologies were detected, the intra-group similarity was not consistently influenced in one direction by the differential training. -/- CONCLUSION -/- Methodologically limited, this study cannot be interpreted as a general failure of a guideline-based approach to ontology development. Further research is needed to increase insight into whether specific development guidelines and practices in ontology design are effective. (shrink)

‘It is supposed’, declared the poet Wordsworth in 1802, ‘that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprizes the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited very different expectations.’ For (...) his own era of literature Wordsworth proposed a language derived from the ‘simple and unelaborated expressions’ of the ‘language really spoken by men’, at the expense of ‘devices to elevate the style’ and ‘what is usually called poetic diction’. (shrink)

Strategies that motivate agrifood producers to adopt more sustainable practices are a critical component for a sustainable future. This case study examines farmer attitudes to a recently released New Zealand agricultural policy aimed at improving freshwater quality by restricting agricultural activities. Our study interprets interviews of nine individuals managing a range of dairy and sheep farming operations to explore how these farmers manage societal expectations of being a ‘good farmer’ in the context of the new regulations. Four themes were developed (...) to capture perceptions of participants: the vested interest of farmers in positive community engagement and being seen as a ‘good’ farmer; the need to manage farms prudently for future generations; the unique geographical and environmental conditions on each farm and their concerns about the lack of acknowledgment of differences across land types in New Zealand; and the unintended consequences of the new regulations for rural communities. Overall, the themes suggest that the way the policy was enacted conflicts with perceptions of a ‘good farmer’ and good farming practice, resulting in identity conflicts for the farming community and reduced motivation to adopt alternative practices. (shrink)

Abstract:The present paper focuses on the linkage between two academic paradigms in the enquiry into business ethics: normative philosophy and empirical social sciences. The paper first reviews existing research pertaining to a normative-empirical dialogue. Further empirical data on the relationship between various standards of morality are discussed in relation to the normative frameworks of ethics. Lastly, future directions for such a dialogue in business ethics are suggested.

Islamic philosophy and creation (Islam) from early works to 1800.

During the past few years considerable debate has arisen within academic journals with respect to the use of smart drugs or cognitive enhancement pharmaceuticals. The following paper seeks to examine the foundations of this cognitive enhancement debate using the example of methylphenidate use among college students. The argument taken is that much of the enhancement debate rests upon inflated assumptions about the ability of such drugs to enhance and over-estimations of either the size of the current market for such drugs (...) or the rise in popularity as drugs for enhancing cognitive abilities. This article provides an overview of the empirical evidence that methylphenidate has the ability to significantly improve cognitive abilities in healthy individuals, and examines whether the presumed uptake of the drug is either as socially significant as implied or growing to the extent that it requires urgent regulatory attention. In addition, it reviews the evidence of side-effects for the use of methylphenidate which may be an influential factor in whether an individual decides to use such drugs. The primary conclusions are that neither drug efficacy, nor the benefit-to-risk balance, nor indicators of current or growing demand provide sufficient evidence that methylphenidate is a suitable example of a cognitive enhancer with mass appeal. In light of these empirically based conclusions, the article discusses why methylphenidate might have become seen as a smart drug or cognitive enhancer. (shrink)

This paper aims to introduce a robust framework for forecasting demand, including data preprocessing, data transformation and standardization, feature selection, cross-validation, and regression ensemble framework. Bagging ), boosting and extreme gradient boosting regression ), and stacking are employed as ensemble models. Different machine learning approaches, including support vector regression, extreme learning machine, and multilayer perceptron neural network, are adopted as reference models. In order to maximize the determination coefficient value and reduce the root mean square error, hyperparameters are set using (...) the grid search method. Using a steel industry dataset, all tests are carried out under identical experimental conditions. In this context, STACK1 and STACK2 models provided better performance than other models. The highest accuracies of R2 of 0.97 and 0.97 are obtained using STACK1 and STACK2, respectively. Moreover, the rank according to performances is STACK1, STACK2, XGBR, GBR, RFR, MLP, ELM, and SVR. As it improves the performance of models and reduces the risk of decision-making, the ensemble method can be used to forecast the demand in a steel industry one month ahead. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: (a) To measure the effect of a guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers compared with the performance after unspecific training by a competency question based evaluation; and (b) to provide empirical evidence for the applicability of competency questions in formal ontology evaluation in general. BACKGROUND: A close connection between ontology development and ontology evaluation as quality management procedure can been attained with the use of competency questions. Competency questions are often used as a semi-formal specification of requirements (...) for an ontology under development. Hence they can also be used as evaluation instruments, in order to check how far an ontology fulfills these requirements. METHODS: A randomized controlled trial was conducted with two groups of 12 students each. The intervention consisted in a differential guideline-based training on ontology development vs. unspecific training. After a group-specific training focusing on three topics per group, performance of students was assessed with 12 exercises (2 exercises per topic), in which the students had to apply their skills. Different types of competency questions were elaborated for the analysis of the students' ontologies. We used the proportion of correct answers as a measure of ontology quality. RESULTS: On single topic level, the performance of ontology developers increased after guideline-based training for two out of the six topics: it increased from a proportion of 0.46 to 0.63 for the topic Process \& Participation and from 0.44 to 0.53 for the topic Collective Material Entity. In regression analysis, a positive correlation was shown between the performance of students on untrained topics and the performance after specific guideline-based training. Moreover, in multiple regression analysis an overall effect of specific training of 0.09 was calculated (p < 0.1). CONCLUSION: The results show an effect of a specific guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers compared to the performance after unspecific training by an increase of about 10 \% on the rate of correct competency questions. In addition, this study has shown the general applicability of competency questions in a formal ontology evaluation scenario. However, the study also shows that the training of ontology developers and their performance evaluation is a tedious task. The resulting performance of ontology developers is more dependent on the a priori individual competencies than on the specific acquired skills after training. (shrink)