This chapter traces the evolution of Japan's systems of household and land registration from c.1600 to the period of early Meiji reforms in the 1870s and 1880s, with due attention to the distinction between a system designed by the state and local forms of registration practice. In the section on the pre-Meiji period, one such local practice of having people ‘disowned’ and its consequence — registerlessness — is examined. The section on the Meiji reforms and the section that follows turn (...) to the issue of continuity and discontinuity, and the question of whether any progress was made by those reforms. In order to illustrate the actual changes that took place at the local level, the chapter begins with an eighteenth-century story about a peasant woman and ends with a case of a family dispute that another village woman brought before the court some 120 years later. (shrink)

This chapter reviews fundamental ethical controversy surrounding the ongoing effort to revise the Uniform Determination of Death Act in the United States. Instead of focusing on the process of the revision itself, the chapter explores the underlying ethical debate over brain death that has been ongoing for many decades and finally culminated in this revision. Three issues are focused: the requirement for consent and personal exemptions before applying brain death for the diagnosis of death; redefining the areas of the brain (...) that have ceased to function in the definition of brain death; and codifying the American Academy of Neurology as the authority to issue the standards of the diagnosis of brain death. The chapter concludes that allowing the personal choice of death determination gives a pragmatic compromise to the disputed definition and practice of diagnosing brain death. So long as all risks and imperfections of the diagnosis are accepted through the consenting process, there is nothing ethically objectionable to continuing the current practice of diagnosing brain death as a successful tool to facilitate heart-beating organ donation without violating the dead-donor rule. By contrast, precluding personal choice and imposing legal restrictions to consent and exemptions would further erode public trust. (shrink)

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to (...) borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology. (shrink)

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments (...) can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the possibility of a dictatorship in the context of Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem. Preliminarily, some propositions about Harsanyi's Theorem are presented using an alternative principle that I name Quasi-strong Pareto, which is the latter part of Strong Pareto. Then I define dictatorship as a requirement that social preference agrees with a dictator's preference or those of members of dictatorial group even if their preferences strictly contradict those of all other people in the society. Conclusively, although (...) in each version of Harsanyi's Theorem with Pareto Indifference, Weak Preference Pareto or Weak Pareto the social utility function may have a form of dictatorship, however if individuals' vNM utility functions are all 'individualistic' and Quasi-strong Pareto is satisfied, then the dictatorship is excluded. (shrink)

現代人が直面する、安楽死、臓器移植、死刑といった倫理問題に、徳、善、良心、愛を基礎として、読者と共に考えぬく強靱な思索。.

This paper investigates the semantics of measure phrases in Japanese. Based on new data, we argue that the interpretation of measure phrases in Japanese is sensitive to scale structure such that (i) measure phrases are introduced by a degree morpheme that selects only for gradable predicates whose scale contains a minimal element (i.e., a lower closed scale) and (ii) violations to this restriction are repaired via coercion, which forces a comparative interpretation with a contextually determined standard and hence a minimal (...) element. We compare the Japanese facts to data in other languages and argue that the requirement of having a minimal element is not specific to Japanese, but universal. We show that languages may vary in how they deal with potential violations of this universal constraint, including coercion of a contextually recoverable derived minimal element (Japanese), ungrammaticality (e.g., Spanish, Korean, Russian), and a hybrid system of ungrammaticality for some adjectives and allowed constraint violation for others (e.g., English, German, Italian). (shrink)

Naturalistic teleological accounts of mental content rely on an etiological theory of function. Nanay has raised a new objection to an etiological theory, and proposed an alternative theory of function that attributes modal force to claims about function. The aim of this paper is both to defend and to cast a new light on an etiological theory of function. I argue against Nanay’s “trait type individuation objection,” suggesting that an etiological theory also attributes modal force to claims about function. An (...) etiological theory of function can be thought to analyze claims about function with modal force, not relying on any theory of counterfactuals. (shrink)

The social and cultural causes behind the widespread use and acceptance of robots in Japan are not yet completely understood. This study compares humans and robots in images gathered through Google searches in Japanese and in English. Numerous pictures obtained by the search in Japanese were found to have a human and a robot looking together at something else (“third item”), whereas many of the images acquired by search in English show a human and a robot facing each other. This (...) is similar to the composition of mother and child in paintings: in _ukiyo-e_ that was painted mainly in the Edo period of Japan, the mother and child are often depicted together viewing something other than themselves, whereas this is not the case in Western paintings of mother and child. It has also been pointed out that, in modern Western paintings, the world inside the picture is separated from the outside world, forming an independent microcosmos, whereas the inside and outside are continuous in Japanese paintings. These may indicate that, in Japanese society, robots are to a certain extent regarded as fellow human beings who can share the third item. In Western society, on the other hand, no code is embedded that can fix robots’ superiority or inferiority to humans, which would easily trigger an antagonistic view toward artificial intelligence (AI)/robots as threatening entities, as shown in most of Western literature and movies. We suggest that such cultural characteristics of Japanese society can contribute to enhance coexistence with AI/robots. (shrink)

To apply reinforcement learning to difficult classes such as real-environment learning, we need to use a method robust to perceptual aliasing problem. The exploitation-oriented methods such as Profit Sharing can deal with the perceptual aliasing problem to a certain extent. However, when the agent needs to select different actions at the same sensory input, the learning efficiency worsens. To overcome the problem, several state partition methods using history information of state-action pairs are proposed. These methods try to convert a POMDP (...) environment into an MDP environment, and thus they are sometimes very useful. However, their computation cost is very high especially in large state spaces. In contrast, memory-less approaches try to escape from the aliased states by outputting actions stochastically. However, these methods output actions stochastically even in unaliased states, and thus the learning efficiency is bad. If we desire to guarantee the rationality in POMDPs, it is efficient to output actions stochastically only in the aliased states and to output one action deterministically in the other unaliased states. Hence, to discriminate between aliased states and unaliased states, the utilization of χ² -goodness-of-fit test is proposed by Miyazaki et al. They point out that, in aliased states, the distributions of the state transitions by random search and a particular policy are different. This difference doesn't occur owing to non-deterministic actions. Hence, if the agent can collect enough samples to implement the test, the agent can distinguish between aliased states and unaliased states well. However, such a test needs a large amount of data, and it's a problem how the agent collects samples without worsening learning efficiency. If the agent uses random search in the course of learning, the learning efficiency worsens especially in unaliased states. Therefore, in this research, we propose a new method called Extended On-line Profit Sharing with Judgement (EOPSwJ) to detect important incomplete perception, which doesn't need large computation cost and numerous samples. We use two criterions for detecting important incomplete perceptions to attain a task. One is the rate of transitions to each state, and the other is the deterministic rate of actions. We confirm the availability of EOPSwJ using two simulations. (shrink)

哲学者・井筒俊彦が見極めた「東洋」哲学とは何か。端的な「ある」とは何か、またその先に開いている「無」を思考することとは?

The Japanese comparative adverb motto has two different uses. In the degree use, motto compares two individuals and denotes that there is a large gap between the target and a given standard with a norm-related presupposition. On the other hand, in the so-called ‘negative use’ it conveys the speaker’s attitude toward the utterance situation. I argue that similarly to the degree motto, the negative motto is a comparative morpheme, but unlike the degree motto it compares a current situation and an (...) expected situation at the level of conventional implicature /expressive. I argue that the speaker’s negative evaluation of the utterance situation in question comes from the large gap between the expected degree and the current degree. The theoretical implications of this paper are that there is a natural extension from semantic comparison to expressive comparison and that there is a type in natural language that can be called an ‘indirect expressive’, as opposed to ‘direct expressives’ like bastard and man. (shrink)

This study investigates interpretations of the Japanese initial mora-based minimizer “X.Y...”-_no_ “X”-_no ji-mo_ ‘lit. even the letter “X” of “X.Y...”.’ Although initial mora-based minimizers have a literal interpretation of _ji_ ‘letter’, they have a non-literal interpretation as well. The non-literal interpretation has several distinctive features that are not present in ordinary minimizers. First, it is highly productive in that various expressions can appear in the form “X.Y...”-_no_ “X”-_no ji_. Second, non-literal minimizers typically co-occur with predicates that relate to knowledge, information, (...) concepts, thought, and habituality, as seen in the corpus data (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese [BCCWJ]). I argue that in the non-literal use, X refers to the minimum on the scale of the main predicate concerning “X.Y...”. I suggest that the non-literal use was developed as a result of the conventionalization of the pragmatic inference derived from the literal reading, and that the co-occurrence with predicates related to knowledge, information, knowledge, concepts, thought, or habituality is due to the interpretation of “X.Y...”, which were originally interpreted as letters as an abstract concept. The theoretical implication of this study is that, in addition to a non-compositional (lexically specified) minimizer whose scale is lexically fixed (e.g., _give a damn_, _lift a finger_), there also exists a compositional (lexically unspecified) minimizer in natural language, whose scale is specified via the predicate with which the minimizer co-occurs. The last section of this paper briefly discusses similar/related phenomena in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Korean, and English from a cross-linguistic perspective. (shrink)

This book, written by one of the leading Japanese scholars in the philosophy of agricultural science, examines the relationship between human life, the natural environment, and agriculture.

Rauszer and Sabalski proved in [2] that distributivity with respect to infi- nite joins and meets is a sucient and necessary condition making the RasiowaSikorski Lemma valid in distributive lattices. The main part of their proof is a direct construction of a required filter under distributivity. In this note we show that a generalization of the result can be obtained from the Rasiowa-Sikorski Lemma for Boolean algebras by using Gornemann’s result in [1] instead of a direct con- ¨ struction. Suppose (...) A is a distributive lattice and Q; R 2 A f;g. We call A complete if 8M 2 Q9 M 2 A and 8N 2 R9 F N 2 A. M 2 Q is -dis if 9 M 2 A and 8a 2 A a t M = m2M. N 2 R is F -dis if 9 F N 2 A and 8a 2 A a u F N = F n2N. is called distributive if every M 2 Q is -dis and every N 2 R is F -dis. Suppose A is complete and C; D A. By rC we mean the filter in A generated by C, in particular, let r; = ; = ;. is called complete if and , where 8M 2 Q 9m 2 MrC \ D[fmg = ;) 8N 2 R 9n 2 NrC[fng \ D = ;). (shrink)

We propose a novel algorithm to transliterate English to Japanese and its application to a voice controlled browser, which enable ordinary Japanese people to browse English Web site by voice. Speech recognition software designed for native English speakers do not work for most Japanese because Japanese can't pronounce English as native English speakers do. Therefore, we combined Japanese speech recognition software with English-to-Japanese transliteration software. The accuracy of our transliteration algorithm is 80% recall for the top candidate, and 92% recall (...) for the top three candidates. The browser using this transliteration algorithm makes it possible for Japanese to navigate English Web pages almost as accurate as Japanese pages by voice commands. (shrink)

The epistemological chasm between how we (implicitly and subjectively) perceive or imagine the actual world and how we (explicitly and “objectively”) think of its underlying entities has motivated perhaps the most disconcerting impasse in human thought: the explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical properties of the world. Here, I advocate a combination of philosophical skepticism and simplicity as an informed approach to arbitrate among theories of consciousness. I argue that the explanatory gap is rightly a gap in our understanding, (...) but one that is not surprising; and we being observers biased by our first-person perspective and our existence may both hinder and (the realization we have them) assist our reasoning. Further, I unfold the concept of observer into two distinct notions based on its functional and phenomenal aspects, and exploit this device to elucidate the subject-observer relationship. Then, I proceed to analyze the philosophical zombie dilemma. Lastly, I contend that from a skeptical viewpoint, panpsychism (or neutral monism) is the most parsimonious doctrine accounting for the explanatory gap, and suggest that it would be possible to make headway in the hard problem of consciousness by uncovering non-trivial causal relationships between qualia states and functional states, if routine and controlled manipulation of neural circuits were easily available. (shrink)

Ce texte propose un essai d’interprétation des contes de Kenji Miyazawa à la lumière de la théorie de l’imagination matérielle de Gaston Bachelard. Il s’agit d’une mise à l’épreuve de ce cadre conceptuel dans un contexte culturel totalement différent. Ces contes de fées japonais sont relus en fonction de leurs évocations des quatre éléments d’Empédocle. Ces quatre éléments révèlent une source d’inspiration inconsciente des expressions et des intrigues de cet auteur japonais. Dans son cas, je montrerai que la terre est (...) l’élément dominant. (shrink)

私たちの現実をこのようなものたらしめている「生命」。生命の内に何か新たなものが姿を現わす可能性としての「自由」。この二つの視点から捉えることで、私たちの現実が成り立っているさまを厳密に、かつ精密に描き 出す。現象学に立脚しながら、心の哲学、西田幾多郎の思想、現代の生命科学...などをめぐって展開する、スリリングで強靱な思考。.