John Hawthorne in a recent paper takes issue with Lewisian accounts of counterfactuals, when relevant laws of nature are chancy. I respond to his arguments on behalf of the Lewisian, and conclude that while some can be rebutted, the case against the original Lewisian account is strong. I develop a neo-Lewisian account of what makes for closeness of worlds. I argue that my revised version avoids Hawthorne's challenges. I argue that this is closer to the spirit of Lewis's first (non-chancy) (...) proposal than is Lewis's own suggested modification. (shrink)

Comparative overall similarity lies at the basis of a lot of recent metaphysics and epistemology. It is a poor foundation. Overall similarity is supposed to be an aggregate of similarities and differences in various respects. But there is no good way of combining them all.

John Hawthorne in a recent paper takes issue with Lewisian accounts of counterfactuals, when relevant laws of nature are chancy. I respond to his arguments on behalf of the Lewisian, and conclude that while some can be rebutted, the case against the original Lewisian account is strong.I develop a neo-Lewisian account of what makes for closeness of worlds. I argue that my revised version avoids Hawthorne’s challenges. I argue that this is closer to the spirit of Lewis’s first (non-chancy) proposal (...) than is Lewis’s own suggested modification. (shrink)

In a recent paper, I argue that Perky’s famous experiments do not show what they are often taken to show. Bence Nanay has criticised my argument on two grounds. I argue against both his lines of objection.

In this article, I try to defend my conception of noninferential justification from important criticisms raised by Ted Poston in a recent article published in Philosophical Studies. More specifically, I argue that from within the framework of an acquaintance theory, one can still allow for fallible noninferential justification, and one can do so without losing the advantages I claim for the theory.

In their article on the limited duty to reinterpret genetic variants, Watts and Newson argue that clinical labs are not morally obligated to conduct routine reinterpretation despite its potential clinical and personal value.1 We endorse the authors’ argument for a circumscribed duty to reclassify genomic variants in certain cases, including to promote diagnostic equity for racial and ethnic minority populations that have been historically excluded from and exploited by genomic research and medicine. However, given the history and resilience of scientific (...) racism, the use of socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to enhance diagnostic equity raises several ethical and practical challenges. In the short term, using socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to identify patients for variant reclassification is a practical approach for addressing concerns of diagnostic equity. In contrast, diagnostic accuracy depends on patients’ genetic similarity to reference genomes, rather than their socially determined race or ethnicity.2 Thus, in the long term, securing both diagnostic equity and diagnostic accuracy through targeted variant reclassification will require a shift away from relying on race and ethnicity and towards assessing genetic similarity. Critically, the identification of patients for genomic variant reclassification using socially constructed race or ethnicity runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful …. (shrink)

Being imitated has a wide range of pro-social effects, but it is not clear how these effects are mediated. Naturalistic studies of the effects of being imitated have not established whether pro-social outcomes are due to the similarity and/or the contingency between the movements performed by the actor and those of the imitator. Similarity is often assumed to be the active ingredient, but we hypothesized that contingency might also be important, as it produces positive affect in infants and (...) can be detected by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of associative learning. We manipulated similarity and contingency between performed and observed actions in a computerized task. Similarity had no positive effects; however, contingency resulted in greater enjoyment of the task, reported closeness to others, and helping behavior. These results suggest that the pro-social effects of being imitated may rely on associative mechanisms. (shrink)

If connectionism is to be an adequate theory of mind, we must have a theory of representation for neural networks that allows for individual differences in weighting and architecture while preserving sameness, or at least similarity, of content. In this paper we propose a procedure for measuring sameness of content of neural representations. We argue that the correct way to compare neural representations is through analysis of the distances between neural activations, and we present a method for doing so. (...) We then use the technique to demonstrate empirically that different artificial neural networks trained by backpropagation on the same categorization task, even with different representational encodings of the input patterns and different numbers of hidden units, reach states in which representations at the hidden units are similar. We discuss how this work provides a rebuttal to Fodor and Lepore's critique of Paul Churchland's state space semantics. (shrink)

In the domain of legal information retrieval, an important challenge is to compute similarity between two legal documents. Precedents play an important role in The Common Law system, where lawyers need to frequently refer to relevant prior cases. Measuring document similarity is one of the most crucial aspects of any document retrieval system which decides the speed, scalability and accuracy of the system. Text-based and network-based methods for computing similarity among case reports have already been proposed in (...) prior works but not without a few pitfalls. Since legal citation networks are generally highly disconnected, network based metrics are not suited for them. Till date, only a few text-based and predominant embedding based methods have been employed, for instance, TF-IDF based approaches, Word2Vec and Doc2Vec based approaches. We investigate the performance of 56 different methodologies for computing textual similarity across court case statements when applied on a dataset of Indian Supreme Court Cases. Among the 56 different methods, thirty are adaptations of existing methods and twenty-six are our proposed methods. The methods studied include models such as BERT and Law2Vec. It is observed that the more traditional methods that rely on a bag-of-words representation performs better than the more advanced context-aware methods for computing document-level similarity. Finally we nominate, via empirical validation, five of our best performing methods as appropriate for measuring similarity between case reports. Among these five, two are adaptations of existing methods and the other three are our proposed methods. (shrink)

토머스 쿤이 남긴 개념체계와 추론에 대한 개요는 인지과학의 성과에 힘입어 더욱 정교한 이론으로 발전했으며, 이러한 인지적 접근은 그동안 해명하기 어려웠던 과학 활동의 동학을 설명하는 데 매우 유용한 틀을 제공하고 있다. 이러한 접근은 그동안 강조되어 왔던 규칙과 정의 및 정언적 합리성의 역할을 축소시키는 한편, 그 자리에 유사관계에 의거한 개념체계와 사례/모형 기반 추론을 채우고, 과학 활동의 핵심에 과학의 ‘내용’이 아닌 과학을 수행하는 ‘인지적 행위자’를 둠으로써, 과학 활동의 양식과 내용의 변화를 유연하게 설명하는 데 상당한 성과를 내고 있다. 그러나 일반적인 인간의 인지적 능력만으로는 과학 (...) 연구의 방향이 결정되지 않으며, 그렇기에 부각되는 것이 ‘과학자가 어떤 문제를 풀고 있는가’와 ‘그가 동원할 수 있는 자원이 무엇인가’이다. 이 점에서 과학은 경로 의존성을 가지게 되며, 과학의 역사적, 사회적 차원은 과학 활동을 설명하기 위한 중요한 자원이 된다. (shrink)

Previous studies making use of indirect processing measures have shown that perceptual grouping can occur outside the focus of attention. However, no previous study has examined the possibility of subliminal processing of perceptual grouping. The present work steps forward in the study of perceptual organization, reporting direct evidence of subliminal processing of Gestalt patterns. In two masked priming experiments, Gestalt patterns grouped by proximity or similarity that induced either a horizontal or vertical global orientation of the stimuli were presented (...) as masked primes and followed by visible targets that could be congruent or incongruent with the orientation of the primes. The results showed a reliable priming effect in the complete absence of prime awareness for both proximity and similarity grouping principles. These findings suggest that a phenomenal report of the Gestalt pattern is not mandatory to observe an effect on the response based on the global properties of Gestalt stimuli. (shrink)

The common law system is a legal system that values precedent, or previous court decisions, in the resolution of current cases. As the availability of legal documents in digital form has increased, it has become more difficult for legal professionals to manually identify relevant past cases due to the vast amount of data. Researchers have developed automated systems for determining the similarity between legal documents to address this issue. Our research explores various representations of a legal document and discusses (...) a novel paragraph filtering process to identify key paragraphs using legal citation information to remove unnecessary text paragraphs without disturbing the concept of the legal document. State-of-the-art techniques like TF-IDF, BERT, Legal Bert, Doc2Vec, and Legal-longformer are used for the performance analysis of the proposed approach with document comparison. It has been shown that a model trained on the proposed filtered paragraphs can achieve better results than a model trained on the complete text and can also shorten the document by over 40%. The proposed filtering strategy could be helpful for models like BERT, where the maximum token length is fixed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMoran and Bar-Anan. The effect of object-valence relations on automatic evaluation. Cognition and Emotion, 27, 743–752) demonstrated that evaluations on...

This article readdresses the Przywara-Barth controversy concerning analogia entis. The main point of our analysis is the question of whether the concept of analogy presented by Erich Przywara was in line with the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic definition and use of analogy in theistic predication. First, we ask about Przywara’s strong conviction that analogy is primarily a metaphysical and not merely a grammatical doctrine. Secondly, after presenting the complexity of Aquinas’ notion of analogy, as well as the variety of opinions on this (...) subject among his commentators, we analyze the objectives of Przywara’s view of analogia entis, his grounding it in the terminology taken from the typology offered by Cajetan and juxtaposing analogia proportionalitatisand analogia atributionis, and his introduction of the concept of “a new ‘attributive analogy’”, proceeding form above to below and sustaining the tension within analogia entis. We show that Przywara remained a faithful student and interpreter of Thomas, which makes Barth’s accusation that the Catholic doctrine of analogia entisputs God and creatures on a common plane of being, unjustified. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore [(1992) Holism: a shopper's guide, Oxford: Blackwell; (1996) in R. McCauley (Ed.) The Churchlands and their critics , Cambridge: Blackwell] have launched a powerful attack against Paul Churchland's connectionist theory of semantics--also known as state space semantics. In one part of their attack, Fodor and Lepore argue that the architectural and functional idiosyncrasies of connectionist networks preclude us from articulating a notion of conceptual similarity applicable to state space semantics. Aarre Laakso and Gary Cottrell (...) [(1998) in M. A. Gernsbacher & S. Derry (Eds) Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum; Philosophical Psychology ] 13, 47-76 have recently run a number of simulations on simple feedforward networks and applied a mathematical technique for measuring conceptual similarity in the representational spaces of those networks. Laakso and Cottrell contend that their results decisively refute Fodor and Lepore's criticisms. Paul Churchland [(1998) Journal of Philosophy, 95, 5-32 ] goes further. He uses Laakso and Cottrell's neurosimulations to argue that connectionism does furnish us with all we need to construct a robust theory of semantics and a robust theory of translation. In this paper I shall argue that whereas Laakso and Cottrell's neurocomputational results may provide us with a rebuttal of Fodor and Lepore's argument, Churchland's conclusion is far too optimistic. In particular, I shall try to show that connectionist modelling does not provide any objective criterion for achieving a one-to-one accurate translational mapping across networks. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Religion: A Radical-Constructivist Perspective” by Andreas Quale. Upshot: Quale argues that radical constructivism and religion are incompatible: a believer must necessarily be a realist, while radical constructivism, with its fundamental relativistic epistemology, can neither confirm nor deny religious beliefs. In the commentary, I first question Quale’s distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge, especially from the point of view of the discussion of religious beliefs. Later on, I follow his argumentation of the epistemic position associated (...) with religious belief and point out that Quale’s conclusions could be extrapolated, presenting a basis for an interesting and relevant discussion about the split between the everyday and the constructivist epistemic positions. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that the Complex Conceptual Spaces − Single Observation Mathematical framework is a useful tool for event characterization. This mathematical framework is developed on the basis of Conceptual Spaces and uses integer linear programming to find the needed similarity values. The work of this paper is focused primarily on space event characterization. In particular, the focus is on the ranking of threats for malicious space events such as a kinetic kill. To make the Conceptual Spaces framework (...) work, the similarity values between the contents of observations on the one hand and the properties of the entities observed on the other needs to be found. This paper shows how to exploit Dempster-Shafer theory to implement a statistical approach for finding these similarities values. This approach will allow a user to identify the uncertainty involved in similarity value data, which can later be propagated through the developed mathematical model in order for the user to know the overall uncertainty in the observation-to-concept mappings needed for space event characterization. (shrink)