Det är stort, Europa, tycker urmakarn. Han har just inte tänkt på det förut. Tyskland, Frankrike, England, ett stycke Skandinavien, ett stycke Ryssland. Och gränserna förändras då och då; ljudlöst, nästan omärkligt på kartan, med buller och bråk där ute. Där ute—?... Långt uppe en liten prick, en liten stad. Hammar upptäcker att den verkligen hör till Europa, är en punkt i världen, ett litet centra, kring vilket en landsbygd sluter sig—en kärna.... Det är litet. Han måste erkänna, att det (...) är försvinnande. Stockholm är en helt annan sak, men detta är för litet.1[It is big, Europe, thinks the watchmaker. He hasn't happened to think about it before. Germany, France, England, a bit of Scandinavia, a bit of... (shrink)

There are many problems about causality and identity in Humeanism. Especially, a problem that “Humean Supervenience” allowing many possibilities of various external laws encounters is concerned with the difficulty whether such laws can be coherent with the intrinsic properties of causation. This problem is related to another one whether “Humean Supervenience” is compatible with objectivism in accordance with Hume's original intention. Struggling with a disharmony between Hume's pragmatic epistemology and his realistic ontology, many philosophers have tried to dissolve such a (...) complicated problem. But I think their efforts wouldn't be successful and the disharmony doesn't need to be settled, because the prospective collapses of their efforts wouldn't reduce the meaning of Humeanism. In this paper, I conclude that the seeming incoherence should be retained, because it suggests a moderate scientific attitude to be placed between dogmatism and skepticism. I demonstrate it by emphasizing the significance of some parts included in Hume's Treatise. (shrink)

(First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actually experience time? Or do we infer time from something in, or some aspect of our experience? And so forth. These and many (...) related questions in the “philosophy of mental time”, the topic of this special issue of the Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, are not purely philosophical questions. Or at least, they are not likely to be satisfactorily answered by philosophers alone. Rather, they also need the input of neuroscientists, psychologists, physicists, linguists, and others. And conversely, answers to these questions may have implications outside the scope of philosophy. The papers in this special issue illustrate this inherent multi- or interdisciplinarity of the philosophy and science of mental time. In this theme introduction, we want to give a few more examples to illustrate this interdisciplinarity, but also to point out that much of the field is still wide open—that is, these illustrations raise more questions than answers. (shrink)

Dynastic politicians, defined as those whose family members have also served in the same position in the past, occupy a sizable portion of offices in many parts of the world. We develop a model of how dynastic politicians with inherited political advantages affect electoral outcomes and policy choices. Our model predicts that, as compared with non-dynastic legislators, dynastic legislators bring more distributions to the district, enjoy higher electoral success, and harm the economic performance of the districts, despite the larger amount (...) of distributive benefits they bring. We test the implications of the model using data from Japan between 1997 and 2007. (shrink)

Although logical positivism had been known before World War II, it was introduced into academic philosophy in Japan only after it. In this process, the US philosophers who came to Japan in order to participate in American Studies Seminar played an important role. The first generation of Japanese analytic philosophers, who were born in the 1920s and 1930s, began to have some influence in the 1960s, and some of them published original works of high quality in the 1970s. The second (...) generation of analytic philosophers were born in the 1940s and 1950s. They began to teach in the 1970s and 1980s, and went on to publish papers and books in analytic philosophy. For many years, analytic philosophy had been known as kagaku tetsugaku, which may mean either philosophy of science or scientific philosophy. It had been frequently criticized as “non-philosophy.” Analytic philosophy, however, has changed the style of philosophical discussion and made it possible to form a language that is sufficient to express philosophical ideas and arguments in an intelligible way. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

—Human eyes not only serve the function of enabling us “to see” something, but also perform the vital role of allowing us “to show” our gaze for non-verbal communication, such as through establishing eye contact and joint attention. The eyes of service robots should therefore also perform both of these functions. Moreover, they should be friendly in appearance so that humans may feel comfortable with the robots. Therefore we maintain that it is important to consider gaze communication capability and friendliness (...) in designing the appearance of robot eyes. In this paper, we propose a new robot face with rear-projected eyes for changing their appearance while simultaneously realizing the showing of gaze by incorporating stereo cameras. Additionally, we examine which shape of robot eyes is most suitable for gaze reading and gives the friendliest impression, through experiments where we altered the shape and iris size of robot eyes. Keywords: Gaze reading; facial design; projector camera system. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

La crise de la démocratie d’aujourd’hui a remis en cause la notion même de la solidarité. Le philosophe japonais, Hiroki Azuma, dans Volonté générale 2.0, présente un argument qui repense les conditions de participation et de présence de la politique. En prenant pour fil conducteur la notion rousseauiste de « volonté générale », il essaie de mettre à jour cette notion classique, en se référant au développement de la technologie informatique. Notre article vise à mesurer la portée politico-philosophique de la (...) « volonté générale 2.0 ». (shrink)

This study examined the effect of fake news on electoral outcome. Using post-election surveys, previous studies found associations between exposure to fake news and voting behavior, though these observational studies failed to show that these changes were actually caused by fake news. To examine whether fake news really affects voting behavior, we need to experimentally manipulate voters’ exposure to fake news in real elections and see if voters regret their vote choice knowing that the information was false. For this purpose, (...) our study focused on Mexico’s 2018 presidential election, which provided an ideal setting. During the campaign, false information about a scandal allegedly involving Ricardo Anaya, a candidate from the National Action Party, was widely disseminated. However, his innocence was officially acknowledged after the election. Using this correction of fake news as a treatment, we tested a sample of 1,561 individuals to assess whether the retraction of fake news caused post-election regret: would Mexican voters have voted differently if they had not been exposed to such false information. Our multivariate analyses found that the retraction of fake news did cause post-election regret among voters with lower internal political efficacy, but voters associated with higher political knowledge and internal political efficacy were not affected by the retraction and were less likely to experience regret. About 20% of the respondents experienced post-election regret, and of those, about 35% would have switched their vote to Anaya. The findings corroborate lasting effects of fake news, which may have non-negligible effects on electoral outcomes. (shrink)

The aims of this study were twofold, to: examine the behavior displayed by participants who expected to be nominated for donor roles in dictator games wherein initial endowments of players are determined by lottery and investigate the conduct of donors who were confident in their good fortune in relation to their power as they redistributed the rewards they had gained. Results from a dictator game in which a donor is accorded the absolute power to redistribute initial income and a random (...) dictator game in which both a donor and a recipient declare their redistributive preferences and one of them is selected randomly by a computer were compared. Confident donors made more self-serving redistribution decisions than did unconfident donors in both games, but the difference was clearer in the dictator game. In relation to their preferences exhibited before being informed of their roles, confident donors decreased their redistribution amounts after discovering their roles; the decrements in the dictator game were conspicuously larger than those in the random dictator game. In short, confident donors were greedier than unconfident donors; the difference became more pronounced when their redistributive power was unconditional even though their confidence had no rational basis. (shrink)

1. Ronri to gengo -- 2-3. Imi to yōsō -- 4. Shinri to imi.

This article summarizes the findings of this special issue focusing on five questions: (1) who studies Japanese politics and international relations in China, Japan and the Republic of Korea?; (2) what is being studied in each of these countries?; 3) how are Japanese politics studied in each of these countries?; (3) what determines the nature of the study of Japanese politics and international relations?; and 4) what is the impact of the study of Japanese politics in each of these three (...) countries? The findings on the first questions are that most scholars in each of these countries are concentrated in their forties and fifties, but their educational backgrounds are considerably varied. On the second question, the topics of study are becoming more wide-ranging in recent years, although in China, government policy still puts a constraint on the range of topics studied. Regarding the third question, the approaches that are used are becoming more varied, especially in Japan and South Korea. Concerning the fourth question, domestic politics in each of these countries matter, and financial constraints are a problem in China. Finally, it seems that Korean scholars in this area may have greater impact on the government than in the other two countries. (shrink)

二〇世紀、論理学と哲学を横断して起きた「知の革命」。パラドクス・無限・不完全性と完全性・言語と論理・計算機科学と論理学などをキーワードに、論理をめぐる哲学探究の刺激に満ちた現在を、気鋭の著者陣が解説す る。.

This paper examines the history of Japanese genetics in the 1920s to 1950s as seen through the work of Hitoshi Kihara, a prominent wheat geneticist as well as a leader in the development of the discipline in Japan. As Kihara's career illustrates, Japanese genetics developed quickly in the early twentieth century through interactions with biologists outside Japan. The interactions, however, ceased due to the war in the late 1930s, and Japanese geneticists were mostly isolated from outside information until the late (...) 1940s. During the isolation in wartime and under the postwar U.S. Occupation, Kihara adapted to political changes. During wartime, he developed a research institute focusing on applied biology of various crops, which conformed to the national need to address food scarcity. After the war, he led the campaign for the establishment of a national institute of genetics and negotiated with American Occupation officers. The Americans viewed this Japanese effort with suspicion because of the rising popularity of the controversial theory of the Russian agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, in Japan. The institute was approved in 1949 partly because Kihara was able to bridge the gap between the American and Japanese sides. With Kihara's flexible and generous leadership, Japanese genetics steadily developed, survived the wartime, and recovered quickly in the postwar period. The article discusses Kihara's interest in cytoplasmic inheritance and his synthetic approach to genetics in this political context, and draws attention to the relation between Kihara's genetics and agricultural practice in Japan. (shrink)

BackgroundEach individual’s unique health-related beliefs can greatly impact the patient-clinician relationship. When there is a conflict between the patient’s preferences and recommended medical care, it can create a serious ethical dilemma, especially in an emergency setting, and dramatically alter this important relationship.Case presentationA 56-year-old man, who remained comatose after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, was rushed to our hospital. The patient was scheduled for emergency coronary angiography when his adolescent daughter reported that she and her father held sincere beliefs against radiation exposure. (...) We were concerned that she did not fully understand the potential consequences if her father did not receive the recommended treatment. A physician provided her with in depth information regarding the risks and benefits of the treatment. While we did not want to disregard her statement, we opted to save the patient’s life due to concerns about the validity of her report.ConclusionsVariations in beliefs regarding medical care force clinicians to incorporate patient beliefs into medical practice. However, an emergency may require a completely different approach. When faced with a patient in a life-threatening condition and unconscious, we should take action to prioritize saving their life, unless we are highly certain about the validity of their advance directives. (shrink)

Prediction is essential for the efficiency of many cognitive processes; however, this process is not always perfect. Predictive coding theory suggests that the brain generates and updates a prediction to respond to an upcoming event. Although an electrophysiological index of prediction, the stimulus preceding negativity, has been reported, it remains unknown whether the SPN reflects the prediction accuracy, or whether it is associated with the prediction error, which corresponds to a mismatch between a prediction and an actual input. Thus, the (...) present study aimed to investigate this question using electroencephalography. Participants were asked to predict the original pictures from pictures that had undergone different levels of pixelation. The SPN amplitude was affected by the level of pixelation and correlated with the subjective evaluation of the prediction accuracy. Furthermore, late positive components were negatively correlated with SPN. These results suggest that the amplitude of SPN reflects the prediction accuracy; more accurate prediction increases the SPN and reduces the prediction error, resulting in reduced LPC amplitudes. (shrink)