Bird’s new book, Knowing Science, provides an exemplar of how to do epistemology and philosophy of science together. While I wholeheartedly appreciate his attempt to bridge the gap between epistemology and philosophy of science and find his project promising, I am not convinced by the central thesis of the book that knowledge plays a central role in science. In this article, I focus on Bird’s epistemic account of scientific progress, which is the view that the nature of scientific progress is (...) the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Contra Bird, I argue that scientific progress cannot be fully characterised as the accumulation of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This is a review of a book by Shan Gao called "The meaning of the wave function", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

This article examines how modern Chinese Buddhism has been influenced by Christianity. For our purposes ‘modern Chinese Buddhism’ refers to a form of what has become known in the West as ‘Engaged Buddhism’, but in Chinese is known by titles which can be translated ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ or ‘Buddhism for Human Life’. This tradition was initiated on the Chinese mainland between the two World Wars by the monk Tài X?, and Part one of the article is devoted to him. Since the (...) communist conquest of China, its main branches have flourished in Taiwan, whence two of them have spread worldwide. The most successful, at least in numerical terms, has been Fo Guang Shan, founded by a personal disciple of Tài X?, Hsing Yun, now very old, and it is on this movement that we concentrate in Parts two and three. We differentiate between conscious imitation and analogous development due to similar social circumstances, and show how Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism have had different effects. In Part four, we examine Fo Guang Shan as a missionary religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 159-161 [Access article in PDF] Benedict's Dharma: Buddhist Reflections on the Rule of Saint Benedict. By Norman Fischer, et al. Edited by Patrick Hart, with an afterword by David Steindl-Rast and a translation of the Rule by Patrick Berry. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. xvi + 222 pp. When Buddhist and Christian monastics meet, they recognize each other as brothers and sisters engaged in a (...) similar quest, despite their doctrinal differences. The nature of this quest is explored in Benedict's Dharma, in which four Buddhists (Norman Fischer, Joseph Goldstein, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Yifa, representing the Zen, Theravadin, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhist traditions) ruminate on their fraternal and sororal feelings.Venerable Yifa, a nun of the prominent Taiwanese monastery Fo Guang Shan, is the only one of the four in monastic vows, and the reader may wonder what the three non-monastics could offer to a discussion on the monastic life. This is not a new problem. Patrick Henry and Donald Swearer's groundbreaking study, For the Sake of the World: The Spirit of Buddhist and Christian Monasticism (1989), spends a great deal of time on Zen monks, even though there are no Zen monks, theVinaya is kept by the Zen nuns or by the monastics of the parent and sibling lineages of Chan, Son, and Thien. (See my review article, "Why Are There Monks and Nuns?" in Buddhist-Christian Studies 12.) The monastic, it seems, is not confined to the habit.Brother David Steindl-Rast, a monk of Mount Saviour Monastery, grapples with this problem in his afterword, "Conclusions about a Beginning." It was at Mount Saviour that the phrase "the monastic dimension" was coined, to refer to those of monastic bent who for one reason or another did not or could not live in the cloister. One of Brother David's books was to be called, he told me, The Monk in Us, "us" meaning laypeople, but the title had an odd sound and was dropped. So, what is the monastic dimension? Brother David suggests that it is mindfulness, and he comes close to saying that wherever there is mindfulness, there is monasticism. "If mindfulness is all that matters, the monastery is merely a most convenient environment for this kind of life, but it can be lived anywhere, by anyone" (126). He goes on to discuss the phenomenon of monasteries shrinking in size at the same time as the number of long- and short-term visitors to monasteries grows, and proposes that we are moving toward a new understanding of the terms "contemplative," "monastic," and "lay."This insight may point to the most important contribution of this book. It is not about monasticism per se, and it is not a comparative study of the Rule and the Vinaya, with practical suggestions for their mutual reform; rather, it is a meditation on how anyone, monastic or lay, might live the contemplative or mindful life. Throughout the history of the Church and the sangha, laypeople have been in the majority, but attention has been focused on the priests and monastics. Pope Pius X [End Page 159] put it bluntly: the laypeople are the sheep who are to be led, and the clergy are the shepherds who lead. The Church, he added, is not a democracy. I do not know of a Buddhist who has been quite this straightforward, but many have come close, and the history of Buddhism is not that of a democracy. Occasionally, lay movements in both traditions have arisen, basing themselves on the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers or on the teaching of universal Buddha-nature, but they have quickly been co-opted by leaders who proclaimed themselves to be more equal than their fellows. The tragedy for both Buddhism and Christianity is that the contemplative or mindful life has become restricted to a group of professionals, with the attendant belief that such a life is unattainable by most Buddhists and Christians. Now that the dharma has come to the land of the red-faced people, where democracy is... (shrink)

This article discusses the practice and development of organ donation by capital prisoners in China. It analyzes the issue of informed consent regarding organ donation from capital prisoners in light of Confucian ethics and expounds the point that under the influence of Confucianism, China is a country that attaches great importance to the role of the family in practicing informed consent in various areas, the area of organ donation from capital prisoners included. It argues that a proper form of organ (...) donation from capital prisoners can be justified within the Confucian moral context in which the proper interests of capital prisoners and their families, the benefit of organ receptors, and a rightful order of society should all be appropriately considered. From the Confucian perspective, the act of donating organs from a capital prisoner must be decided by both the prisoner and his/her family (i.e., each side should hold a veto power), whereas such donation, in the proper circumstance protected by a rightful procedure, should be appreciated as a morally praiseworthy act of the prisoner who is willing to make the final effort to repent and correct his/her evil conduct and to leave something good to the world. (shrink)

Over recent years, the issue of corruption in the public construction sector has attracted increasing attention from both practitioners and researchers worldwide. However, limited efforts are available for investigating the underlying factors of corruption in this sector. Thus, this study attempted to bridge this knowledge gap by exploring the underlying factors of corruption in the public construction sector of China. To achieve this goal, a total of 14 structured interviews were first carried out, and a questionnaire survey was then administered (...) to 188 professionals in China. Two iterations of multivariate analysis approaches, namely, stepwise multiple regression analysis and partial least squares structural equation modeling were successively utilized to analyze the collected data. In addition, a case study was also conducted to triangulate the findings obtained from the statistical analysis. The results generated from these three research methods achieve the same conclusion: the most influential underlying factor leading to corruption was immorality, followed by opacity, unfairness, procedural violation, and contractual violation. This study has contributed to the body of knowledge by exploring the properties of corruption in the public construction sector. The findings from this study are also valuable to the construction authorities as they can assist in developing more effective anti-corruption strategies. (shrink)

This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing over a decade of research, Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan put forward the Continuation Hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation.

We present a general theory of scope and binding in which both crossover and superiority violations are ruled out by one key assumption: that natural language expressions are normally evaluated (processed) from left to right. Our theory is an extension of Shan’s (2002) account of multiple-wh questions, combining continuations (Barker, 2002) and dynamic type-shifting. Like other continuation-based analyses, but unlike most other treatments of crossover or superiority, our analysis is directly compositional (in the sense of, e.g., Jacobson, 1999). In (...) particular, it does not postulate a level of Logical Form or any other representation distinct from surface syntax. One advantage of using continuations is that they are the standard tool for modeling order-of-evaluation in programming languages. This provides us with a natural and independently motivated characterization of what it means to evaluate expressions from left to right. We give a combinatory categorial grammar that models the syntax and the semantics of quantifier scope and wh-question formation. It allows quantificational binding but not crossover, in-situ wh but not superiority violations. In addition, the analysis automatically accounts for a variety of sentence types involving binding in the presence of pied piping, including reconstruction cases such as Whose criticism of hisi mother did each personi resent? (shrink)

This essay carefully examines the debate between Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt about the meaning of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, and more specifically about several verses in Gîtâ 6 regarding the radical emptying and purification of the mind. My aim is to propose a new and wider conversation, not possible in Hegel’s time but necessary in ours, between European scholars and peer Indian intellectuals in traditions familiar with the Gîtâ for centuries before any European knew of it at all. To exemplify (...) this new work, I attend to the reading of the same Gîtâ 6 passage by the famed philosopher and theologian Madhusûdana Sarasvatî. In this way, the European inquiry into the status of Indian thought and religion ceases to be an exclusively European endeavor, becoming instead a beneficial and mutually corrective crosscultural and interreligious conversation about texts and history, philosophy and theology. (shrink)

This paper presents syntactic and semantic rules for a fragment of English with mixed quotation. The fragment shows that quotation has a recursive and compositional structure. Quoted expressions turn out to denote characters, so the semantics of quotation simulates the pragmatics of speech, including dependence on utterance contexts and reference to mental entities. The analysis also accommodates varieties of unquotation, pure quotation, and causal reference.

For several decades, renewed interest in the connection between perception and knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism. Recently, however, a growing consensus claims the skeptical challenge has been substantially met, and that realism in some robust form has emerged a clear victor. I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-part response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff ews bolsters Barry Stroud’s call (...) for a new paradigm of objectivity. In the second part I sketch such a paradigm based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey’s pragmatism, and indicate its resilience to skeptical attacks. (shrink)

Social capital can serve as informal governance in weak investor-protection regimes. Using hand-collected data on entrepreneurs’ political connections and firm ownership, we construct several original measures of social capital and examine their effect on the performance of entrepreneurial firms in China after their initial public offerings. Political connections or a high percentage of external investors tend to enhance firm performance, but intragroup related-party transactions commonly lead to performance decline. These forms of social capital have a strong influence on the performance (...) of Chinese firms, whereas formal governance variables such as board size or board independence have little effect. Although social capital may serve as an informal governance mechanism and effectively substitute for formal governance mechanisms in an emerging market, this role of social capital raises several ethical concerns, notably the development of rent-seeking and crony capitalism. (shrink)

Among biologists and philosophers, there is an ongoing debate over the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Some argue that our current evolutionary biology is in need of (at least) some substantial revision or nontrivial extension, while others maintain that the Modern Synthesis remains the foundational framework for evolutionary biology. It has been widely debated whether the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis provides a more promising framework than the Modern Synthesis. The nature and methodological implications of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis were (...) also examined. This paper offers an integrated historical and philosophical examination of the debate over the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. It reviews the development of evolutionary biology of the twentieth century. It argues that there are substantial conceptual and theoretical differences between the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, but they are not incommensurable paradigms in the Kuhnian sense. It also argues for a functional approach to the debate over these two frameworks of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

The popularity of Deleuze and Guattari is an undeniable precedent in current theoretical exchanges, and it could be stated without much contention that one's theoretical positioning must at some point deal with the salient conceptual offerings of Deleuze and Guattari, especially their double-opus, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus wherein a wealth of critique abounds. However, the significant trends concerning Deleuze and Guattari ‘scholarship’ may be jeopardised by the use of certain conceptual themes and methods in their work that are distorted (...) and employed by big business looking to secure their legacies of power by means of a control mechanism that looks to subjugate an entire world by means of ‘globalitarianism’. Our aim here will be to use McDonald's Corporation as an example of how the theoretical offerings of Deleuze and Guattari have been indirectly and hastily deployed for corporate ends, how these attempts are counter-Deleuzian, and to answer at least one of Žižek's criticisms against Deleuze. (shrink)

Recently implemented Chinese health insurance schemes have failed to achieve a Chinese health care system that is family-oriented, family-based, family-friendly, or even financially sustainable. With this diagnosis in hand, the authors argue that a financially and morally sustainable Chinese health care system should have as its core family health savings accounts supplemented by appropriate health insurance plans. This essay’s arguments are set in the context of Confucian moral commitments that still shape the background culture of contemporary China.

With the ultrahigh-speed, large-scale development of tourism and the increasing frequency, intensity, and scope of extreme natural hazards in the context of climate warming, tourism has entered a high-risk era. Based on the central urban area within the outer ring of Shanghai as the research area and the tourism attraction as the research object, this paper takes the flood scenario simulation combined with GIS network analysis to evaluate the spatial accessibility of the emergency response of urban key public service departments (...) under current and future river flood scenarios in different return periods. The results of the study show that, under the current and future flood scenarios, the submergence range is mainly distributed within 2 ∼ 3 km along the banks of the Huangpu River, and it tends to increase from north to south; there are 6, 9, and 21 tourism attractions in the emergency blind area under the once-in-a-century floods in 2010, 2030, and 2050 and 98, 105, and 112 tourism attractions in the emergency blind area under the once-in-a-millennium floods in 2010, 2030, and 2050, respectively; in the flood scene, local road traffic in the inundation area is interrupted by water, and 120 first aid cannot get or be delayed to some tourist attraction ; and in 2030, under the normal and flooding scenarios, 120 first aid in the downtown area of Shanghai has the fastest route to tourism attractions according to the speed of S1, S2, S3, and S4. The flooding intensity, road traffic conditions, and the number and location of key public service departments jointly determine the service scope and response time of medical emergency in urban floods. Since the flood control area of the central city in Shanghai is mainly distributed in the 2 ∼ 3 km area on both banks of the Huangpu River, the impact of flood on the emergency medical service in the entire central city is limited, mainly in some hospitals in the riverside area, where 120 emergency vehicles are unable or delayed to reach some tourism attractions. The research indicates that the quantitative assessment method of spatial accessibility of the emergency response under flood scenario simulation has important scientific value and practical significance, which can provide decision-making basis for emergency management of tourism in China’s urban flood disaster. (shrink)

We investigate the meaning of the wave function by analyzing the mass and charge density distributions of a quantum system. According to protective measurement, a charged quantum system has effective mass and charge density distributing in space, proportional to the square of the absolute value of its wave function. In a realistic interpretation, the wave function of a quantum system can be taken as a description of either a physical field or the ergodic motion of a particle. The essential difference (...) between a field and the ergodic motion of a particle lies in the property of simultaneity; a field exists throughout space simultaneously, whereas the ergodic motion of a particle exists throughout space in a time-divided way. If the wave function is a physical field, then the mass and charge density will be distributed in space simultaneously for a charged quantum system, and thus there will exist gravitational and electrostatic self-interactions of its wave function. This not only violates the superposition principle of quantum mechanics but also contradicts experimental observations. Thus the wave function cannot be a description of a physical field but a description of the ergodic motion of a particle. For the later there is only a localized particle with mass and charge at every instant, and thus there will not exist any self-interaction for the wave function. Which kind of ergodic motion of particles then? It is argued that the classical ergodic models, which assume continuous motion of particles, cannot be consistent with quantum mechanics. Based on the negative result, we suggest that the wave function is a description of the quantum motion of particles, which is random and discontinuous in nature. On this interpretation, the square of the absolute value of the wave function not only gives the probability of the particle being found in certain locations, but also gives the probability of the particle being there. We show that this new interpretation of the wave function provides a natural realistic alternative to the orthodox interpretation, and its implications for other realistic interpretations of quantum mechanics are also briefly discussed. (shrink)

Medical futility is often defined as providing inappropriate treatments that will not improve disease prognosis, alleviate physiological symptoms, or prolong survival. This understanding of medical futility is problematic because it rests on the final outcomes of procedures that are narrow and medically defined. In this article, Walker's `expressivecollaborative' model of morality is used to examine how certain critical care interventions that are considered futile actually have broader social functions surrounding death and dying. By examining cardiopulmonary resuscitation and life-sustaining intensive care (...) measures as moral practices, we show how so-called futile interventions offer ritualistic benefit to patients, families, and health care providers, helping to facilitate the process of dying. This work offers a new perspective on the ethical debate concerning medical futility and provides a means to explore how the social value of treatments may be as important in determining futility as medical scientific criteria. (shrink)

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Keynesian model of government regulation and social entitlement was widely overrun by a resurgence of marketplace economics. Far from fulfilling its promise of unbridled personal freedom and global prosperity, however, the ensuing decade of economic crisis and ongoing disenfranchisement has led many to rethink fundamental beliefs about social justice and the distribution of wealth. Not surprisingly, John Dewey’s call for a “Great Community” figures prominently in this discussion. In 2009, Omar Swartz, Katia Campbell and (...) Christina Pestana explored the promise of Dewey’s democratic community in Neo-Pragmatism, Communication, and the Culture of Creative Democracy. This new collection of.. (shrink)

Scott Aiken and Thomas Dabay contend that a satisfactory account of truth is both infallibilist and antiskeptical. Externalist correspondence theories, they say, preserve the infallibility of the truth-relation yet invite skeptical qualms. In tying truth to experience, pragmatist theories resist skeptical challenges, but embrace a fallibilism that renders their account of truth inconsistent and even incoherent. While agreeing with Aiken and Dabay that externalist accounts are vulnerable to skepticism, I dispute each of the four arguments they offer against pragmatist fallibilism. (...) Though partially successful against Peirce’s more popular view that truth is the final belief of a community of inquirers, their arguments are wholly ineffective against Dewey’s account of truth as warranted assertability. (shrink)

This article sympathetically explores the phenomenological pragmatism of Robert E. Innis in Consciousness and the Play of Forms and Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense. Disputing both the realistic view that perception underlies semiosis and deconstructionist reversals of this, Innis claims they are inextricably interwoven. He forges an alliance between pragmatists Peirce and Dewey, and Continental phenomenologists Polanyi, Bühler, and Cassirer, a "polyphony" that also yields a richly aesthetic critique of technology. By restricting his analysis to a methodological "frame," Innis (...) overlooks a metaphysical tension between Polanyi's realism and Cassirer's idealism, though potentially resolvable in Dewey's transactional philosophy. (shrink)

It is shown that Uffink's attempt to protect the interpretation of the wave function against protective measurements fails due to several errors in his arguments.

This article analyzes the implications of protective measurement for the meaning of the wave function. According to protective measurement, a charged quantum system has mass and charge density proportional to the modulus square of its wave function. It is shown that the mass and charge density is not real but effective, formed by the ergodic motion of a localized particle with the total mass and charge of the system. Moreover, it is argued that the ergodic motion is not continuous but (...) discontinuous and random. This result suggests a new interpretation of the wave function, according to which the wave function is a description of random discontinuous motion of particles, and the modulus square of the wave function gives the probability density of the particles being in certain locations. It is shown that the suggested interpretation of the wave function disfavors the de Broglie-Bohm theory and the many-worlds interpretation but favors the dynamical collapse theories, and the random discontinuous motion of particles may provide an appropriate random source to collapse the wave function. (shrink)

We show that the physical meaning of the wave function can be derived based on the established parts of quantum mechanics. It turns out that the wave function represents the state of random discontinuous motion of particles, and its modulus square determines the probability density of the particles appearing in certain positions in space.

Although previous studies have recognized the important role of patients' trust in promoting their intention to use health information technologies, most of those studies were under the “risk-benefit” theoretical framework. To deepen the understanding of patients' online consultation decisions, this paper develops a dual-path model investigating how patients develop trust beliefs toward online physicians from the perspective of communication. Drawing on media naturalness theory, we propose that HIT media naturalness will improve patients' perception of communication effort from online physicians and (...) decrease communication ambiguity between patients and online physicians. This improved communication will further strengthen patients' trust in online physicians and promote their intention to use HIT. Based on a two-wave time-lagged survey from 361 participants, the empirical results demonstrated that the relationship between HIT media naturalness and patients' intention to use HIT is individually and serially mediated by two chains, including perceived communication effort and patients' trust and perceived communication ambiguity and patients' trust. We thus contribute to the related literature and provide practical implications. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants to make emotion, gender, (...) or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime f... (shrink)