Rafael Malach is currently a professor in the department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. His current research is aimed at understanding how the neuronal circuitry in the human brain translates a stream of sensory stimuli into meaningful perception. Rafael Malach received his PhD in physiological optics from UC Berkeley and did his post-doctorate research at MIT. Originally doing research on the organization of neuronal connections in the primate brain, his focus has recently shifted to the study of (...) the human cerebral cortex using fMRI. Professor Malach has begun this research at Massachusetts General Hospital, exploring a new object-related region called the lateral occipital complex. Since then he expanded this research, studying the human visual cortex using a variety of methods, including adaptation paradigms, backward masking, and more recently naturalistic stimuli--all aimed at deciphering the intriguing link between perceptual experience and brain activity. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach (...) to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. Our account also explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to exhibition of a mechanism. (shrink)

Most research on cross-cultural emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions. To integrate the body of evidence on vocal expression, we present a meta-analysis of 37 cross-cultural studies...

The great variety of meditation techniques found in different contemplative traditions presents a challenge when attempting to create taxonomies based on the constructs of contemporary cognitive sciences. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Travis and Shear add ‘automatic self-transcending’ to the previously proposed categories of ‘focused attention’ and ‘open monitoring’, and suggest characteristic EEG bands as the defining criteria for each of the three categories. Accuracy of current taxonomies and potential limitations of EEG measurements as classifying criteria are (...) discussed. (shrink)

Microbial diversity has become a leitmotiv of contemporary microbiology, as epitomized in the concept of the microbiome, with significant consequences for the classification of microbes. In this paper, I contrast microbiology’s current diversity ideal with its influential predecessor in the twentieth century, that of purity, as epitomized in Robert Koch’s bacteriological culture methods. Purity and diversity, the two polar opposites with regard to making sense of the microbial world, have been operationalized in microbiological practice by tools such as the “clean” (...) Petri dish versus the “dirty” Winogradsky column, the latter a container that mimics, in the laboratory, the natural environment that teems with diverse microbial life. By tracing the impact of the practices and concepts of purity and diversity on microbial classification through a history of techniques, tools, and manuals, I show the shifts in these concepts over the last century. Juxtaposing the dominant purity ideal with the more restricted, but continuously articulated, diversity ideal in microbial ecology not only provides a fresh perspective on microbial classification that goes beyond its intellectual history, but also contextualizes the present focus on diversity. By covering the period of a century, this paper outlines a revised longue durée historiography that takes its inspiration from artifacts, such as Petri dish and the Winogradsky column, and thereby simple, but influential technologies that often remain invisible. This enables the problem of historical continuity in modern science to be addressed and the accelerationist narratives of its development to be countered. (shrink)

This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. The central claim of the paper is that theoretical models make better sense in the context of a menu of possible explanations. In order to justify this claim, we introduce a distinction (...) between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes. These conceptual tools help us to articulate the basis for modelers’ intuitive confidence that their models make an important epistemic contribution. By focusing on the role of the menu of possible explanations in the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, it is possible to understand how a causal mechanism scheme can improve our explanatory understanding even in cases where it does not describe the actual cause of a particular phenomenon. (shrink)

This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and (...) asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existences. However, despite their metaphysical differences, the same key ideas about explanation largely apply to both. Causal and constitutive explanations face similar challenges (such as the problems of relevance and explanatory regress) and both are in the business of mapping networks of counterfactual dependence—i.e. mechanisms—although the relevant counterfactuals are of a different sort. In the final section the issue of developmental explanation is discussed. It is argued that developmental explanations deserve their own place in taxonomy of explanations, although ultimately developmental dependencies can be analyzed as combinations of causal and constitutive dependencies. Hence, causal and constitutive explanation are distinct, but not always completely separate forms of explanation. (shrink)

It is proved that MacLane''s coherence results for monoidal and symmetric monoidal categories can be extended to some other categories with multiplication; namely, to relevant, affine and cartesian categories. All results are formulated in terms of natural transformations equipped with graphs (g-natural transformations) and corresponding morphism theorems are given as consequences. Using these results, some basic relations between the free categories of these classes are obtained.

This paper is an attempt to further our understanding of mechanisms conceived of as ontologically separable from laws. What opportunities are there for a mechanistic perspective to be independent of, or even more fundamental than, a law perspective? Advocates of the mechanistic view often play with the possibility of internal and external reliability, or with the paralleling possibilities of enforcing, counteracting, redirecting, etc., the mechanisms’ power to produce To further this discussion I adopt a trope ontology. It is independent of (...) the notion of law, and can easily be adapted to account for such characteristics of mechanisms. The idea of tropes as mechanisms is worked out in some detail. According to the resulting picture, there is still an opportunity to link mechanisms and laws. But while the predominant law view conceives of mechanistic approaches as special kinds of law accounts, this study indicates that the converse may be true. Law accounts are special cases of mechanistic accounts, and they work only in those worlds where the mechanisms are of the right kind. (shrink)

In this chapter I will employ a well-known scientific research heuristic that studies how something works by focusing on circumstances in which it does not work. Rather than trying to describe what scientific understanding would ideally look like, I will try to learn something about it by observing mundane cases where understanding is partly illusory. My main thesis is that scientists are prone to the illusion of depth of understanding (IDU), and as a consequence they sometimes overestimate the detail, coherence, (...) and depth of their understanding. I will analyze the notion of understanding and its relation to a sense of understanding. In order to make plausible the claim that these are often disconnected, I will describe an interesting series of psychological experiments by Frank Keil and his coauthors that suggests that ordinary people routinely overestimate the depth of their understanding. en I will argue that we should take seriously the possibility that scientific cognition is also aðected by IDU and spell out some possible causes of explanatory illusions in science. I will conclude this chapter by discussing how scientific explanatory practices could be improved and how the philosophy of science might be able to contribute to this process. (shrink)

In this paper we propose substructural propositional logic obtained by da Costa weakening of the intuitionistic negation. We show that the positive fragment of the da Costa system is distributive lattice logic, and we apply a kind of da Costa weakening of negation, by preserving, differently from da Costa, its fundamental properties: antitonicity, inversion, and additivity for distributive lattices. The other stronger paraconsistent logic with constructive negation is obtained by adding an axiom for multiplicative property of weak negation. After that, (...) we define Kripke-style semantics based on possible worlds and derive from it many-valued semantics based on truth-functional valuations for these two paraconsistent logics. Finally, we demonstrate that this model-theoretic inference system is adequate—sound and complete with respect to the axiomatic da Costa-like systems for these two logics. (shrink)

Since in Heyting Arithmetic all atomic formulas are decidable, a Kripke model for HA may be regarded classically as a collection of classical structures for the language of arithmetic, partially ordered by the submodel relation. The obvious question is then: are these classical structures models of Peano Arithmetic ? And dually: if a collection of models of PA, partially ordered by the submodel relation, is regarded as a Kripke model, is it a model of HA? Some partial answers to these (...) questions were obtained in [6], [3], [1] and [2]. Here we present some results in the same direction, announced in [7]. In particular, it is proved that the classical structures at the nodes of a Kripke model of HA must be models of IΔ1 and that the relation between these classical structures must be that of a Δ1-elementary submodel. MSC: 03F30, 03F55. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the class of truth-functional modal many-valued logics with the complete lattice of truth-values. The conjunction and disjunction logic operators correspond to the meet and join operators of the lattices, while the negation is independently introduced as a hierarchy of antitonic operators which invert bottom and top elements. The non-constructive logic implication will be defined for a subclass of modular lattices, while the constructive implication for distributive lattices is based on relative pseudo-complements as in intuitionistic logic. (...) We show that the complete lattices are intrinsically modal, with banal identity modal operator. We define the autoreferential set-based representation for the class of modal algebras, and show that the autoreferential Kripke-style semantics for this class of modal algebras is based on the set of possible worlds equal to the complete lattice of algebraic truth-values. The philosophical assumption is based on the consideration that each possible world represents a level of credibility, so that only propositions with the right logic value can be accepted by this world, then we connect it with paraconsistent properties and LFI logics. The bottom truth value in this complete lattice corresponds to the trivial world in which each formula is satisfied, that is, to the world with explosive inconsistency. The top truth value corresponds to the world with classical logics, while all intermediate possible worlds represent the different levels of paraconsistent logics. (shrink)

This article discusses agent-based simulation (ABS) as a tool of sociological understanding. I argue that agent-based simulations can play an important role in the expansion of explanatory understanding in the social sciences. The argument is based on an inferential account of understanding (Ylikoski 2009, Ylikoski & Kuorikoski 2010), according to which computer simulations increase our explanatory understanding by expanding our ability to make what-if inferences about social processes and by making these inferences more reliable. The inferential account also suggests a (...) number of ways in which the use of simulation methodology might give rise to illusory understanding. The structure of the article is as .. (shrink)

This work consists of two parts. Part I will be a contribution to a philo- sophical discussion of the nature of causal explanation. It will present my contrastive counterfactual theory of causal explanation and show how it can be used to deal with a number of problems facing theories of causal explanation. Part II is a contribution to a discussion of the na- ture of interest explanation in social studies of science. The aim is to help to resolve some controversies (...) concerning interest explanation by explicating the concept of interest and its explanatory uses by using the account of explanation developed in Part I. (shrink)

Tiivistelmä: Poliittisen filosofian paluu : teoreettisen politiikantutkimuksen mahdollisuutta koskevan keskustelun historia.

_Christianity and the Roots of Morality_ combines philosophical, early Christian and empirical studies to cast light on the role of religion, especially Christianity, in morality, pro-social behavior and altruism.

This article explores a stylized version of “natural” birdsong as an element of the soundscape of a historical city, late-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. From 1880 to 1900, canaries were brought to the city in great numbers from hatcheries located in the Russian countryside. Their song was the ovsîanka, a mix of melodies acquired from wild Russian birds. This song reflects “enhanced nature,” linking human intentionality to the agency of a nonhuman animal, the canary, and both to the city. Breeders, merchants, keepers, (...) and birds formed a super-urban assemblage spanning the city and the countryside. Canaries, like human migrants flooding to the city during this time, retained their strong village roots, and their urban role depended on them. In this super-urban assemblage, the canaries’ urban performance was an expression of their modified and contextual agency, though their agency was assembled and authorized by human-nonhuman networks engendered by the city. (shrink)

Publication date: 28 April 2021 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 90 Author: Zoran Mastilo, Nenad Božović, Dejan Mastilo The paper addresses and evaluates the currency board policy and assesses whether the currency board, as a form of monetary policy, is in the function of development of Bosnia and Herzegovina's national economy. In this context, a hypothesis that the currency board provides the foundation for growth and development of a transition economy is being put to the (...) test. To test the hypothesis, the paper compares the movement of economic growth indicators among the countries of South Eastern Europe with the primary focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina. By comparing the obtained results, as well as by applying the correlation and regression analysis, by means of simple linear regression, it is proven that the currency board does not represent an obstacle to economic growth, but is the basis for establishing the stability of the economy and the basis for sustainable growth and development able to adequately respond to shocks. (shrink)

Publication date: 2 May 2019 Source: Author: Zoran Mastilo Aim of this paper is to, by means of comparative analysis, demonstrate that contemporary pension systems are limitation factors of development of the Republic of Srpska, and that they should be reformed and improved. Ultimately, pension systems should be the basis for development of the Republic of Srpska. They should significantly improve strengthening of financial markets, enhancement of capital markets, higher growth rates of the Republic of Srpska, idecrease of unemployment. (...) Private pension funds are to change the habits and ideas of every future insurance holder, aiming to make the pension rights a matter of concern of every individual, instead being the obligation and ballast of the society. Today, stabile financing of pension systems and their funds is becoming increasingly questionable. A gap is emerging between the area of rights gained by law and financial possibilities for their implementation. Pay-as-you-go systems, i.e. systems of inter-generation solidarityare particularly endangered. Adequate systematization of gathered data, i.e. evidence, should provide conclusions that pension systems are a limitation todevelopment of national economy. This claim is present in underdeveloped and developing countries, with developed economies also facing grave problems. (shrink)

During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea (...) of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton’s idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation between Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and Mill's concept of 'tendencies' and argues that they are not equivalent. Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and her motivation to adopt it as a central notion in her philosophy of science are described. It is argued that the Millian concept of 'tendencies' is distinct because Mill restricts its use to a set of special cases. These are the cases in which causes combine 'mechanically'. Hence for Mill 'tendencies' do not merely (...) describe the operation of causes, but also and perhaps even primarily how they combine. This does not hold of Cartwrightian capacities which are meant to have unlimited applicability. Mill also explicitly denies the realism of 'capacities' in a sense which overlaps with Cartwright's. Her attempt to derive empirist credentials for her notion of capacity from Mill is therefore unsuccessful. (shrink)

is chapter takes a fresh look at micro-macro relations in the social sciences from the point of view of the mechanistic account of explanation. Traditionally, micro- macro issues have been assimilated to the problem of methodological individualism. It is not my intention to resurrect this notoriously unfruitful controversy. On the contrary, the main thrust of this chapter is to show that the cul-de-sac of that debate can be avoided if we give up some of its presuppositions. The debate about methodological (...) individualism is based on assumptions about explanation, and once we change those assumptions, the whole argumenta- tive landscape changes. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We compare Guala’s unified theory of institutions with that of Searle and Greif. We show that unification can be many things and it may be associated with diverse explanatory goals. We also highlight some of the important shortcomings of Guala’s account: it does not capture all social institutions, its ability to bridge social ontology and game theory is based on a problematic interpretation of the type-token distinction, and its ability to make social ontology useful for social sciences is hindered by (...) Guala’s interpretation of social institution types as social kinds akin to natural kinds. (shrink)

This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account makes it understandable how the manipulation of surrogate systems like models can provide genuinely new empirical understanding about the world. Similarly, the account provides an answer to the question how models, that always incorporate assumptions that are literally untrue of the model target, can still provide factive explanations. Finally, (...) the paper shows how the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation can provide tools for assessing the explanatory power of models. (shrink)

Development of biopharmaceuticals is a challenging issue in bioethics. Unlike conventional, small molecular weight drugs, biopharmaceuticals are proteins derived from DNA technology and hybrid techniques with complex three dimensional structures. Immunogenicity of biopharmaceuticals should always be tested in clinical settings due to low predictive value of preclinical animal models. However, non-human primates and transgenic mice could be used to address certain aspects of immunogenicity. Substantial efforts have been made to reduce NHP use in biopharmaceutical drug development, e.g. study design improvements (...) and changes in regulatory policy. In addition, several expert groups are active in this field. Despite that, there is an increasing trend of use of NHP in preclinical safety testing of biopharmaceuticals, especially regarding monoclonal antibodies. Other potential bioethical issues related biopharmaceutical drug development are their cost/effectiveness ratio, clinical safety assessment, production of biosimilars, and comparison of their efficacy with placebo in countries without intention to market. Identification of the human genome has opened many new bioethical issues. Development of biopharmaceuticals is an important bioethical issue for several reasons. It connects all aspects of contemporary bioethics: bio?medicine, animal welfare and the most recent ad?vances in biotechnology. In particular, biopharmaceutical drug development is a challenging issue regarding treatment of rare diseases. Razvoj biofarmaceutika predstavlja izazov u bioetici. Za razliku od uobicajenih lekova male molekulske mase, biofarmaceutici su proteini kompleksne trodimenzionalne strukture koji se dobijaju tehnologijom rekombinantne DNK i tehnikom hibridoma. Imunogenost biofarmaceutika treba uvek proveriti u klinickim studijama zbog male prediktivne prednosti pretklinickih animalnih modela. Medjutim, primati i transgeni sojevi miseva mogu se upotrebiti da bi se naznacili neki aspekti imunogenosti. Znacajni napori su ucinjeni u cilju smanjenja upotrebe primata u razvoju biofarmaceutika, npr. poboljsanja dizajna istrazivanja i promene u zakonskoj regulativi. Osim toga, u ovoj oblasti su aktivne i pojedine ekspertske grupe. Uprkos tome, postoji rastuci trend upotrebe primata izuzev coveka u pretklinickom ispitivanju bezbednosti biofarmaceutika, posebno kada su u pitanju monoklonska antitela. Druga bioeticka pitanja koja se mogu dovesti u vezu sa razvojem biofarmaceutika su odnos njihove cene i efikasnosti, procena bezbednosti u klinickim uslovima, proizvodnja bioloski slicnih lekova i uporedjivanje njihove efikasnosti sa placebom u zemljama u kojima ne postoji namera o plasmanu. Upoznavanje humanog genoma otvorilo je mnoga bioeticka pitanja. Razvoj biofarmaceutika je vazno bioeticko pitanje iz vise razloga. Ono povezuje sve aspekte savremene bioetike: biomedicinu, dobrobit zivotinja i najnovija dostignuca u biotehnologiji. Posebno, razvoj biofarmaceutika je izazov kada je u pitanju lecenje retkih bolesti. (shrink)

This project draft discusses the issues facing a nation state in the dynamic processes of globalization. First, the term globalization is tentatively defined as a decentralized process of condensation and homogenization of space and time. Then, the ambivalent structure of the globalization discourse, i.e. its semantic and pragmatic dimensions, are shown. The neo-liberal viewpoint is explored of the erosion and weakening of the nation state within the global capitalist power, both in terms of its traditional functions, and in terms of (...) its internal and external sovereignty. Against the neo-liberal thesis about the decline of the nation state many empirical arguments have been offered. Some of these are presented in this text. The main point of this argumentation consists in a general view that the decline of the nation state is strongly linked with the process of globalization. In view of the critical argumentation included in the paper, it is argued that in the environment of global processes only the societies which have a strong state behind them have a chance to succeed. Politics, not economy, still dominates international relations. Emphasis on state politics opens a new perspective in discussing the process of globalization. Current globalization processes cannot be judged accurately unless geopolitical interests and the changing balance of world power are understood. Finally, the paper points to the ideological nature of the neo-liberal discourse of globalization, questioning another basic assumption of the latter, namely, the idea that the process of globalization is at the same time a process of emancipation. By challenging the positing of a necessary link between globalization and emancipation we formulate a position that allows for a normative critique of current processes. U nacrtu ovog projekta raspravlja se o izazovima pred kojim se nalazi nacionalna drzava u dinamicnim procesima globalizacije. Prvo se nastoji odrediti pojam globalizacije kao decentralizovani proces kondenzacije i homogenizacije prostora i vremena a zatim se ukazuje na ambivalentnu strukturu diskursa o globalizaciji - njegovu semanticku i pragmaticku dimenziju. Potom se izlaze neoliberalno glediste o eroziji i slabljenju nacionalne drzave usled premoci globalnog kapitalistickog pogona, kako u pogledu njenih tradicionalnih funkcija tako i u pogledu njenog internog i eksternog suvereniteta. Protiv neoliberalne teze o eroziji nacionalne drzave izneseni su mnogi uglavnom empirijski argumenti. Neki od njih su prezentovani u ovom tekstu. Poenta ove argumentacije sastoji se u generalnom stavu da izmedju erozije nacionalne drzave i procesa globalizacije ne postoji jaka veza. U skladu sa prezentovanom kritickom argumentacijom tvrdi se da u uslovima globalizacionih procesa samo ona drustva iza kojih stoji jaka i stabilna drzava imaju izglede na uspeh. Politika a ne ekonomija i dalje dominira medjunarodnim odnosima. Naglasavanje momenta drzavne politike otvara novu perspektivu u razmatranju procesa globalizacije. Tekuci globalizacioni procesi ne mogu se razumeti nezavisno od geopolitickih interesa i promene balansa svetske moci. Tekst se zavrsava ukazivanjem na ideologicnost neoliberalnog diskursa o globalizaciji propitivanjem druge bazicne i nereflektovane pretpostavke ovog diskursa po kojoj su procesi globalizacije u isto vreme i procesi emancipacije. Osporavanjem nuzne veze izmedju globalizacije i emancipacije gradi se pozicija sa koje je moguca normativna kritika tekucih procesa. (shrink)

A well known paragraph in Mill's 'Utilitarianism' has standardly been misread. Mill does not claim that if some pleasure is of 'higher quality', then it will be (or ought to be) chosen over the pleasure of lower quality regardless of their respective quantities. Instead he says that if some pleasure will be chosen over another available in larger quantity, then we are justified in saying that the pleasure so chosen is of higher quality than the other. This assertion is unproblematic.