This article explores how `social harmony' as cultural performance, is conducted by Chinese in their conversation at the surface level, with turbulence and manipulation concealed beneath superficial politeness. Although their more collective cultural orientation may lead them to greater cooperation and less confrontation, Chinese also develop artfully crafted messages to communicate competition and frustration. Selected discourse samples collected in Taiwan were analyzed in depth to show how social harmony may become a matter of external display, constructed, enacted and negotiated through (...) participants' verbal exchanges in their moment-to-moment interaction. It is concluded that superficial harmony allows the extensive web of interpersonal connections and hierarchical positioning to be maintained with minimal discord, while at the same time concealing underlying aggressiveness and ulterior motives. (shrink)

Urban streetscapes are outdoor areas in which the general public can appreciate green landscapes and engage in outdoor activities along the street. This study tested the extent to which the degree of awareness of urban street trees impacts attention restoration and perceived restorativeness. We manipulated the degree of awareness of street trees. Participants were placed into four groups and shown different images: (a) streetscapes with absolutely no trees; (b) streetscapes with flashes of trees in which participants had minimal awareness (...) of the content; (c) streetscapes with trees; and (d) streetscapes with trees to which participants were told to pay attention. We compared the performance of 138 individuals on measures of attention and their evaluations of perceived restorativeness. Two main findings emerged. First, streetscapes with trees improved the performance of participants on attentional tests even without their awareness of the trees. Second, participants who had raised awareness of street trees performed best on the attentional test and rated the streetscapes as being more restorative. These findings enhance our knowledge about the role of an individual's awareness of restorative elements and have implications for designers and individuals who are at risk of attentional fatigue. (shrink)

We describe a model of iterated belief revision that extends the AGM theory of revision to account for the effect of a revision on the conditional beliefs of an agent. In particular, this model ensures that an agent makes as few changes as possible to the conditional component of its belief set. Adopting the Ramsey test, minimal conditional revision provides acceptance conditions for arbitrary right-nested conditionals. We show that problem of determining acceptance of any such nested conditional can be (...) reduced to acceptance tests for unnested conditionals. Thus, iterated revision can be accomplished in a "virtual" manner, using uniterated revision. (shrink)

Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: (...) truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint. (shrink)

Different similarity relations on sets are introduced, and their logical properties are investigated. Close relationships are shown to hold between similarity relations that are based on symmetrical difference and operators of belief contraction that are based on relational selection functions. Two new rationality criteria for minimal belief contraction, the maximizing property and the reducing property, are proposed.

We present a decision-theoretically motivated notion of contraction which, we claim, encodes the principles of minimal change and entrenchment. Contraction is seen as an operation whose goal is to minimize loses of informational value. The operation is also compatible with the principle that in contracting A one should preserve the sentences better entrenched than A (when the belief set contains A). Even when the principle of minimal change and the latter motivation for entrenchment figure prominently among (...) the basic intuitions in the works of, among others, Quine and Ullian (1978), Levi (1980, 1991), Harman (1988) and Gärdenfors (1988), formal accounts of belief change (AGM, KM – see Gärdenfors (1988); Katsuno and Mendelzon (1991)) have abandoned both principles (see Rott (2000)). We argue for the principles and we show how to construct a contraction operation, which obeys both. An axiom system is proposed. We also prove that the decision-theoretic notion of contraction can be completely characterized in terms of the given axioms. Proving this type of completeness result is a well-known open problem in the field, whose solution requires employing both decision-theoretical techniques and logical methods recently used in belief change. (shrink)

When a group of agents attempts to reach an agreement on certain issues, it is usually desirable that the resulting consensus be as close as possible to the original judgments of the individuals. However, when these judgments are logically connected to further beliefs, the notion of closeness should also take into account to what extent the individuals would have to revise their entire belief set to reach an agreement. In this work, we present a model for generation of agreement with (...) respect to a given agenda which allows individual epistemic entrenchment to influence the value of the consensus. While the postulates for the transformation function and their construction resemble those of AGM belief revision, the notion of an agenda is adapted from the theory of judgment aggregation. This allows our model to connect both frameworks. (shrink)

This work contrasts conservative or minimally mutilating revisions of empirical theories as they are identified in the presently dominant AGM model of formal belief revision and the structuralist program for the reconstruction of empirical theories. The aim is to make understandable why both approaches only partly succeed in substantially informing and formally restraining the issue. With respect to the rationality of minimal change, the overall result is negative. Readers with an interest in formal epistemology are provided with application (...) cases (mercury anomaly, revision of early thermo-dynamics, introduction of the neutrino), the historically inclined reader is offered a systematic perspective. The discussion can largely be followed without a background in formal logic. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the notion of a minimal belief change that incorporates new information. I apply the fundamental decision-theoretic principle of Pareto-optimality to derive a notion of minimal belief change, for two different representations of belief: First, for beliefs represented by a theory – a deductively closed set of sentences or propositions – and second for beliefs represented by an axiomatic base for a theory. Three postulates exactly characterize Pareto-minimal revisions of theories, yielding a weaker (...) set of constraints than the standard AGM postulates. The Levi identity characterizes Pareto-minimal revisions of belief bases: a change of belief base is Pareto-minimal if and only if the change satisfies the Levi identity (for “maxichoice” contraction operators). Thus for belief bases, Pareto-minimality imposes constraints that the AGM postulates do not. The Ramsey test is a well-known way of establishing connections between belief revision postulates and axioms for conditionals (“if p, then q”). Pareto-minimal theory change corresponds exactly to three characteristic axioms of counterfactual systems: a theory revision operator that satisfies the Ramsey test validates these axioms if and only if the revision operator is Pareto-minimal. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the notion of a minimal belief change that incorporates new information. I apply the fundamental decisiontheoretic principle of Pareto-optimality to derive a notion of minimal belief change, for two different representations of belief: First, for beliefs represented by a theory –a deductively closed set of sentences or propositions–and second for beliefs represented by an axiomatic base for a theory. Three postulates exactly characterize Pareto-minimal revisions of theories, yielding a weaker set of constraints (...) than the standard AGM postulates. The Levi identity characterizes Pareto-minimal revisions of belief bases: a change of belief base is Pareto-minimal if and only if the change satisfies the Levi identity (for “maxichoice” contraction operators). Thus for belief bases, Pareto-minimality imposes constraints that the AGM postulates do not. Keywords: belief revision, decision theory.. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson thinks that every object is a necessary, eternal existent. In defense of his view, Williamson appeals primarily to considerations from modal and tense logic. While I am uncertain about his modal claims, I think there are good metaphysical reasons to believe permanentism: the principle that everything always exists. B-theorists of time and change have long denied that objects change with respect to unqualified existence. But aside from Williamson, nearly all A-theorists defend temporaryism: the principle that there (...) are temporary existents. I think A-theorists are better off without this added commitment, but I will not argue for that in any great detail here. Instead, I will contend that a very tempting A-theoretic argument for temporaryism is unsound. In the first half of the paper, I will develop the Moorean “common sense” argument for temporaryism and dispute its central premise, namely that temporaryism is a valid generalization from highly plausible beliefs about change. I will argue that given the pervasive vagueness in our ordinary beliefs about change and the background commitments of all A-theories, no party can claim to be the common sense view because no party can accommodate most of our common sense beliefs about change in existence. In the second half of the paper, I will propose a permanentist A-theory that explains all change over time as a species of property change. I call it the minimal A-theory, since it dispenses with the change in existence assumption. As we'll see, the permanentist alternative performs well enough in explaining our ordinary beliefs about change, and it has better prospects for answering some objections commonly levied against A-theories. (shrink)

In this paper I formalize the notion of minimal disturbance, as this seems to be required by usual interpretations of the theory of quantum mechanics, and construct a quantum logical (lattice) model of the type of situation that seems to be at the root of the problem of the interpretation of Luders’ projection rule as a criterion of minimal disturbance for individual state transformations. What is particularly interesting in the situation to be depicted here is that, on the (...) basis of a simple model, which depends only on some very general features of the lattice structure of the theory (and its semantical interpretation), usual interpretive assumptions on minimal disturbance appear to be wanting.If we restrict our attention to the statistics of measurement results, Luders’ rule can, easily be interpreted as a formula describing ‘minimal change’ for statistical states. (shrink)

For years, phenomenological psychiatry has proposed that distortions of the temporal structure of consciousness contribute to the abnormal experiences described before schizophrenia emerges, and may relate to basic disturbances in consciousness of the self. However, considering that temporality refers mainly to an implicit aspect of our relationship with the world, disturbances in the temporal structure of consciousness remain difficult to access. Nonetheless, previous studies have shown a correlation between self disorders and the automatic ability to expect an event in time, (...) suggesting timing is a key issue for the psychopathology of schizophrenia. Timing disorders may represent a target for cognitive remediation, but this requires that disorders can be demonstrated at an individual level. Since cognitive impairments in patients with schizophrenia are discrete, and there is no standardized timing exploration, we focused on timing impairments suggested to be related to self disorders. We present the case report of AF, a 22 year old man suffering from schizophrenia, with no antipsychotic intake. Although AF shows few positive and negative symptoms and has a normal neurocognitive assessment, he shows a high level of disturbance of Minimal Self Disorders (SDs) (assessed with the EASE scale). Moreover, AF has a rare ability to describe his self and time difficulties. An objective assessment of timing ability (variable foreperiod task) confirmed that AF had temporal impairments similar to those previously described in patients, i.e., a preserved ability to distinguish time intervals, but a difficulty to benefit from the passage of time to expect a visual stimulus. He presents additional difficulties in benefitting from temporal cues and adapting to changes in time delays. The impairments were ample enough to yield significant effects with analyses at the individual level. Although causal relationships between subjective and objective impairments cannot be established, the results show that exploring timing deficits at the individual level is possible in patients with schizophrenia. Besides, the results are consistent with hypotheses relating minimal self disorders (SDs) to timing difficulties. They suggest that both subjective and objective timing investigations should be developed further so that their use at an individual level can be generalized in clinical practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This work presents efficient algorithms to update knowledge bases in the presence of integrity constraints. The algorithms ensure that the changes to the knowledge bases are minimal. We use the deductive database paradigm to represent knowledge. Minimality is defined as a natural partial order over possible models of the database and expresses a preference for data explicity stored in the database over the data deduced by default. This requirement seems rational for many applications and yet it is hard (...) to be expressed with a set of integrity constraints. We handle safe negation and local variables in the bodies of the rules. We tackle the issue of modifying the active domain (i.e. adding new constants or removing some of the constants which are present in the knowledge base), and we demonstrate how interaction with the user can be used to handle recursive definitions. (shrink)

A sentence A is epistemically less entrenched in a belief state K than a sentence B if and only if a person in belief state K who is forced to give up either A or B will give up A and hold on to B. This is the fundamental idea of epistemic entrenchment as introduced by Gärdenfors (1988) and elaborated by Gärdenfors and Makinson (1988). Another distinguishing feature of relations of epistemic entrenchment is that they permit particularly simple and elegant (...) construction recipes for minimal changes of belief states. These relations, however, are required to satisfy rather demanding conditions. In the present paper we liberalize the concept of epistemic entrenchment by removing connectivity, minimality and maximality conditions. Correspondingly, we achieve a liberalization of the concept of rational belief change that does no longer presuppose the postulates of success and rational monotony. We show that the central results of Gärdenfors and Makinson are preserved in our more flexible setting. Moreover, the generalized concept of epistemic entrenchment turns out to be applicable also to relational and iterated belief changes. (shrink)

We investigate how weak square principles are denied by Chang’s Conjecture and its generalizations. Among other things we prove that Chang’s Conjecture does not imply the failure of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\square_{\omega_1, 2}}$$\end{document}, i.e. Chang’s Conjecture is consistent with \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\square_{\omega_1, 2}}$$\end{document}.

Few works of social criticism about contemporary America have elicited so much response as The Culture of Narcissism. There Christopher Lasch argued that the traditional American emphasis on individualism has degenerated into a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. He explained this transformation by pointing to the psychological consequences resulting from changes in the nature of production, consumption, and socialization. Of particular importance was the shift from handicraft to factory modes of production and the subsequent takeover of workers' knowledge by a (...) managerial elite. Rarely encouraged to be self-sufficient, today's individual is asked to rely too often on professional experts, who provide certified answers for every aspect of life — a process which unwittingly duplicates the conditions of infancy in which we are all dependent on the adult world. (shrink)

Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals and (...) perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system’s viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition. (shrink)

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's (...) belief corpus is modified in a minimal fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information p ∨ q their belief corpus is modified so that p∨q is believed but stronger propositions like p∧q are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information. (shrink)

Liberalism faces a tension between its commitment to minimal interference with individual liberty and the urgent need for strong collective action on global climate change. This paper attempts to resolve that tension. It does so on the one hand by defending an expanded model of collective moral responsibility, according to which a set of individuals can be responsible, qua ?putative group?, for harm resulting from the predictable aggregation of their individual acts. On the other, it defends a collectivized (...) version of the harm principle. The claim is that the collectivized principle pushes the burden of argument, against coercively enforced measures to curtail climate change and compensate its victims, onto the global elite collectively responsible for environmental harms. Some such potential arguments are briefly considered and rejected. (shrink)

Drug overdose has recently surpassed motor vehicle accidents to become the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The epidemic is largely driven by opioids such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone, which kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined. The demographics of overdose have changed over the past few decades as well: according to the latest data, the average overdose victim is now a non-Hispanic white man aged 45-54.These deaths — over 16,000 per year — are (...) almost entirely preventable. Opioid overdose kills by slowly depressing respiration, a process that can take several hours. It can be quickly and effectively reversed by the timely administration of naloxone, an opioid antagonist that works by displacing opioids from the brain receptors to which they attach, reversing their depressant effect. Naloxone, also known as Narcan, has many benefits and minimal risks. Although it is a prescription drug, it is not a controlled substance and has no abuse potential. (shrink)

Changing the Theory of Theory Change: Towards a Computational Approach’ (Tennant [1994]; henceforth CTTC) claimed that the AGM postulate of recovery is false, and that AGM contractions of theories can be more than minimally mutilating. It also described an alternative, computational method for contracting theories, called the Staining Algorithm. Makinson [1995] and Hansson and Rott [1995] criticized CTTC's arguments against AGM-theory, and its specific proposals for an alternative, computational approach. This paper replies as comprehensively as space allows.

We distinguish the set of explicit beliefs of a reasoner, his "belief base", from the beliefs that are merely implicit. Syntax-based belief change governed by the structure of the belief base and the ranking ("prioritization") of its elements is reconstructed with the help of an epistemic entrenchment relation in the style of Gärdenfors and Makinson. Though priorities are essentially different from entrenchments, distinguished relations of epistemic entrenchment may be obtained from prioritized belief bases by a number of different constructions. (...) An approximate reconstruction of syntax-based belief change is possible, which can be strengthened to a strict identity in some important special cases. A competitive interpretation and a minimal change interpretation of the basic idea of entrenchment are discussed. It is argued that entrenchment essentially involves multiple belief changes, i.e., changes by sets of sentences. (shrink)

In this paper we study changes of beliefs in a ranking-theoretic setting using non-extremal implausibility thresholds for belief. We represent implausibilities as ranks and introduce natural rank changes subject to a minimal change criterion. We show that many of the traditional AGM postulates for revision and contraction are preserved, except for the postulate of Preservation which is invalid. The diagnosis for belief contraction is similar, but not exactly the same. We demonstrate that the one-shot versions of both revision (...) and contraction can be represented as revisions based on semiorders, but in two subtly different ways. We provide sets of postulates that are sound and complete in the sense that they allow us to prove representation theorems. We show that, and explain why, the classical duality between revision and contraction, as exhibited by the Levi and Harper identities, is partly broken by threshold-based belief changes. We also study the logic of iterated threshold-based revision and contraction. The traditional Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision continue to hold, as well as two additional postulates that characterize ranking-based revision as a restricted `improvement' operator. We investigate the dual notion of iterated threshold-based belief contraction and provide a new set of postulates for it, characterizing contraction as a restricted 'degrading' operator. (shrink)

The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives, young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the (...) literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time. (shrink)

This paper studies efficient learning with respect to mind changes. Our starting point is the idea that a learner that is efficient with respect to mind changes minimizes mind changes not only globally in the entire learning problem, but also locally in subproblems after receiving some evidence. Formalizing this idea leads to the notion of uniform mind change optimality. We characterize the structure of language classes that can be identified with at most α mind changes by some learner (not (...) necessarily effective): A language class L is identifiable with α mind changes iff the accumulation order of L is at most α. Accumulation order is a classic concept from point-set topology. To aid the construction of learning algorithms, we show that the characteristic property of uniformly mind change optimal learners is that they output conjectures (languages) with maximal accumulation order. We illustrate the theory by describing mind change optimal learners for various problems such as identifying linear subspaces and one-variable patterns. (shrink)

‘Changing the Theory of Theory Change: Towards a Computational Approach’ (Tennant [1994]; henceforth CTTC) claimed that the AGM postulate of recovery is false, and that AGM contractions of theories can be more than minimally mutilating. It also described an alternative, computational method for contracting theories, called the Staining Algorithm. Makinson [1995] and Hansson and Rott [1995] criticized CTTC's arguments against AGM-theory, and its specific proposals for an alternative, computational approach. This paper replies as comprehensively as space allows.

This paper addresses the problem that Bayesian statistical inference cannot accommodate theory change, and proposes a framework for dealing with such changes. It first presents a scheme for generating predictions from observations by means of hypotheses. An example shows how the hypotheses represent the theoretical structure underlying the scheme. This is followed by an example of a change of hypotheses. The paper then presents a general framework for hypotheses change, and proposes the minimization of the distance between (...) hypotheses as a rationality criterion. Finally the paper discusses the import of this for Bayesian statistical inference. (shrink)

Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals and (...) perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system’s viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition. (shrink)

Assembly of minimal genomes revealed many genes encoding unknown functions. Three overlooked functional categories account for some of them. Cells are prone to make errors and age. As a first key function, discrimination between proper and changed entities is indispensable. Discrimination requires management of information, an authentic, yet abstract, cur- rency of reality. For example proteins age, sometimes very fast. The cell must identify, then get rid of old proteins without destroying young ones. Implementing discrimination in cells leads to (...) the second set of functions, usually ignored. Being abstract, information must nevertheless be embodied into material entities, with unavoidable idiosyncratic properties. This brings about novel unmet needs. Hence, the buildup of cells elicits specific but awkward material implementations, ‘kludges’ that become essential under particular settings, while difficult to identify. Finally, a third functional category char- acterizes the need for growth, with metabolic implementations allowing the cell to put together the growth of its cytoplasm, membranes, and genome, spanning different spatial dimensions. Solving this metabolic quandary, critical for engineering novel synthetic biology chassis, uncovered an unexpected role for CTP synthetase as the coordinator of nonhomothetic growth. Because a significant number of SynBio constructs aim at creating cell factories we expect that they will be attacked by viruses (it is not by chance that the function of the CRISPR system was identified in industrial settings). Substantiating the role of CTP, natural selection has dealt with this hurdle via synthesis of the antimetabolite 30-deoxy-30,40-didehydro- CTP, recruited for antiviral immunity in all domains of life. (shrink)

We argue that cognitive functions are not reducible to biological functionality. Since only neural animals can develop complex forms of agency, we assume that genuinely cognitive processes are deeply related with the activity of the nervous system. We first analyze the significance of the appearance of the nervous system in certain multicellular organisms, arguing that it has changed the logic of their biological organization. Then, we focus on the appearance of specifically cognitive capacities within the nervous system. Considering a case (...) of a minimal form of perceptual representation, we analyze the specific functional role of this minimal form of activity in relatively earlier nervous systems, arguing that though this role is only understandable within a biological organization, yet it is not reducible to the underlying biological functionality. Finally, we conclude that the appearance of cognition is in turn linked to the emergence of an autonomous neurodynamic domain and a qualitative change in body complexity. (shrink)

This essay demonstrates a previously unnoticed connection between formal and statistical learning theory with regard to Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction. Discussions of Goodman’s riddle in formal learning theory explain how conjecturing “all green” before “all grue” can enhance efficient convergence to the truth, where efficiency is understood in terms of minimizing the maximum number of retractions or “mind changes.” Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension is a central concept in statistical learning theory and is similar to Popper’s notion of degrees of (...) testability. I show that for a class inductive problems of which Goodman’s riddle is one example, a reliable inductive method minimizes the maximum number of mind changes exactly if it always conjectures the hypothesis from the set with lowest VC dimension consistent with the data. I also discuss the relevance of these results to language invariance and curve fitting. (shrink)

We examine two-cardinal problems for the class of O-minimal theories. We prove that an O-minimal theory which admits some must admit every. We also prove that every "reasonable" variant of Chang's Conjecture is true for O-minimal structures. Finally, we generalize these results from the two-cardinal case to the $\delta$-cardinal case for arbitrary ordinals $\delta$.

In our previous work, a new approach to the notorious problem of quantum measurement was proposed. Existing treatments of the problem were incorrect because they ignored the disturbance of measurement by identical particles and standard quantum mechanics had to be modified to obey the cluster separability principle. The key tool was the notion of separation status. Changes of separation status occur during preparations, registrations and scattering on macroscopic targets. Standard quantum mechanics does not provide any correct rules that would govern (...) these changes. This gives us the possibility to add new rules to quantum mechanics that would satisfy the objectification requirement. The method of the present paper is to start from the standard unitary evolution and then introduce minimal corrections. Several representative examples of registration and particle scattering on macroscopic targets are analysed case by case in order to see their common features. The resulting general Rule of Separation Status Changes is stated in the Conclusion. (shrink)

Answering a question of Sakai :29–45, 2013), we show that the existence of an ω1\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\omega _1$$\end{document}-Erdős cardinal suffices to obtain the consistency of Chang’s Conjecture with □ω1,2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\square _{\omega _1, 2}$$\end{document}. By a result of Donder, volume 872 of lecture notes in mathematics. Springer, Berlin, pp 55–97, 1981) this is best possible. We also give an answer to another question of Sakai (...) relating to the incompatibility of □λ,2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\square _{\lambda, 2}$$\end{document} and ↠\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$ \twoheadrightarrow $$\end{document} for uncountable κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa $$\end{document}. (shrink)

Proof theory and semantics of an adaptive logic that deals adequately with change in individuals with or without a name are presented. New logical constants are introduced, viz. indicators. Within a given context they function as names, predicates and quantifiers at the same time. The thus extended language (of classical logic) has a big expressive power and solvespartly — the (classical) non-logical presuppositions with respect to ‘the existence of individuals’. Nevertheless, from a purely logical point of view, the here (...) pre - sented logic requires nothing but a very intuitive selection of classical models of the premises, viz. the minimally abnormal ones. (shrink)