We model economic environments in which individual choice sets are fixed and the level of a specific parameter that systematically modifies the preferences of all agents is determined endogenously to achieve equilibrium. The equilibrium concept, Biased Preferences Equilibrium, is reminiscent of competitive equilibrium: agents’ choice sets and their preferences are independent of the behaviour of other agents, the combined choices must satisfy overall feasibility constraints and the endogenous adjustment of the equilibrating preference parameter is analogous to equilibrating price adjustment. The (...) concept is applied in a number of economic examples. (shrink)

Popper conceived an experiment whose analysis led to a result that he deemed absurd. Popper wrote that his reasoning was based on the Copenhagen interpretation and therefore invalidated it. Many authors who have examined Popper's analysis have found in it various technical flaws which are briefly summarized here. However, the aim of the present article is not technical. My concern is to redress logical flaws in Popper's argument: the terminology he uses is ambiguous, his analysis involves counterfactual hypotheses, and it (...) violates Bohr's complementarity principle. Therefore, the absurdity of Popper's result only confirms Bohr's approach. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects (...) the commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

Linear combinations of “elements of reality,” as defined by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, may not be themselves “elements of reality.” There are questions which can be formulated (and unambiguously answered) in the ordinary language of experimental physics, but cannot be represented in the mathematical framework of quantum theory in a nontrivial way.

The study of the feeling of knowing may have implications for some of the metatheoretical issues concerning consciousness and control. Assuming a distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments, it is argued that the sheer phenomenological experience of knowing (''noetic feeling'') occupies a unique role in mediating between implicit-automatic processes, on the one hand, and explicit-controlled processes, on the other. Rather than reflecting direct access to memory traces, noetic feelings are based on inferential heuristics that operate implicitly and unintentionally. Once (...) such heuristics give rise to a conscious feeling that feeling can then affect controlled action. Examination of the cues that affect noetic feelings suggest that not only do these feelings inform controlled action, but they are also informed by feedback from the outcome of that action. (shrink)

Comparisons have been made between the tobacco industry’s historic tactics in defending their products with the responses of some key actors in the sports world to head injuries. Both, it is said, have deployed deceptive marketing and advertising techniques to entice youth to engage with a subjective pleasure-producing product that has undeniable short- and long-term health detriments. Unlike what is called euphemistically, ‘Big Tobacco’, however, the National Football League (NFL) has evaded legal restrictions on the promotion of an inherently dangerous (...) product that targets youth. By contrast, in 1997, the Federal Trade Commission charged tobacco company R.J. Reynolds with violating federal law by using a cartoon character, Joe Camel, to allure children under age 18. The NFL has partnered with Nickelodeon to produce programs such as NFL Rush Zone and NFL Slimetime that target youth by using cartoon mascots, bright colors, 3D iconography, and other child-friendly symbols. In addition to fostering positive associations between tackle football and cartoons, these broadcasts have explicitly minimized the risks of tackling. For example, one NFL Playoffs on Nickelodeon announcer equated a forceful head collision with a scrape of the knee that a child might experience during school recess. The NFL’s marketing strategies deflect public attention away from the risks of repetitive head collisions, concussions, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), portraying football as an appealing activity. The ongoing connections between the NFL and youth-oriented television programming raise crucial questions about how risk is communicated in a sport with inherent dangers of long-term cognitive damage. As long as tackle football is portrayed alongside beloved cartoon characters such as Spongebob Squarepants, impressionable children are likely to form undilutedly positive perceptions of the NFL and ignore the substantial risks of repeated, full-body collisions when enchanted by brightly-colored slime, animated bubbles, and goofy dance moves. (shrink)

Recent research has filled many gaps about Caenorhabditis natural history, simultaneously exposing how much remains to be discovered. This awareness now provides means of connecting ecological and evolutionary theory with diverse biological patterns within and among species in terms of adaptation, sexual selection, breeding systems, speciation, and other phenomena. Moreover, the heralded laboratory tractability of C. elegans, and Caenorhabditis species generally, provides a powerful case study for experimental hypothesis testing about evolutionary and ecological processes to levels of detail unparalleled by (...) most study systems. Here, I synthesize pertinent theory with what we know and suspect about Caenorhabditis natural history for salient features of biodiversity, phenotypes, population dynamics, and interactions within and between species. I identify topics of pressing concern to advance Caenorhabditis biology and to study general evolutionary processes, including the key opportunities to tackle problems in dispersal dynamics, competition, and the dimensionality of niche space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Butler on Subjectivity and Authorship: Reflections on Doing Philosophy in the First PersonAsher WaldenWhat drew me to theology a number of years ago was that it was the most personal kind of philosophy, to the extent that it deals with the most important issues of one’s own “personal” life. It used the tools of the philosophical tradition to address questions that the philosophers—especially those in the University of Chicago’s (...) analytically oriented environment—seemed not to want to ask; at least, not when I was an undergraduate there some years ago. My engagement with philosophy has always been about personal questions, and in the past I tended to eschew the political realm as being at best external to the more essential business of philosophy. But the questions I have been asking lately are rather different from the ones that concerned me back when I was still in Chicago. Largely due to the birth of my son two years ago, questions that before were only secondhand—questions about education, democracy, and debt—are now very personal and very, very important to me. I am perhaps a latecomer to the position that, as the saying goes, “The personal is the political.” But being a convert, like the earliest Christian Apologists, may afford me an opportunity and motivation to argue the position all the more earnestly.The way I have sought to incorporate these different questions and perspectives in my theologizing has primarily been through engagement with the Confucian philosophical tradition. The Confucian tradition is, in large measure, a series of reflections on the individual’s utter embeddedness in familial, sociopolitical, environmental, and sacred structures and forces. The tradition has its own resources for expressing and navigating this embeddedness, but what has become interesting to me is that the requisite resources are being developed independently, and perhaps more forcefully, within the realm of postmodern and postcolonial theory. Indeed, these newer articulations may [End Page 55] well be vital for present-day Confucian thinkers to consider in reformulating and re-presenting their own commitments and traditions in the current era.The questions posed to and for the current paper are, first, how does the religiously committed philosopher (or theologian, in a loose sense of the term) consciously incorporate political and economic considerations into her theological research and discursive product; and second, to what extent and in what ways is it necessary for her also to include and address her own personal life/history into the same. Naturally, these are questions which religious thinkers will ask and answer anew for themselves, and repeatedly. My own engagement with Judith Butler in the current paper will merely provide, I hope, one possible model for such an account of how the personal and the political may function in theological discourse. Generally, the model given here suggests that such considerations are not external add-ons to the more essential “hard-core” theologizing of the doctrines of God and Christology. It is not a matter of (first) theory and (then) application. Rather, theological discourse is one place where ethical subjectivity is attained, if provisionally, through conscientious and critical engagement with both one’s religious tradition and the sociopolitical-economic structures in which those traditions are practiced, and where one’s own place within those structures is both questioned and created.In her recent work Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler continues her project of deconstructing the metaphysics of the substantive self, begun in her deservedly noted early work, Gender Trouble. In particular, she argues that the subject comes into being through processes and in contexts that, while not completely determinative of one’s subjectivity, do limit one’s ability to give a complete account of oneself, one’s actions and motivations. She asks the important question of whether this opacity of the conditions of one’s coming into being limits the possibility of taking responsibility, or being held responsible, for one’s actions. She ultimately finds, with Foucault, that selfhood is itself an ethical process, one occasioned and in large part constituted by the call, and subsequent attempt, to give an account.The question which drives Butler’s essay is, generally, if the subject comes... (shrink)

This paper draws upon Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'right to have rights' to critique the current protection gap faced by refugees today. While refugees are protected from refoulement once they make it to the jurisdiction or territory of a state, they face an ever-increasing array of non-entrée policies designed to stymie access to state territory. Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity, refugees cannot achieve the rights which ought to be (...) afforded to them under international law. Drawing upon both legal theory and political philosophy, this paper argues that refugees today, just as the stateless in Arendt’s time, must be afforded the ‘right to have rights’, understood as a right to enter state territory. (shrink)

We extend the notion of limitwise monotonic functions to include arbitrary computable domains. We then study which sets and degrees are support increasing limitwise monotonic on various computable domains. As applications, we provide a characterization of the sets S with computable increasing η-representations using support increasing limitwise monotonic sets on ℚ and note relationships between the class of order-computable sets and the class of support increasing limitwise monotonic sets on certain domains.

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. This analysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speech act level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just (...) as co-predication shows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously' of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too. Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both the lexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or "preemption by synonymy": Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their `paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even if this interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. We provide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it with existing accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

Bell inequalities are derived for any number of observers, any number of alternative setups for each one of them and any number of distinct outcomes for each experiment. It is shown that if a physical system consists of several distant subsystems, and if the results of tests performed on the latter are determined by local variables with objective values, then the joint probabilities for triggering any given set of distant detectors are convex combinations of a finite number of Boolean arrays, (...) whose components are either 0 or 1 according to a simple rule. This convexity property is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of local objective variables. It leads to a simple graphical method which produces a large number of generalized Clauser-Horne inequalities corresponding to the faces of a convex polytope. It is plausible that quantum systems whose density matrix has a positive partial transposition satisfy all these inequalities, and therefore are compatible with local objective variables, even if their quantum properties are essentially non-local. (shrink)

This article considers financial risk management practice using a virtue ethics lens, in response to ongoing critiques of risk management from within business ethics. Risk management should be seen as embedded within a complex system of cultures, organizations and regulations that are underpinned by a quantitatively reductive or ‘mechanistic’ economic paradigm, where dominant logics of self-interest, profit maximization and short-termism prevail. Building on recent work applying virtue ethics in finance, an alternative to the values, normative expectations and priorities in financial (...) risk management is presented in the form of a refined ‘taxonomy’ of the virtues that can be applied to individuals and organizations engaged in financial risk management. This article aims to contribute to and extend debate on the ethical aspects of risk management and presents an alternative to more technically based critiques which do not engage with the underlying socially constructed foundations of risk management practice. It thereby provides a basis to critique the mechanistic and narrow approach used in the current regulation of the sector. (shrink)

The most efficient way of obtaining information about the state of a quantum system is not always a direct measurement. It is sometimes preferable to extend the original Hilbert space of states into a larger space, and then to perform a quantum measurement in the enlarged space. Such an extension is always possible, by virtue of Neumark's theorem. The physical interpretation usually given to that theorem is the introduction of an auxiliary quantum system, prepared in a standard state, and the (...) execution of a quantum measurement on both systems together. However, this widespread interpretation is unacceptable, because the statistical properties of the supposedly standard auxiliary system are inseparably entangled with those of the original, unknown system. A different method of preparing the auxiliary system is proposed, and shown to be physically acceptable. (shrink)

The future of ethics -- Minds and related matters -- On transition -- The colors of life -- The far future -- At the limits of the conceivable -- Loose ends and final thoughts.

I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the (...) semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time. (shrink)