Recent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center–periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and (...) identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre-contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome. (shrink)

conditional with his discussions of the hypothetical proposition. Peirce spoke often of the consequentia de inesse ,1 the concept of which is intimately linked with the material, or "Philonian" conditional; indeed, we shall see him calling himself a Philonian. And it is not uncommon to hear Peirce—at least prior to the last decade of his life—declared a Philonian, whose fundamental analysis of the conditional was essentially the same as that of Philo (and of more modern types like Russell and like (...) Quine). (shrink)

Key words: the continuum, structuralism, conceptual structuralism, basic structural conceptions, Euclidean geometry, Hilbertian geometry, the real number system, settheoretical conceptions, phenomenological conceptions, foundational conceptions, physical conceptions.

Inferentialism is explained as an attempt to provide an account of meaning that is more sensitive (than the tradition of truth-conditional theorizing deriving from Tarski and Davidson) to what is learned when one masters meanings.

Lewis signaling games illustrate how language might evolve from random behavior. The probability of evolving an optimal signaling language is, in part, a function of what learning strategy the agents use. Here we investigate three learning strategies, each of which allows agents to forget old experience. In each case, we find that forgetting increases the probability of evolving an optimal language. It does this by making it less likely that past partial success will continue to reinforce suboptimal practice. The learning (...) strategies considered here show how forgetting past experience can promote learning in the context of games with suboptimal equilibria. (shrink)

We provide a general investigation of Logic in which the notion of a simple consequence relation is taken to be fundamental. Our notion is more general than the usual one since we give up monotonicity and use multisets rather than sets. We use our notion for characterizing several known logics (including Linear Logic and non-monotonic logics) and for a general, semantics-independent classi cation of standard connectives via equations on consequence relations (these include Girard's \multiplicatives" and \additives"). We next investigate the (...) standard methods for uniformly representing consequence relations: Hilbert type, Natural Deduction and Gentzen type. The advantages and disadvantages of using each system and what should be taken as.. (shrink)

What is the simplest and most natural axiomatic replacement for the set-theoretic definition of the minimal fixed point on the Kleene scheme in Kripke’s theory of truth? What is the simplest and most natural set of axioms and rules for truth whose adoption by a subject who had never heard the word "true" before would give that subject an understanding of truth for which the minimal fixed point on the Kleene scheme would be a good model? Several axiomatic systems, old (...) and new, are examined and evaluated as candidate answers to these questions, with results of Harvey Friedman playing a significant role in the examination. (shrink)

It is well known that indefinite phrases are more liberal in taking scope than other quantifying phrases. In general, the scope of indefinites is not limited by the finite clause in which they occur, although the scope of universal quantifiers is. Wh-phrases behave very much like indefinites: in languages with wh in situ, their scope need not be restricted by anything like clause boundedness.

E.O. Wilson (1975) described humans as one of the four pinnacles of social evolution. The other pinnacles are the colonial invertebrates, the social insects, and the non-human mammals. Wilson separated human sociality from that of the rest of the mammals because, with the exception of the social insect like Naked Mole Rats, only humans have generated societies of a grade of complexity that approaches that of the social insects and colonial invertebrates. In the last few millennia, human societies have even (...) begun to exceed, in numbers of individuals and degree of complexity, the societies of ants, termites, and corals. (shrink)

In 1974, John Maynard Smith wrote in his little book Models in Ecology, A theory of ecology must make statements about ecosystems as a whole, as well as about particular species at particular times, and it must make statements that are true for many species and not just for one… For the discovery of general ideas in ecology, therefore, different kinds of mathematical description, which may be called models, are called for. Whereas a good simulation should include as much detail (...) as possible, a good model should include as little as possible. (1974. (shrink)

Apotemnophilia, a disorder that blurs the distinction between neurology and psychiatry, is characterized by the intense and longstanding desire for amputation of a speci¢c limb. Here we present evidence from two individuals suggestive that this condition, long thought to be entirely psychological in origin, actually has a neurological basis. We found heightened skin conductance response..

It is fairly well-known that certain hard computational problems (that is, 'difficult' problems for a digital processor to solve) can in fact be solved much more easily with an analog machine. This raises questions about the true nature of the distinction between analog and digital computation (if such a distinction exists). I try to analyze the source of the observed difference in terms of (1) expanding parallelism and (2) more generally, infinite-state Turing machines. The issue of discreteness vs continuity will (...) also be touched upon, although it is not so important for analyzing these particular problems. (shrink)

Kyburg goes half-way towards objective Bayesianism. He accepts that frequencies constrain rational belief to an interval but stops short of isolating an optimal degree of belief within this interval. I examine the case for going the whole hog.

The distinction between COMPLEMENTS and ADJUNCTS has a long tradition in grammatical theory, and it is also included in some way or other in most current formal linguistic theories. But it is a highly vexed distinction for several reasons, one of which is that no diagnostic criteria have emerged that will reliably distinguish adjuncts from complements in all cases — too many examples seem to fall into the crack between the two categories, no matter how theorists wrestle with them.

“Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 94).

The aim here is to describe how to complete the constructive logicist program, in the author’s book Anti-Realism and Logic, of deriving all the Peano-Dedekind postulates for arithmetic within a theory of natural numbers that also accounts for their applicability in counting finite collections of objects. The axioms still to be derived are those for addition and multiplication. Frege did not derive them in a fully explicit, conceptually illuminating way. Nor has any neo-Fregean done so.

The usage of sorts in first-order automated deduction has brought greater conciseness of representation and a considerable gain in efficiency by reducing the search spaces involved. This suggests that sort information can be employed in higher-order theorem proving with similar results.

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able to notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. This basic strategy of self-guided learning is termed the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. This paper (a) argues that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) (...) details the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describes specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outlines both short-term and long-term research agendas. (shrink)

In this work, we treat the interpretation of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in Present adjuncts embedded under will. Russian Present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. This follows from our SOT parameter. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts (...) that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts. Contrary to Russian, English has Present under Future in before-clauses. It would be nice to relate this feature to the SOT parameter, but the construction seems to be an idiosyncrasy in the domain of subordinate tense. (shrink)

The SDML programming language which is optimized for modelling multi-agent interaction within articulated social structures such as organizations is described with several examples of its functionality. SDML is a strictly declarative modelling language which has object-oriented features and corresponds to a fragment of strongly grounded autoepistemic logic. The virtues of SDML include the ease of building complex models and the facility for representing agents flexibly as models of cognition as well as modularity and code reusability.

This book is an argument for the importance of diversity in society. It is not naive, in the sense that it does not argue that any diversity is helpful, but rather tries to distinguish some of the ways in which it can be helpful and, hence, some the conditions under which it can be helpful. It does this is a largely non technical language and using informal argument using argument, examples and a review of the evidence to support its conclusions. (...) It ends with some policy suggestions, particularly in terms of university admission and job recruitment. (shrink)

Conservativity in generalized quantifiers is linked to presupposition filtering, under a propositions-as-types analysis extended with dependent quantifiers. That analysis is underpinned by modeltheoretically interpretable proofs which inhabit propositions they prove, thereby providing objects for quantification and hooks for anaphora.

Quantum mechanical measurements on a physical system are represented by observables - Hermitian operators on the state space of the observed system. It is an important question whether all observables may be realized, in principle, as measurements on a physical system. Dirac’s influential text ( [1], page 37) makes the following assertion on the question: The question now presents itself – Can every observable be measured? The answer theoretically is yes. In practice it may be very awkward, or perhaps even (...) beyond the ingenuity of the experimenter, to devise an apparatus which could measure some particular observable, but the theory always allows one to imagine that the measurement can be made. This Letter re-examines the question of whether it is possible, even in principle, to measure every quantum mechanical observable. Unexpectedly, ideas from com-. (shrink)

The project that Dan Lloyd has undertaken is admirable and audacious. He has tried to boil down the substrate of information-processing that underlies conscious experience to some very simple elements, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. Some people will suspect that by considering a model as simple as a connectionist network, Dan has thrown away everything that is interesting about consciousness. Perhaps there is something to that complaint, but I will take a different tack. It seems (...) to me that if we apply his own reasoning, we can see that Dan has not taken things far _enough_. When we have boiled things down to a system as simple as a connectionist network, it seems faint-hearted to stop there, and perhaps a little arbitrary as well. So I will take things further, and ask what seems to be the really interesting question in the vicinity: what is it like to be a thermostat? (shrink)

One textbook may introduce the real numbers in Cantor’s way, and another in Dedekind’s, and the mathematical community as a whole will be completely indifferent to the choice between the two. This sort of phenomenon was famously called to the attention of philosophers by Paul Benacerraf. It will be argued that structuralism in philosophy of mathematics is a mistake, a generalization of Benacerraf’s observation in the wrong direction, resulting from philosophers’ preoccupation with ontology.

A glance at the sky raises my probability of rain to .7. As it happens, the conditional probabilities of each state given rain remain the same, and similarly for their conditional probabilities given no rain. As Jeffrey (1983, Ch. 11) points out, my new distribution P2 is therefore fixed by the law of total probability. For example, P2(RC) = P2(RC | R)P2(R)+P2(RC | ¯.

Technical results about the time dependence of eigenvectors of reduced density operators are considered, and the relevance of these results is discussed for modal interpretations of quantum mechanics which take the corresponding eigenprojections to represent definite properties. Continuous eigenvectors can be found if degeneracies are avoided. We show that, in finite dimensions, the space of degenerate operators has co-dimension 3 in the space of all reduced operators, suggesting that continuous eigenvectors almost surely exist. In any dimension, even when degeneracies are (...) hit, we find conditions under which a theorem due to Rellich can provide continuous eigenvectors. We use this result to formulate an extended version of the modal interpretation. We also discuss eigenvector instability which we argue poses a serious problem for the modal interpretation, even in our extended version. Many examples are given to illustrate the mathematics. (shrink)

We describe a formalization of asymptotic O notation using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant.

“DNA-RNA-Protein-everything else” (Arthur Kornberg) on its detail, satisfactory answers to central questions – What is life? head and who try to understand protein bodies as context- How did it originate and how do we view ourselves as living dependent interpreters of the genetic text, (3.) a philosophy that beings? – have been lost in a universe of analytical units.

Scientific theories often allow multiple formulations, e.g., classical mechanics allows Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations. While we count them as equally true, it has been suggested that one formulation can still be more metaphysically perspicuous than another. This paper provides a new account of metaphysical perspicuity, offering both descriptive and revisionary components: As a descriptive component, we examine how metaphysical perspicuity has been conceptualized in the literature. As a revisionary component, we challenge the conventional conception that associates metaphysical perspicuity with other (...) neighboring notions. Thus, we argue that metaphysical perspicuity is a sui generis notion, worth adding to philosophers’ toolbox. (shrink)

We model happiness as a measurement tool used to rank alternative actions. Evolution favors a happiness function that measures the individual’s success in relative terms. The optimal function, in particular, is based on a time-varying reference point –or performance benchmark –that is updated over time in a statistically optimal way in order to match the individual’s potential. Habits and peer comparisons arise as special cases of such updating process. This updating also results in a volatile level of happiness that continuously (...) reverts to its long-term mean. Throughout, we draw a parallel with a problem of optimal incentives, which allows us to apply statistical insights from agency theory to the study of happiness. (shrink)

Let me regale you with yet another variant of the story of Sleeping Beauty. In this one, the experiment takes place in a room with a skylight, so that Beauty can see what the weather is like outside as soon as she wakes up. The weather can be in any one of n different states on any given day. Beauty regards each of these states as equiprobable; moreover, she takes there to be no correlation between the weather on Monday and (...) the weather on Tuesday, or between the weather on either day and the coin-toss. The rest of the story works as usual: Beauty will be awoken on Monday, after which a coin will be tossed; if it lands Tails, she will be woken again on Tuesday having had her memories of the Monday awakening erased; otherwise, she will stay asleep until Wednesday.1 The weather is the only source of variation in her wakings, so if it should happen that the weather is the same on Monday and Tuesday, her total evidence will be exactly the same on both wakings. (shrink)

[1]. Recently renewed interest in non transformational approaches to syntax [2] suggests that it might be well to take another look at categorial grammars, since they seem to have been neglected largely because they had been shown to be equivalent to context free phrase structure grammars in weak generative capacity and it was believed that such grammars were incapable of describing natural languages in a natural way. It is my purpose here to sketch a theory of grammar which represents a (...) generalization of categorial grammars of the sort invented by Ajdukiewicz (1935) and further elaborated especially by Bar Hillel (1953) and Lambek (1961). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to pick up the threads of a debate about the ontology of becoming in spacetime that was triggered by a provocative article published by Nicholas Maxwell in 1985. This debate is itself merely a recent episode in a long dialogue that goes back at least as far as the time of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Here is the question around which this debate centres: is change or becoming the distinguishing feature of the natural or physical (...) world, as suggested obscurely by Heraclitus and argued at length by Aristotle? Or is our usual uncritical belief in the reality of change the product of some sort of perceptual illusion or intellectual error, as believed by Parmenides and a small host of recent authors such as Gödel and Julian Barbour? I won’t be able to solve the whole of this momentous problem here. However, I intend both to set aside a few unwarranted assumptions which have for a long time dogged our thinking about the puzzle of becoming, and to assemble some tools which should aid in finding a solution to it. In particular, I will argue that we can do much better than is usually supposed in identifying structures which can both “live” within Minkowski spacetime and represent objective becoming. I shall also discuss whether such structures would necessarily contradict the Principle. (shrink)

Když jsem v roce 1992 začínal na filosofické fakultě UK přednášet teorii sémantiky, cítil jsem intenzivní potřebu poskytnout studentům nějaký učební text. O překotném vývoji tohoto interdisciplinárního oboru, který odstartovalo v sedmdesátých letech úspěšné “zkřížení logiky s lingvistikou” Richardem Montaguem a dalšími a který se nezpomalil dodnes, totiž v češtině neexistovaly prakticky žádné zprávy (s čestnou výjimkou přístupu tzv. transparentní intenzionální logiky, který byl dílem českého emigranta Pavla Tichého a o kterém u nás psal Pavel Materna). Přehledové publikace, jaké jsou (...) potřeba pro někoho, kdo se chce v dané problematice zorientovat, se ovšem v té době i po světě teprve začínaly objevovat: v roce 1990 vyšla kniha An Introduction to Semantics Gennara Chierchii a Sally McConell-Ginnetové a v roce 1991 vydala skupina holandských logiků pod kolektivním pseudonymem L.T.F. Gamut dvousvazkovou knihu Language and Meaning. Za této situace jsem se pokusil co nejrychleji sepsat učební text, který by moji studenti i jiní zájemci o sémantiku mohli použít; a protože o jeho vydání paradoxně projevila větší zájem filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity v Brně (kde jsem já osobně nikdy neučil; ale zájem o sémantiku tam neúnavně podněcoval a vydání mého textu tam zprostředkoval kolega Materna) než filosofická fakulta mojí domovské Karlovy univerzity, vyšel tento text v Brně, a to pod názvem Úvod do teoretické sémantiky. (shrink)

The appeal of scientific realism is chiefly based on the – staggering – empirical success of the theories currently accepted in science. The realist exhibits some currently accepted scientific theory (the General Theory of Relativity, say), points to its astounding empirical success (with the gravitational redshift, the precession of Mercury’s perihelion, etc) and suggests that it would be monumentally implausible to suppose that the theory could score such empirical successes and yet not reflect, at least to some good approximation, the (...) underlying nature of reality. To hold that combination of beliefs would be, in Poincaré’s celebrated phrase (1905/1952, p. 150), “to attribute an inadmissible role to chance”. (shrink)

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem shows that no axiomatic theory can prove all mathematical truths, while Gödel's second incompleteness theorem shows that a specific mathematical result is unprovable. A famous mathematician of the time, David Hilbert, had asked for a proof that an important axiomatic theory was consistent, and Godel showed that such a proof could not be carried out within the axiomatic theory itself, and presumably could therefore not be established in a convincing way outside of the theory either.

We present a preliminary study on disambiguation of symbolic expressions in mathematical documents. We propose to use the natural language within which the expressions are embedded to resolve their semantics. The approach is based on establishing a similarity between the expression’s discourse context and a set of terms from Term Clusters based on OpenMath Content Dictionaries. The Term Clusters are semi-automatically constructed terminological resources which classify related mathematical concepts into groups. Each group is labelled with a term which represents the (...) common denominator between the concepts. (shrink)

Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on rational self-esteem and respect for the human capacity to direct one’s own life according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is a law proceeding from my own will. The ground of a law of autonomy lies in the very will which is (...) to be subject to the law, and this leaves no room for any issue about why this will should obey the law. The idea of autonomy also identifies the authority of the law with the value constituting the content of the law, in that it bases the law on our esteem for the dignity of rational nature in ourselves, which makes every rational being an end in itself. (shrink)

Arguments are movements of thought. From a logical point of view, such a movement is justifiable as it tends to preserve or transmit truth. To speak of such tendency is to abstract from particular movements of thought and to ascent to the forms of such movements. Thus logical theory is said to concern rules of validity or cogency that one may use to evaluate forms of arguments, forms as may be instantiated by particular sets of statements which we may use (...) to represent particular movements of thought. (shrink)

Most of the revolutionaries who turned toward anarchism as a consequence of 1848 did so by virtue of hindsight, but one man at least, independently of Proudhon, made his defense of the libertarian attitude during the Year of Revolutions itself. “Anarchy is order; government is civil war.” It was under this slogan, as willfully paradoxical as any of Proudhon’s, that Anselme Bellegarrigue made his brief, obscure appearance in anarchist history. Bellegarrigue appears to have been a man of some education, but (...) little is known of his life before the very eve of 1848; he arrived back in Paris on February 23 from a journey in the United States, where he had met President Polk on a Mississippi steamer and had developed an admiration for the more individualistic aspects of American democracy. According to his own account, he was as little impressed as Proudhon by the revolution that broke out on his first morning back in Paris. A young National Guardsman outside the Hôtel de Ville boasted to him that this time the workers would not be robbed of their victory. “They have robbed you already of your victory,” replied Bellegarrigue. “Have you not named a government?”. (shrink)

Translation of the death scene from Phaedo by Plato.

Some philosophers believe science does not or should not aim at the truth. Sometimes they say scientists do not really care much about truth. Sometimes they say truth is an outdated Enlightenment hand-me-down, full of confusion and rhetoric but empty of explanatory or normative importance. And sometimes they argue that it is irrational to pursue the truth. This last claim is the target of the present paper.

In a recent book, ^[1] Michael Tye has offered a representational theory of phenomenal consciousness. As Tye himself admits, part of his account involves arguing for a position which has traditionally received little support; he contends that _all_ experiences and feelings have representational.

I want to begin by saying that the terms of reference of this series of lectures grated on me, in particular, the word ‘power’. One thing it conjured up was the criticism made by people who say we use our power over our patients to brainwash them, that the psychotherapeutic relationship is inescapably authoritarian, domineering, coercive. This was widely said in the sixties by leftist and feminists and others who sought a therapeutic relationship that was more equal, co-counselling, for example, (...) where the client and the therapist took turns exposing their problems. In my experience, most people who took up that position eventually saw the merits of relatively orthodox psychotherapy, and many have trained in conventional psychodynamic psychotherapy. I asked my partner, who is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, what the term power conjured up for her and got an uncharacteristically sharp response. She said, ‘I hate that word. It’s used by humanistic therapists who are afraid of authority, difference and knowledge and want us all to be the same. It’s like saying colour doesn’t matter. They confuse the abuse of power with the use of power. They assume that all exercise of power is abusive.’. (shrink)

Kant was not a very knowledgeable historian of philosophy. He came to the study of philosophy from natural science, and later the fields of ethics, aesthetics, politics and religion came to occupy his central concerns, but his approach to philosophical issues never came by way of reflection on their history. He was well acquainted, of course, with the recent tradition of German philosophy: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Crusius, and he seems also to have had knowledge of eighteenth century French philosophy, (...) and of as much of Anglophone philosophy as had been translated into either French or German. But like many modern philosophers, he had an inadequate appreciation of the scholastic tradition, and his knowledge of classical Greek philosophy was mostly at second hand. (shrink)

ed individuals. Total diversity D is the sum of two fundamental principles governing broad classes of such..