Cognitive control is easy to identify in its effects, but difficult to grasp conceptually. This creates somewhat of a puzzle: Is cognitive control a bona fide process or an epiphenomenon that merely exists in the mind of the observer? The topiCS special edition on cognitive control presents a broad set of perspectives on this issue and helps to clarify central conceptual and empirical challenges confronting the field. Our commentary provides a summary of and critical response to each of the papers.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

I describe epistemic versions of the contrast between causal and conventionally probabilistic decision theory, including an epistemic version of Newcomb's paradox.

“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.” Simon Newcomb, Professor of Mathematics, John Hopkins University, 1901 Abstract Free will is described in terms of the useful properties that it could confer, explaining why (...) it might have been selected for over the course of evolution. These are: exterior unpredictability; interior rationality; and social accountability. A process is described that might bring it about when deployed in a suitable social context. It is suggested that this process could itself be of an evolutionary nature – that free will might “evolve” in the brain during development. This mental evolution effectively separates the internal and external contexts, whilst retaining the coherency between individual’s public accounts of their actions. This is supported by the properties of evolutionary algorithms and possesses the three desired properties. Some objections to the possibility of free will are dealt with by pointing out the prima facie evidence and showing how an assumption that everything must be either deterministic or random can result from an unsupported assumption of universalism. (shrink)

Written for the general reader and the student of moral philosophy, this book provides a clear and unified treatment of Kant's theory of morals. Bruce Aune takes into account all of Kant's principal writings on morality and presents them in a contemporary idiom. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important (...) books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Newton certainly regarded his second law of motion in the Principia as a fundamental axiom of mechanics. Yet the works that came after the Principia, the major treatises on the foundations of mechanics in the eighteenth century—by Varignon, Hermann, Euler, Maclaurin, d’Alembert, Euler (again), Lagrange, and Laplace—do not record, cite, discuss, or even mention the Principia’s statement of the second law. Nevertheless, the present study shows that all of these scientists do in fact assume the principle that the Principia’s second (...) law asserts as a fundamental axiom in their mechanics. (For what that second law asserts, we rely on Newton’s own testimony.) Some, like Varignon and Hermann, assume the axiom implicitly, apparently unaware that any assumption is being made, while others, like Maclaurin and Euler, assume the axiom explicitly, apparently unaware that the assertion assumed is the second law as Newton himself understood it. But in every case these scientists employ the principle asserted by the Principia’s second law fundamentally, unaware that they should be citing Neutonus, Prin., Phil. Nat. Math., Lex II. (shrink)

Public health involves the use of power to change institutions and redistribute resources and deliberately to shape individual thought and behavior. This requires normative legitimation and demands ethical critique. This article explores concepts that are vital to public health ethics, but have been relatively neglected. These are membership, solidarity and the concept of place. The article argues that the practice of public health should recognize the equal rights of membership in communities of health justice. Public health should also rely on (...) a sense of obligation and mutual aid in a world of shared vulnerability and reciprocal recognition. Finally, public health achieves its goals not merely—and perhaps not most fundamentally—through information and altering the logical ratiocination of individuals or groups, but rather through the reformation of sense and sensibility. (shrink)

to small scales. Further, it is often useful to describe motor control and sensorimotor coordination in terms of external elds such as force elds and sensory images. We survey the basic concepts of eld computation, including both feed-forward eld operations and eld dynamics resulting from recurrent connections. Adaptive and learning mechanisms are discussed brie y. The application of eld computation to motor control is illustrated by several examples: external force elds associated with spinal neurons, population coding of direction in motor (...) cortex, continuous transformation of direction elds, and linear gain elds and coordinate transformations in posterior parietal cortex. Next we survey some eld-based representations of motion, including direct, Fourier, Gabor and wavelet or multiresolution representations. Finally we consider brie y the application of these representations to constraint satisfaction, which has many applications in motor control. (shrink)

Where Medicine Went Wrong explores how the idea of an average value has been misapplied to medical phenomena, distorted understanding and lead to flawed medical ...

The paper investigates what is meant by "good science" and "bad science" and how these differ as between the natural (physical and biological) sciences on the one hand and social sciences on the other. We conclude on the basis of historical evidence that the natural science are much more heavily constrained by evidence and observation than by theory while the social sciences are constrained by prior theory and hardly at all by direct evidence. Current examples of the latter proposition are (...) taken from recent issues of leading social science journals. We argue that agent based social simulations can be used as a tool to constrain the development of a new social science by direct (what economists dismiss as anecdotal) evidence and that to do so would make social science relevant to the understanding and influencing of social processes. We argue that such a development is both possible and desirable. We do not argue that it is likely. (shrink)

I argue that results from foraging theory give us good reason to think some evolutionary phenomena are indeterministic and hence that evolutionary theory must be probabilistic. Foraging theory implies that random search is sometimes selectively advantageous, and experimental work suggests that it is employed by a variety of organisms. There are reasons to think such search will sometimes be genuinely indeterministic. If it is, then individual reproductive success will also be indeterministic, and so too will frequency change in populations of (...) organisms employing such search. (shrink)

Psychological essentialism operates in two realms that have consequences for our attitudes towards groups and individuals. Although essentialism is more familiar in the context of biological group membership, it can also be evoked when considering unique artefacts, especially when they are emotionally significant items.

Biomedical ethics is an essential part of the medical curriculum because it is thought to enrich moral reflection and conduce to ethical decisionmaking and ethical behavior. In recent years, however, the received idea that competency in moral reasoning leads to moral responsibility “in the field” has been the subject of sustained attention. Today, moral education and development research widely recognize moral reasoning as being but one among at least four distinguishable dimensions of psychological moral functioning alongside moral motivation, moral character, (...) and moral sensitivity. In a reflection of this framework, medical educators and curriculum planners repeatedly advance the idea that educators should be concerned with supporting empathy, and this, very often, as a means of improving on and broadening medical ethics education’s traditional focus on moral reasoning. (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.

We consider here issues of open access to social simulations, with a particular focus on software licences, though also briefly discussing documentation and archiving. Without any specific software licence, the default arrangements are stipulated by the Berne Convention (for those countries adopting it), and are unsuitable for software to be used as part of the scientific process (i.e. simulation software used to generate conclusions that are to be considered part of the scientific domain of discourse). Without stipulating any specific software (...) licence, we suggest rights that should be provided by any candidate licence for social simulation software, and provide in an appendix an evaluation of some popularly used licences against these criteria. (shrink)

Standard models of statistical explanation face two intractable difficulties. In his 1984 Salmon argues that because statistical explanations are essentially probabilistic we can make sense of statistical explanation only by rejecting the intuition that scientific explanations are contrastive. Further, frequently the point of a statistical explanation is to identify the etiology of its explanandum, but on standard models probabilistic explanations often fail to do so. This paper offers an alternative conception of statistical explanations on which explanations of the frequency of (...) a property consist in the derivation of that frequency from a statistical specification of the mechanism by which instances of the relevant property are produced. Such explanations are contrastive precisely because they identify the determinate causal etiologies of their explananda. (shrink)

This paper has been superseded by chapter 3 of my book "God, the Best, and Evil" (OUP 2008). The chapter concerns God's choices in cases in which God has infinitely many better and better options.

The city of Cork experienced a political odyssey between Easter 1916 and the end of 1918. Wartime policies conceived in London manifested themselves unexpectedly in Cork--The Defence of the Realm Act was used to repress political speech; deficit spending generated massive inflation; mandatory arbitration encouraged workers to join trade unions; food rationing panicked a country scarred by the Potato Famine; and military conscription generated virtual rebellion. As a result, the Cork public increasingly turned against the war. The book examines the (...) political situation in Cork prior to the Easter Rising; local reactions to the rebellion; the rapid creation of the Republican mass movement; the dramatic decline of the Irish Party; the explosion of anti-authority street rioting; the mobilization of women in the independence struggle; disturbances against venereal disease treatments and visiting American sailors; the emergence of radical trade unionism; agitation over the retention of local food supplies; the nationalist mobilization during the Conscription Crisis; and Sinn Féin's triumph in the 1918 General Election. (shrink)

When I lectured on Lonergan’s economic writings at Boston College, Fordham, or Woodstock, people asked the same questions: What’s the big deal about Lonergan’s economics? How does it differ from mainstream economics? What’s Lonergan’s solution to poverty? This paper is a move towards answering those questions.

According to Blanshard, the aim of philosophy is to understand the world. This understanding is achieved, he thinks, only when we can offer a special kind of answer to the question Why? as it may be directed to any thing or event that puzzles us. The answer given will provide an explanation of the puzzling thing or event. The relevant kind of explanation is "logical," and the answer given must be "ultimate," that is, self-evidently true or such that it can (...) be seen to follow from something that is self-evident. (shrink)