This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

Although extremely comprehensive in its subject-matter, catholic in its treatment of diverse points of view, and lucid, this book is not simply a survey. Rather, it is, in its own way, original—not because any information or thesis it contains is new, but because it offers a clear, synoptic, and sophisticated look at what has been a relatively ill-defined and fragmented sector of philosophy, that of determining the nature of the "behavioral sciences." Kaplan's way of accomplishing this is to consider (...) the concepts and activities of science "functionally"; and he generally finds that "no one function can suffice" to show us what, e.g., a law of nature is, or what an experiment is, or what a model is, etc. Thus he typically finds other, mutually competing theories both partially true and too narrow. He also has much that is illuminating to say about the Deweyan ideas that the logic of science is fundamentally a "logic-in-use" ; and that scientific concepts are "open" and properly depend on the context of inquiry, rather than on the logician, for their "closure." Consonant with these themes is his stress on the openness of the concept of methodology itself: behavioral scientists, he contends, will gain no salvation merely by finding better procedures. Of greater importance are the values, choices, and invention of the inquirer himself; and Kaplan, accordingly, treats these matters in detail.—C. T. W. (shrink)

Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context invariant meanings arguably do not suffice to secure semantic values in context. Demonstratives and demonstrative pronouns are the examples of such expressions that have received the most attention from philosophers. However, arguably this class of contextually sensitive expressions includes among other expressions modals, conditionals, tense, gradable adjectives, possessives, ‘only’, quantifiers, and expressions that take implicit arguments (e.g. ‘ready’ in sentences like ‘Molly is ready.’). Most theorists, including me, think that since the (...) context invariant meanings of such expressions do not by themselves secure semantic values in context for these expressions, they must be supplemented in some way in context in order to secure semantic values in context. For this reason, I call these expressions supplementives. I just said that supplementives need some sort of supplementation to secure semantic values in context. Of course, the question of what form the supplementation in context takes is controversial. For example, ever since Kaplan claimed that the semantic value of a demonstrative or demonstrative pronoun in context is the demonstratum of its associated demonstration, there has been a lively controversy over whether that or some other account is the correct one. Call an account of how a given supplementive secures a semantic value in context a metasemantics for the supplementive. In King [2018] I argue that all supplementives have felicitous uses in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context. This conclusion is somewhat surprising, since many uses of supplementives in which they have not been assigned unique semantic values in context are quite infelicitous. I call felicitous uses of supplementives in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context instances of felicitous underspecification. The central idea is that in cases of felicitous underspecification, supplementives get assigned a range of candidates for being their semantic values in contexts rather than being assigned unique semantic values in contexts. Consider an example. Glenn and I are out surfing at Lost Winds beach. There are some surfers to our south stretching a quarter mile or so down the beach. I notice that some surfers in an ill-defined group to our immediate south are getting incredible rides. I say to Glenn looking south toward them ‘Those guys are good.’ It seems easy to imagine that nothing in the context of utterance determines a unique group of surfers as the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. For example, it is easy to imagine that I didn’t intend any specific, unique group to be the semantic value in context. Instead, there is a range of overlapping groups that are legitimate candidates for being the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. Nonetheless, my utterance is felicitous: Glenn had no qualms about my utterance and took it to be impeccably acceptable. So this is an instance of felicitous underspecification. As its title suggests, felicitous underspecification is the main topic of the present book. Here is a summary of what is in each chapter. Chapter 1 provides examples of felicitous underspecification for a variety of supplementives. In each case of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1, I say how I think conversational participants update the Stalnakerian common ground after accepting the utterance of the sentence containing a felicitous underspecified use of a supplementive. I do so without there formulating a principle that determines the updates in question. In Chap. 2, I formulate such a principle and illustrate its predictions with some of the cases of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1. I claim the principle correctly predicts the updates discussed in Chap. 1. In Chap. 3, I consider and discuss the mechanism that I claim associates ranges of candidate semantic values in context with felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives. In Chap. 4, I discuss cases in which felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are embedded in certain ways: under negation, and under ‘believes’ and ‘doubts’. In Chap. 5 I take up I take up the question of why sentences containing felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are felicitous in the contexts in which they are uttered. In particular, I formulate a notion of a context being appropriate for an LF, where an LF is felicitous in a context only if the context is appropriate for the LF. In particular, an LF ϕ containing a use of an underspecified supplementive in a context c will be felicitous only if c is appropriate for ϕ. In Chap. 6, I take up some problems that arise with underspecified uses of pronouns, demonstratives and possessives and consider revising the appropriateness condition of Chap. 5. (shrink)

– The paper explores first the postulational basis and significance of‘measures of information’in current information theory and their possible relations to physical entropy and Brillouin's‘negentropy’regarded as the negative of entropy. For some purposes, the same pattern or formal structure may be abstracted from both‘entropy’and‘information’. The paper analyzes, in the second place, the mathematical analogies which have been traced between information theory and quantum mechanics and argues that the analogies have but a limited value when we come to grips with the (...) deeper, and yet unsolved, problems of quantum theory. Lastly it is urged that the indiscriminate extensions of statistical and information‐theoretic methods, and of quantum‐mechanical analogies, e.g.‘linguistic duality’, to psycholinguistics, literary and aesthetic Gestalten, can result only in crude exaggerations. Dialectical methodology requires the continual reformulation of all scientific descriptions which have to reckon perpetually with the richness of human materials. (shrink)

At some point before the late fifth centurya.d.an unidentified writer compiled and affixed to each book of Dio'sRoman Historyan index, most notably comprising a table of contents and an excerpt of the consularfasti. Of dubious provenance these paratexts have played a peripheral role in the editorial history of the work. Bekker and Dindorf, with somewhat puritanical zeal, removed them from the main text of their editions of theRoman Historyin the belief that they were not by Dio's hand. Conversely, the stereotyped (...) edition of Dio's history produced under the auspices of Karl Tauchnitz at Leipzig in 1818 provided Latin translations of the indices, but omitted the Greek. Dio's more recent editors have restored them to their editions of theRoman History, despite questions over their origins. (shrink)

Many have bowed before the recently acquired powers of ‘new technologies’. However, in the shift from tekhnē to tekhnologia, it seems we have lost human values. These values are communicative in nature as technological progress has placed barriers like distance, web pages and ‘miscellaneous extras’ between individuals. Certain values, like the interpersonal pleasures of rendering service, have been lost as their domain of predilection has for many become fully commercially oriented, dominated by the cadence of profitability. Though the popular cultures (...) of the artificial have surged forth to deliver us from the twentieth century, they have enabled some very superfluous dreaming—Man has succumbed to the Godly role of simulating himself and creating other beings. Communication is replaced by machines, services are rendered via many automated devices, procreation has entered the public sphere, robots and entertainment agents educate our youth and mesmerising screen-integrating ‘forms of intelligence’ even think for us. As such, this so-called culture threatens the very values Man constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to guide himself into the future. But what if the phenomena mentioned just reflect our new values? The author presents an investigation into this cultural shift, its impact on human practices with regards the mind and the body and evokes some pros and cons of generally accepting the ‘Culture of the Artificial’. (shrink)

A coordinate-free formulation is established for (semi) classical particle-field interactions. The exterior language of spacetime chains and De-Rham currents enables the description to include extended strings and membranes besides point particles. Treating physical fields in terms of sections of particular bundles, a unified account of interactions is presented in terms of an intrinsic action principle on a bundle of jets over spacetime. The theory is illustrated by considering the specific model of point particles with intrinsic spin covariantly coupled to theU(1) (...) andSL(2, C) connections describing the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, respectively. The notion of dual spin is examined in this context and coupled equations for this particle-field system are explicitly derived in a local chart. Attention is drawn to the global implications of the theory. (shrink)

The kleptocratic supremacy of the praetorian prefect C. Fulvius Plautianus was felt throughout the city of Rome, the Empire and even beyond the imperial frontiers. Indeed, for the senatorial historian Dio Cassius, there was no more picturesque demonstration of Plautianus' acquisitiveness than his seizure of strange striped horse-like creatures from ‘islands in the Erythraean Sea’. The passage, as preserved in the text of Xiphilinus' Epitome, reads as follows : καὶ τέλος ἵππους Ἡλίῳ τιγροειδεῖς ἐκ τῶν ἐν τῇ Ἐρυθρᾷ θαλάσσῃ νήσων, (...) πέμψας ἑκατοντάρχους, ἐξέκλεψεν·In the end he even stole tiger-like horses to Helios from the islands in the Erythraean Sea, having sent some centurions to carry out the task. (shrink)

We study the problem of existence of maximal chains in the Turing degrees. We show that: 1. ZF+DC+"There exists no maximal chain in the Turing degrees" is equiconsistent with ZFC+"There exists an inaccessible cardinal"; 2. For all a ∈ 2ω.(ω₁)L[a] = ω₁ if and only if there exists a $\Pi _{1}^{1}[a]$ maximal chain in the Turing degrees. As a corollary, ZFC + "There exists an inaccessible cardinal" is equiconsistent with ZFC + "There is no (bold face) $\utilde{\Pi}{}_{1}^{1}$ maximal chain of (...) Turing degrees". (shrink)

In this article, I establish a theory of knowledge approach for evaluating the use of computers for educational purposes at the university. In so doing, I trace part of the history of the “enabling factor” of Artificial Intelligence in this sector, an important element that has been integrated into everyday learning environments. The result of my reflection is a dialogical structure, directly inspired by past technology assessment research, which illustrates the conceptual advancement of researchers in the field of learning technologies. (...) The notions covered have implications in future policy-related discourse with regards to education. (shrink)