Through established modern theories of design thinking, the internalization of environmental design through studio education is fundamentally a construct of ego-centrism. This fact subsequently inhibits an intersubjective and discursive professional ethic. Alternatively, a pedagogy set within a construct of practical discourse could ground an ethical construction of practice which more accurately reflects the realities of intersubjectivity found in human learning, in the best possibilities of studio education, and in the discursive processes fundamental to environmental design in society.

What is it for a thinker to possess the concept of perceptual experience? What is it to be able to think of seeings, hearings and touchings, and to be able to think of experiences that are subjectively like seeings, hearings and touchings?

There are three independent properties of a mode of presentation of a number: being specific; being recognitional; and being canonical. A perceptual m.p. of the form that many Fs is specific although it is neither recognitional nor canonical. The literature has not distinguished noncanonical from nonspecific m.p.s of numbers. Ratios are fundamentally ratios of magnitudes.

We describe a machine learning system for the recognition of names in biomedical texts. The system makes extensive use of local and syntactic features within the text, as well as external resources including the web and gazetteers. It achieves an F- score of 70% on the Coling 2004 NLPBA/BioNLP shared task of identifying five biomedical named entities in the GENIA corpus.

Many NLP tasks rely on accurately estimating word dependency probabilities P(w1|w2), where the words w1 and w2 have a particular relationship (such as verb-object). Because of the sparseness of counts of such dependencies, smoothing and the ability to use multiple sources of knowledge are important challenges. For example, if the probability P(N |V ) of noun N being the subject of verb V is high, and V takes similar objects to V , and V is synonymous to V , then (...) we want to conclude that P(N |V ) should also be reasonably high—even when those words did not cooccur in the training data. (shrink)

Perhaps we should change our focus from constitutionalized practices of democracy to democratized practices of constitutionalism. Dworkin and Perry both seek to respond to democratic objections to judicial review by relying on a theory of the legitimacy constraints of democracy itself. According to this view, on some matters, legitimate democracy requires getting the right moral answers. Thus democratic processes must be constitutionalized to ensure such right outcomes on fundamental moral matters. To the extent that judges are better positioned to engage (...) in principled moral reasoning, the arguments continue, we ought to entrust them with ensuring the constitutionalized legitimacy conditions of democracy. I argued that this latter institutional move, however, threatened to simply revive the paternalist worries forcefully articulated by Learned Hand. Waldron’s rights-based objection to rightsbased judicial review, although not dispositive, provided further warning of the moral costs of treating fellow citizens as incapable of reasoning together about the content and proper scope of the legal rights required for democracy. An alternative strategy for justifying judicial review that this chapter investigates is to understand a constitution itself as a product of true democracy, of real popular sovereignty. It is then up to the people, exercising their constituent power at the level of a constitutional assembly, to decide what particular institutional arrangements will best carry forward their collective ideals and decisions. The specific character and structure of those arrangements—whether they are populist or elitist, deliberative or aggregative, sensitive or insulated, electorally accountable or politically independent, and so on—is then a secondary matter. What is central is that the constitutional arrangements the people decide on are, first and foremost, democratically legitimated by the fact that they are the result of authentic popular sovereignty.. (shrink)

The response mode bias, in which subjects exhibit different risk attitudes when assessing certainty equivalents versus indifference probabilities, is a well-known phenomenon in the assessment of utility functions. In this empirical study, we develop and apply a cardinal measure of risk attitudes to analyze not only the existence, but also the strength of this phenomenon. Since probability levels involved in decision problems are already known to have a strong impact on behavior, we use this approach to study the impact of (...) probabilities on the extent of the response mode bias. We find that the direction in which probabilities influence measured risk aversion is the opposite in the certainty equivalence (CE) method versus in the probability equivalence (PE) method. Utilizing the CE elicitation approach leads to an increase of risk seeking for gambles involving high probabilities. For the PE method, subjects tend to behave risk averse with gambles of high probabilities. This behavior is reversed in the gain domain. This “tailwhip” effect is consistently replicated in several experiments, involving both loss and gain domains of lotteries. (shrink)

In The Beast and The Sovereign Volume 2, a collection of ten lectures focused on the “odd couple” of Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Derrida devotes a substantial portion of his second lecture to one of the most well-known scenes in Defoe’s novel: Robinson’s discovery of “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore” (Derrida 31, Defoe 162). Having lived alone on his island for fifteen years, Robinson is “thunder-struck,” as if having “seen an apparition” (162). After running (...) up and down the shore in a failed effort to find additional prints, Robinson flees in terror to his “castle,” observing that “never frighted hare fled to cover, or fox to earth, with more terror of mine than I to this retreat” (162). .. (shrink)

Given how much the tradition owes to Dewey’s pragmatic reconstruction of philosophy, that more is not written of a political bent by those working under the sign of pragmatism is to me always surprising. John McGowan’s Pragmatist Politics is a shining exception. The book’s aim is “to articulate and practice a liberal democratic ethos inspired primarily by the American pragmatist tradition.”1 Two compelling opening chapters lay out McGowan’s melioristic conception of pragmatism as a philosophy of possibility animated by a belief (...) in progress, drawing most heavily from James and Dewey but ranging well beyond them, both within the pragmatist tradition and outside it. Three subsequent chapters articulate “a vision of a .. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur repeatedly maintained that his philosophical reflection was autonomous from theological influence. Those who seek to contest this view have hitherto sought to deny the autonomy of philosophy from theology, but this article makes a more radical argument: not that philosophy is not autonomous, but that autonomy is not philosophical. According to Ricoeur’s own understanding of the structure of philosophical systems, the very notion of autonomy to which philosophy makes claim can only be thought as a theological notion. The (...) argument has two parts. First, philosophy is theological in its own structure, and secondly, the relation between philosophy and theology can only be thought theologically. (shrink)

This paper examines feature selection for log linear models over rich constraint-based grammar (HPSG) representations by building decision trees over features in corresponding probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs). We show that single decision trees do not make optimal use of the available information; constructed ensembles of decision trees based on different feature subspaces show signifi- cant performance gains (14% parse selection error reduction). We compare the performance of the learned PCFG grammars and log linear models over the same features.

In this paper I will discuss a rather recondite phenomenon in the area of sequence of tense (SOT), exhibited by sentences like (1): (1) John said that Mary is pregnant. According to traditional grammar, this is a sentence where sequence of tense has failed to apply (i.e., concord has been broken): standard sequence of tense rules would dictate use of a past tense when embedding an event contemporaneous to the embedding verb under a past tense verb, giving the sentence John (...) said that Mary was pregnant. For some verbs breaking concord is impossible (*Mary said that John builds a house) or can only have a present-as-future interpretation (John said that the last spaceship to Mars leaves tomorrow), but with stative verbs, as En¸c (1987) and others have observed, this failure of sequence of tense to apply is associated with a rather special meaning, which we will try to elucidate below. For the moment, let us merely observe that the use of present tense seems to cause such sentences to end up saying something about a larger interval including both the time of utterance and the time of the event described in the main clause. For this reason En¸c calls them “double access sentences”, but that seems a rather dubious name as the interpretation seems to rely on evaluation at a large interval, not just at two points. (shrink)

Many factors are thought to increase the chances of misrecognizing a word in ASR, including low frequency, nearby disfluencies, short duration, and being at the start of a turn. However, few of these factors have been formally examined. This paper analyzes a variety of lexical, prosodic, and disfluency factors to determine which are likely to increase ASR error rates. Findings include the following. (1) For disfluencies, effects depend on the type of disfluency: errors increase by up to 15% (absolute) for (...) words near fragments, but decrease by up to 7.2% (absolute) for words near repetitions. This decrease seems to be due to longer word duration. (2) For prosodic features, there are more errors for words with extreme values than words with typical values. (3) Although our results are based on output from a system with speaker adaptation, speaker differences are a major factor influencing error rates, and the effects of features such as frequency, pitch, and intensity may vary between speakers. (shrink)

Spinoza revises his early Cartesian arguments for God in three important respects. By defining God in terms of conceptually distinct attributes, he has an argument for God’s actual possibility. By defining God in terms of conceptual independence, he has an argument for the mind independence of God’s nature. By including reason and power as features of God’s nature, he provides a mechanism by which God’s nature necessitates God. Each of these address important objections to Descartes’ ontological argument. Given his similarities (...) with Descartes and familiarity with these objections, Spinoza may have had Descartes’ critics in mind, and regardless, Cartesians may benefit by examining Spinoza’s ontological arguments more closely. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine arguments from Stephen Munzer and A. John Simmons and find that historical entitlement arguments for private property ownership are either too weak to justify poverty, as they must if they are to defend a property system wherein historical entitlement claims dominate, or they are subject to Jeremy Waldron’s “Proudhon Strategy.” I conclude that a general rights-based property system can accommodate the attractive aspects of historical entitlement arguments.