First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

BackgroundKinarm Standard Tests is a suite of upper limb tasks to assess sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, which produces granular performance data that reflect spatial and temporal aspects of behavior. We have previously used principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data using the Kinarm End-Point Lab. Here, we performed PCA using data from the Kinarm Exoskeleton Lab, and determined agreement of PCA results across EP and EXO platforms in healthy participants. We additionally examined whether further dimensionality reduction (...) was possible by using PCA across behavioral tasks.MethodsHealthy participants were assessed using the Kinarm EXO and EP. Four behavioral tasks were performed that quantified arm sensory and motor function, including position sense [Arm Position Matching ] and three motor tasks [Visually Guided Reaching, Object Hit, and Object Hit and Avoid ]. The number of components to include per task was determined from scree plots and parallel analysis, and rotation type was decided on a per-task basis. To assess agreement, we compared principal components across platforms using distance correlation. We additionally considered inter-task interactions in EXO data by performing PCA across all six behavioral assessments.ResultsBy applying PCA on a per task basis to data collected using the EXO, the number of behavioral parameters were substantially reduced by 58–75% while accounting for 76–87% of the variance. These results compared well to the EP analysis, and we found good-to-excellent agreement values between PCs from the EXO and those from the EP. Finally, we were able to reduce the dimensionality of the EXO data across tasks down to 16 components out of a total of 76 behavioral parameters, which represents a reduction of 79% while accounting for 73% of the total variance.ConclusionPCA of Kinarm robotic assessment appears to capture similar relationships between kinematic features in healthy individuals and is agnostic to the robotic platform used for collection. Further work is needed to investigate the use of PCA-based data reduction for the characterization of neurological deficits in clinical populations. (shrink)

We note in Section I that an acceptable formulation of Presentism must preserve its consistency with Transient Time and inconsistency with Static Time. After arguing in Section II that certain formulations of Presentism are unacceptable, we offer in Section III a formulation of Presentism that we defend against the charge of triviality.

Arguing that the universe is absolutely directioned and that there exist spatial (directional) relations that Leibniz overlooked, H. Scott Hestevold formulates a new relationalist theory of space, exploring its implications for the Special Composition Question, reductivism regarding boundaries and holes, and the nature of spacetime.

Abstract: Presentism is the view that whatever exists presently exists. Without defending Presentism, I argue first that Presentists should be Time-Free Presentists – Presentists whose views do not imply that there exist irreducible times. Second, I argue that Presentists should accept Limited Thick Presentism, the view that 'the present' has some extension and is thereby neither durationlessly thin nor unlimitedly 'thick'. Third, before addressing several objections to Limited Time-Free Thick Presentism [LTFTP], I argue that defenders of LTFTP should accept that (...) 'temporal becoming' involves an overlapping succession of present entities, not a 'skipping' from one set of present entities to the next discrete set. (shrink)

There has been much recent debate about Presentism among those who believe the doctrine to be nontrivial and true, those who believe it to be nontrivial and false, and those who believe it to be trivial — either trivially true or trivially false. Formulating Presentism precisely is problematic, which accounts for some of the controversy.

When is it that two objects compose a whole? Or, put another way, if Z is an object composed of X and Y, then what must be done to bring it about that X and Y both exist and Z does not exist? The author defends an answer to what is now know as the Special Composition Question.

Roderick M. Chisholm’s A Realistic Theory of Categories is a metaphysics treatise of extraordinary breadth and precision. Published in the year of its author’s eightieth birthday, Categories is a lean exposition of Chisholm’s systematic metaphysics, including his views on attributes, propositions, possible worlds, numbers, classes, relations, intentionality, events, time, space, material objects, persons, appearances, fictitious objects, and God. Chisholm develops his metaphysics with the resourcefulness, elegance, and intellectual integrity that have been a hallmark of his work.

There have emerged two distinct approaches to preserving the coherence of theism. The most common approach involves explicating the concept of an absolutely perfect God in terms of the divine attributes and then analyzing the divine-attribute concepts in such a way that they are rendered mutually consistent. According to this ‘multiple-attribute’ approach, the coherence of theism ultimately turns both on whether each divine-attribute concept can be coherently analyzed independently of the other divine-attribute concepts and on whether the divine attributes are (...) then mutually consistent. (shrink)

Is consolidation needed to account for retroactive interference in free recall? Interfering mental activity during the retention interval of a memory task impairs performance, in particular if the interference occurs in temporal proximity to the encoding of the to-be-remembered information. There are at least two rival theoretical accounts of this temporal gradient of retroactive interference. The cognitive neuroscience literature has suggested neural consolidation is a pivotal factor determining item recall. According to this account, interfering activity interrupts consolidation processes that would (...) otherwise stabilize the memory representations of TBR items post-encoding. Temporal distinctiveness theory, by contrast, proposes that the retrievability of items depends on their isolation in psychological time. According to this theory, information processed after the encoding of TBR material will reduce the temporal distinctiveness of the TBR information. To test between these accounts, implementations of consolidation were added to the SIMPLE model of memory and learning. We report data from two experiments utilizing a two-list free recall paradigm. Modeling results imply that SIMPLE was able to model the data and did not benefit from the addition of consolidation. It is concluded that the temporal gradient of retroactive interference cannot be taken as evidence for memory consolidation. (shrink)

“States have no morality, they have interests,” remarked an overzealous diplomat. And in this same manner we sometimes see that reasons of state take priority over moral rules. A sweet young thing testifying before a committee of the United State Congress said “sometimes you have to put yourself above the law,” no doubt repeating something that had been said to her. At a time when unrestrained application of the reasons of state can only lead to violence that can no longer (...) be sustained, we can judge to what extent such remarks are without foundation. (shrink)

Written in debate format, this book covers developing fields such as social cognition, as well as classic areas such as memory, learning, perception and categorization. The links between emotion and memory, learning, perception, categorization, social judgements, and behavior are addressed.

The main theme of these lectures is man's struggle to understand himself as a social being. A discussion of the major problems confronting man in his attempts to come to grips with the modern social world ends with a plea for liberalism and rationalism as the political and intellectual foundations of freedom and progress.

Scott Gordon provides a magisterial review of the historical development of the social sciences from their beginnings in renaissance Italy to the present day.

Challenging recent work that contends that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. This tradition - which Scott Paul Gordon locates in seventeenth-century religious discourse, in early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, in mid eighteenth-century acting theory, and in the emergent novel - resists autonomy and defers agency from the individual to an external 'prompter'. (...) Gordon argues that the trope of passivity aims to guarantee a disinterested self in a culture that was increasingly convinced that every deliberate action involves calculating one's own interest. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas from their roots in the non-conformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 3-7.

Substantivalists claim that spacetime enjoys an existence analogous to that of material bodies, while relationalists seek to reduce spacetime to sets of possible spatiotemporal relations. The resulting debate has been central to the philosophy of space and time since the Scientific Revolution. Recently, many philosophers of physics have turned away from the debate, claiming that it is no longer of any relevance to physics. At the same time, there has been renewed interest in the debate among physicists working on quantum (...) gravity, who claim that the conceptual problems which they face are intimately related to interpretative questions concerning general relativity . My goal is to show that the physicists are correct--there is a close relationship between the interpretative issues of classical and quantum gravity. ;In the first part of the dissertation I challenge the received view that substantivalism has a commanding advantage over relationalism on grounds internal to GR. I argue that this view is based on a misconception of the relationships between realism and substantivalism, and between empiricism and relationalism. This has led to a narrow conception of relationalism. Once this is relinquished it can be seen that none of the standard arguments in favor of substantivalism are cogent. ;In the second part of the dissertation, I consider the way in which considerations arising out of quantum gravity bear upon the substantival-relational debate. I develop a framework in which to discuss the interpretative problems of gauge theories and place GR in this context. From this perspective, I provide a taxonomy of interpretative options, and show how the hole argument arises naturally as a consequence of gauge freedom. This means that certain substantivalist interpretations of GR render the theory indeterministic. In the final chapter, I argue that, far from being a drawback, this presents an opportunity for substantivalists. Examples from quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and quantum gravity, are used to demonstrate that the ambiguities inherent in quantization can lead to an interpretative interplay between theories. In the case of quantum gravity, this means that substantivalism and relationalism suggest, and are suggested by, distinct approaches to quantizing GR. (shrink)

While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers--including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond--to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. (...) The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy's impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science. (shrink)

It seems to me that no substantial support can be provided for the thesis that the Darwinian theory of evolution drew significantly upon ideas in contemporary Political Economy. What Darwin may have derived from Malthus was not an integral part of the theory of population that the classical economists, including Malthus, put forward. He did not know the literature of Political Economy; and if he had been acquainted with it, he would not have been able to derive anything from it (...) that was important for the theory of natural selection. The judgment that “with Darwin's theory there was a real transfer of knowledge from political economy to biology” (Pancaldi 1985:262) cannot be sustained. (shrink)