I am honored to have been invited to participate in this Workshop on Comparative Studies of Building Molecular Biology, with a discussion of Japanese experiences in constructing a science — in this case, the discipline of molecular biology. As I understand it, the construction of a science must be equivalent to building a new culture. My having given this title to my paper suggests that I have enough knowledge about the subject to perhaps even extrapolate its course into the future (...) — which I do not. What I do have is a sincere admiration of my old friends and colleagues, in Japan and elsewhere, who together tried to build a new science of molecular biology in Japan. (shrink)

In 1932, Japanese psychologist Takano Kiyoshi conducted experimental research on vibratory sensations using hundreds of deaf schoolchildren as research subjects. This article examines the little-studied relationship between the global spread of oralism and the local formulation of knowledge about the vibratory sense—or senkaku 顫覚—in Japanese psychoacoustics. In the 1920s, American missionaries and educators helped spread oralism in Japan, and the Japanese state implemented the Blind and Deaf-Mute Schools Ordinance. There was also a notable development of experimental psychology in the country. (...) Influenced by German psychologist David Katz’s work, Takano viewed deafness as a physical “ability” or physiological “advantage” for his scientific project. A close reading of Japanese, German, and American psychologists’ works on the vibratory sense around the time reveals that it was considered not quite identical to hearing, nor to touch. The five senses framework—based on the ideas of touch, hearing, sight, smell, and taste—does not always function properly in sensory history; this prevalent framework can put aside the actual nuances and complexities of one’s varying understanding of the human sensorium across time and space. This study highlights the (anonymous) participation of deaf individuals as research subjects and draws attention to how people with impairments played diverse roles in the history of science. (shrink)

狂信的な国粋主義者か、はたまた魂の尊厳を問うた求道者か。民俗学と国粋主義の親和性とは。多角的な視点からファシズムを再考する。.

In his “A new argument for evidentialism” (Shah, Philos Q 56(225): 481–498, 2006 ), Nishi Shah argues that the best explanation of a feature of deliberation whether to believe that p which he calls transparency entails that only evidence can be reason to believe that p. I show that his argument fails because a crucial lemma that his argument appeals to cannot be supported without assuming evidentialism to be true in the first place.

In bacteria, PriA protein, a conserved DEXH‐type DNA helicase, plays a central role in replication restart at stalled replication forks. Its unique DNA‐binding property allows it to recognize and stabilize stalled forks and the structures derived from them. Cells must cope with fork stalls caused by various replication stresses to complete replication of the entire genome. Failure of the stalled fork stabilization process and eventual restart could lead to various forms of genomic instability. The low viability of priA null cells (...) indicates a frequent occurrence of fork stall during normal growth that needs to be properly processed. PriA specifically recognizes the 3′‐terminus of the nascent leading strand or the invading strand in a displacement (D)‐loop by the three‐prime terminus binding pocket (TT‐pocket) present in its unique DNA binding domain. Elucidation of the structural basis for recognition of arrested forks by PriA should provide useful insight into how stalled forks are recognized in eukaryotes. (shrink)

This paper describes an automatic monitoring system that constantly checks partial update in Web pages and notifies them to a user. While one of the most important advantages of the WWW is update of Web pages, we need to constantly check them out and this task takes much cognitive load. Thus applications to automatically check update of Web pages have been developed, however they can not deal with partial update like update in a particular cell in a table in a (...) Web page. Hence we developed a automatic monitoring system that checks such partial update. A user can give a system regions in which he/she wants to know the update in a Web page as training examples, and it is able to learn rules to identify the partial update by classification learning. By this learning, a user do not need to directly describe the rules. We implemented our system and some executed examples were presented. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an organization method of page information agents for adaptive interface between a user and a Web search engine. Though a Web search engine indicates a hit list of Web pages to user’s query using a large database, they includes many useless ones. Thus a user has to select useful Web pages from them with page information indicated on the hit list, and actually fetch the Web page for investigating the relevance. Unfortunately, since the page information (...) on a hit list is neither sufficient nor necessary for a user, the adequate information is necessary for valid selection. However which information is adequate depends on a user and a task. Hence we propose adaptive interface AOAI in which different page information agents are organized through man-machine interaction. In AOAI, the page information agents indicating different page information on a hit list like the file-size, network traffic and a page title are prepared at first. A user evaluates them through searching with a search engine, and the agents are organized based on the evaluation. As results, different organizations are achieved depending on a user and a task. Finally we make experiments with subjects and find out AOAI is promising for adaptive interface between a user and a search engine. (shrink)

近世の儒者・熊沢蕃山(一六一九~九一)の一つ一つの著作の思想構造の解明をめざし、さらにそれぞれの著作を比較することで、蕃山の思想の変化に注目し、その変化の意味を問う。また中江藤樹『翁問答』や池田光政の 藩政改革をとりあげて、岡山藩における蕃山の政治体験の意味を解明し、それらの考察から多様な蕃山の思想を立体的に浮かび上がらせる。.

One prominent feature of belief is that a belief cannot be formed at will. This paper argues that the best explanation of this fact is that belief formation is a process that takes aim at the truth. Taking aim at the truth is to be understood as causal responsiveness of the processes constituting belief formation to what facilitates achieving true beliefs. The requirement for this responsiveness precludes the possibility of belief formation responding to intentions in a way that would count (...) as forming a belief at will. (shrink)

Although it seems intuitively clear that acts of requesting are different from acts of commanding, it is not very easy to sate their differences precisely in dynamic terms. In this paper we show that it becomes possible to characterize, at least partially, the effects of acts of requesting and compare them with the effects of acts of commanding by combining dynamified deontic logic with epistemic logic. One interesting result is the following: each act of requesting is appropriately differentiated from an (...) act of commanding with the same content, but for each act of requesting, there is another act of commanding with much more complex content which updates models in exactly the same way as it does. We will also consider an application of our characterization of acts of requesting to acts of asking yes-no questions. It yields a straightforward formalization of the view of acts of asking questions as requests for information. (shrink)

If the notion of speech acts is to be taken seriously, it must be possible to treat speech acts as acts. The development of systems of DEL (dynamic epistemic logic) in the last two decades suggests an interesting possibility. These systems are developed on the basis of static epistemic logics by introducing model updating operations to interpret various kinds of speech acts including public announcements as well as private information transmissions as what update epistemic states of agents involved. The methods (...) used in developing DEL can be used to develop logics that deal with a much wider variety of speech acts. For example, in ECL (Eliminative Command Logic) of Yamada (2007a) and ECL II of Yamada (2007b), similar model updating operations are introduced tointerpret acts of commanding as what update deontic aspects of the situations in which agents are involved. In Yamada (2008a), ECL II is further extended so as to model acts of promising along with acts of commanding. Moreover, in Yamada (2008b), ECL II is combined with a modified version of DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) introduced in van Benthem & Liu (2007). In the resulting logic DDPL (dynamic deontic preference logic), illocutionary acts of commanding are differentiated from preference upgrading perlocutionary acts. The development of these logics suggests a recipe for developing logics that deal with various specific speech acts: first, carefully identify the aspects affected by the speech acts you want to study; second, find the modal logic that characterizes the aspects in question; and finally, add dynamic modalities that stand for the types of the speech acts being studied and define model updating operation that interprets these speech acts as what update the very aspects. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 世界衛生組織(WHO)在歷經自1976年伊波拉病毒病(EbolaHemorrhagicFever, 伊波拉出血熱)爆發以來，處理疫情爆發當中出現的種種倫理問題之後，於2016年出版“Guidance for Managing Ethical Issues in Infectious Disease Outbreaks”（中文暫譯：《傳染病爆發處理倫理議題之指引》）一書，其中整理出「正義、行善、效益、尊重自主、自由、團結、互惠」等七項倫理原則，於今面對新冠肺炎（COVID-19）的疫情上，各國防疫 政策，亦可作為應對。作為一名當代墨者，本文即以此為基礎，由醫療的角度，結合國內情況，企欲在墨學義理內作一生命倫理的反思，並試圖對後疫情時代給予具體作為之建議。 In response to various ethical problems that emerged after the 1976 Ebola hemorrhagic fever epidemic, WHO published the book Guidance for Managing Ethical Issues in Infectious Disease Outbreaks in 2016. The content of the book was organized around seven ethical principles, namely, justice, beneficence, benefit, respect for autonomy, freedom, reciprocity, and unity. These seven ethical principles can be used as (...) a framework for countries to develop policies for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from contemporary Mohism, this paper reflects on the situation in Taiwan through the lens of these seven ethical principles. It aims to arrive at a Mohist understanding of bioethics and proposes concrete actions for the post-epidemic era. (shrink)

Cellular pattern formations of some epithelia are believed to be governed by the direct lateral inhibition rule of cell differentiation. That is, initially equivalent cells are all competent to differentiate, but once a cell has differentiated, the cell inhibits its immediate neighbors from following this pathway. Such a differentiation repeats until all non-inhibited cells have differentiated. The cellular polygonal patterns can be characterized by the numbers of undifferentiated cells and differentiated ones. When the differentiated cells become large in size, the (...) polygonal pattern is deformed since more cells are needed to enclose the large cell. An actual example of such a cellular pattern was examined. The pupal wing epidermis of a butterfly Pieris rapae shows a transition of the equivalent-size cell pattern to the pattern involving large cells. The process of the transition was analyzed by using the method of weighted Voronoi tessellation that is useful for treatment of irregularly sized polygons. The analysis supported that the pattern transition of the early stage of the pupal wing epidermis is governed by the lateral inhibition rule. The differentiation takes place in order of largeness, but not smallness, of the apical polygonal area in the differentiating region of the pupal wing. (shrink)

SOCREAL 2010: 2nd International Workshop on Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality. Sapporo, Japan, 2010-03-27/28. Keynote Lecture 3.

There are three main points of the paper. 1. There are straightforward ways of manipulating expected gains and losses that result in a divergence between fair betting odds and credence. Such manipulations are familiar from tools of finance. One can easily see that the Sleeping Beauty case is structured in such a way as to result in a divergence between fair betting odds and credence. 2. The inspection of credences and betting odds in certain betting situations shows that the two (...) main extant positions, Elga's and Lewis's, are both mistaken. 3. My proposal may seem to require a revision of probability theory but it does not. The Sleeping Beauty case merely calls attention to a constraint on partitioning of possibility space that is usually satisfied as a matter of course but can in fact be violated. (shrink)

Developmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify (...) with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance. (shrink)

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects (...) upon attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”. (shrink)

Prior's three-valued modal logic Q was developed as a philosophically interesting modal logic. Thus, we should be able to modify Q as a temporal logic. Although a temporal version of Q was suggested by Prior, the subject has not been fully explored in the literature. In this paper, we develop a three-valued temporal logic $Q_t $ and give its axiomatization and semantics. We also argue that $Q_t $ provides a smooth solution to the problem of future contingents.

Spirituality and religiosity have a significant impact on one's well-being. Although previous studies have indicated that the neuropeptide hormone oxytocin is associated with spirituality/religiosity, existing findings remain inconsistent. Some studies have reported a positive relationship between oxytocin and spirituality/religiosity, while other studies have reported a negative association. Herein, we examined the association between endogenous oxytocin and spirituality/religiosity in 200 non-Abrahamic Japanese individuals by measuring the level of salivary oxytocin and spiritual/religious faith. We found that the level of salivary oxytocin was (...) negatively associated with spiritual/religious faith. Individuals with higher levels of salivary oxytocin tend to have more negative spiritual/religious faith compared with those with low oxytocin levels. Moreover, this tendency was only significant in individuals who were not interested in a specific religion. The uniqueness of spirituality/religiosity in Japan could help interpret the current findings. (shrink)

『哲学探究』以後、最晩期に独立した地位を与える。ウィトゲンシュタインの知識の哲学。.