Part I of this essay will be devoted to Gauthier's principle of minimax relative concession. Part II will focus, more generally, on the variety of possible strategies available to liberal theory. In Part I, I will argue that the principle of minimax relative concession does not define “essential justice” as Gauthier claims. In Part II, I will argue that the difficulties facing Gauthier's strategy are common to other strategies of die same general kind. I will close by suggesting what I (...) think may prove to be a more promising approach. (shrink)

Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.

Explores the moral struggles, political intrigues and violent vendettas that enmeshed Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and philosopher, in the brutal daily lives of the imperial family and the regime of his student, Nero.

An examination of the role of the scientist in the process of understanding the world, and a reexamination of scientific objectivity, model building, and the place of scientists in the hierarchy of natural systems.

Introduction: Socratic divagation/divination -- The holy -- On the sign of Socrates -- Divine madness -- Banishing the poets -- Conclusion: the multiplicity of voices.

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real‐world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to (...) provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two‐layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short‐term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human‐like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR. (shrink)

Halin in 1965 proved that if a graph has [Formula: see text] many pairwise disjoint rays for each [Formula: see text] then it has infinitely many pairwise disjoint rays. We analyze the complexity of this and other similar results in terms of computable and proof theoretic complexity. The statement of Halin’s theorem and the construction proving it seem very much like standard versions of compactness arguments such as König’s Lemma. Those results, while not computable, are relatively simple. They only use (...) arithmetic procedures or, equivalently, finitely many iterations of the Turing jump. We show that several Halin-type theorems are much more complicated. They are among the theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis. Such theorems imply the ability to iterate the Turing jump along any computable well ordering. Several important logical principles in this class have been extensively studied beginning with work of Kreisel, H. Friedman, Steel and others in the 1960s and 1970s. Until now, only one purely mathematical example was known. Our work provides many more and so answers Question 30 of Montalbán’s Open Questions in Reverse Mathematics in 2011. Some of these theorems including ones in Halin in 1965 are also shown to have unusual proof theoretic strength as well. (shrink)

Eminent science writer James Trefil examines the very underpinnings of scientific thought. He recounts the story of mankind's fascinating exploration beyond the earth and the simplistic beauty of the universal principles that govern the cosmos.

People around the world are agitating for democracy and individual rights, but there is no consensus on a theory of liberal democracy that might guide them. What are the first principles of a just society? What political theory should shape public policy in such a society? In this book, James S. Fishkin offers a new basis for answering these questions by proposing the ideal of a "self-reflective society"—a political culture in which citizens are able to decide their own fate (...) through unconstrained dialogue. Fishkin offers a comprehensive critique of liberal political theories that do not satisfy the requirements for a self-reflective society. He then explains his own theory of liberalism, showing that the freely self-examining society he advocates can provide the key to issues of political legitimacy and social justice. Fishkin proposes practical applications of his theory that would lead to more participatory democracy. Among these are deliberative opinion polls that would allow ordinary citizens to explore issues directly with candidates before elections, and vouchers that would allow them to organize representation for their interests. Fishkin examines a broad range of topics from the fresh perspective of a self-reflective society: utility and its limits, justice between generations, conflicting ideals of democracy, equal opportunity, the connections between theory and public policy, the notion of moral progress, and the bases for political obligation. His book makes a new contribution to central debates in moral, political, and legal philosophy. (shrink)

The new atheists are on the warpath. They come armed with arguments to show that belief in God is absurd and dangerous. In the name of societal progress, they promote purging the world of all religious practice. And they claim that people of faith are mentally ill. Some of the new atheists openly declare their hatred for the Judeo-Christian God. Christian apologists have been quick to respond to the new atheists’ arguments. But there is another dimension to the issue which (...) begs to be addressed--the root causes of atheism. Where do atheists come from? How did such folks as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens become such ardent atheists? If we are to believe them, their flight from faith resulted from a dispassionate review of the evidence. Not enough rational grounds for belief in God, they tell us. But is this the whole story? Could it be that their opposition to religious faith has more to do with passion than reason? What if, in the end, evidence has little to do with how atheists arrive at their anti-faith? That is precisely the claim in this book. Atheism is not at all a consequence of intellectual doubts. These are mere symptoms of the root cause--moral rebellion. For the atheist, the missing ingredient is not evidence but obedience. The psalmist declares, “The fool says in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1), and in the book of Romans, Paul makes it clear that lack of evidence is not the atheist’s problem. The Making of an Atheist confirms these biblical truths and describes the moral and psychological dynamics involved in the abandonment of faith. (shrink)

With the development of the division of labor, the household has declined in importance as a unit of economic production. Yet even as the individual wage earner has assumed a central place in modern exchange economies, the household has still been seen as an important unit of distribution, in which wage earners provide for their non-income-producing family members. With the breakdown of the family in recent decades, however, the communal income-sharing function of the family has, in significant part, been taken (...) overby the state. In this essay, I examine this fundamental change in the structure of production and distribution in modern exchange economies. Going beyond this, I propose a new structure of markets–markets for rights to influence collective decision-making within a society. Such markets, I suggest, wouldprovide a source of income for each member of the society. (shrink)

Based on Nietzsche's critique of religion and culture, including recent developments of it, assesses the origin myths that articulate western attitudes toward beauty and shame.

The sounds that make up spoken words are heard in a series and must be mapped rapidly onto words in memory because their elements, unlike those of visual words, cannot simultaneously exist or persist in time. Although theories agree that the dynamics of spoken word recognition are important, they differ in how they treat the nature of the competitor set—precisely which words are activated as an auditory word form unfolds in real time. This study used eye tracking to measure the (...) impact over time of word frequency and 2 partially overlapping competitor set definitions: onset density and neighborhood density. Time course measures revealed early and continuous effects of frequency (facilitatory) and on set based similarity (inhibitory). Neighborhood density appears to have early facilitatory effects and late inhibitory effects. The late inhibitory effects are due to differences in the temporal distribution of similarity within neighborhoods. The early facilitatory effects are due to subphonemic cues that inform the listener about word length before the entire word is heard. The results support a new conception of lexical competition neighborhoods in which recognition occurs against a background of activated competitors that changes over time based on fine-grained goodness-of-fit and competition dynamics. (shrink)

The question of when and how bottom‐up input is integrated with top‐down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken‐word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post‐perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the following phoneme, (...) supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt & McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original lexical feedback explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases. (shrink)

Three common assumptions of both liberal theory and political debate are the autonomy of the family, the principle of merit, and equality of life chances. Fishkin argues that even under the best conditions, commitment to any two of these principles precludes the third._“A brief survey and brilliant critique of contemporary liberal political theory…. A must for all political theory or public policy collections.” –_Choice_ “The strong points of Fishkin’s book are many. He raises provocative issues, locates them within a broader (...) theoretical framework, and demonstrates an urgent need for liberals to set certain priorities. His main message—that liberalism has radical implications for ordinary life—needs to be heard by many.” --Virginia L. Warren, _Michigan Law Review_ “A highly original and powerfully argued book…. Fishkin is undoubtedly right, and his warning needs to be taken seriously…. This is not a book that catechizes us about what we should believe concerning the practicalities of distributive justice. It is a book that advises us about how we need to think about beliefs that are already popular dogmas, in the interest of making sense.” –James Gaffney, _America_ James S. Fishkin_ is associate professor of political science at Yale University. He is also the author of _The Limits of Obligation_ and _Beyond Subjective Morality_. (shrink)