This paper describes the application of eight statistical and machine-learning methods to derive computer models for predicting mortality of hospital patients with pneumonia from their findings at initial presentation. The eight models were each constructed based on 9847 patient cases and they were each evaluated on 4352 additional cases. The primary evaluation metric was the error in predicted survival as a function of the fraction of patients predicted to survive. This metric is useful in assessing a model’s potential to assist (...) a clinician in deciding whether to treat a given patient in the hospital or at home. We examined the error rates of the models when predicting that a given fraction of patients will survive. We examined survival fractions between 0.1 and 0.6. Over this range, each model’s predictive error rate was within 1% of the error rate of every other model. When predicting that approximately 30°K of the patients will survive, all the models have an error rate of less than 1.5%. The models are distinguished more by the number of variables and parameters that they contain than by their error rates; these differences suggest which models may be the most amenable to future implementation as paper-based guidelines. (shrink)

Why believe in the findings of science? John Ziman argues that scientific knowledge is not uniformly reliable, but rather like a map representing a country we cannot visit. He shows how science has many elements, including alongside its experiments and formulae the language and logic, patterns and preconceptions, facts and fantasies used to illustrate and express its findings. These elements are variously combined by scientists in their explanations of the material world as it lies outside our everyday experience. (...) class='Hi'>John Ziman’s book offers at once a valuably clear account and a radically challenging investigation of the credibility of scientific knowledge, searching widely across a range of disciplines for evidence about the perceptions, paradigms and analogies on which all our understanding depends. (shrink)

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not (...) only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their plausibility, and explores their philosophical consequences. It connects the topic's multiple strands (the psychological findings, computationalist background, epistemological consequences of cognitive architecture, and recent philosophical developments) at a time when the outcome of many philosophical debates depends on knowing whether and how cognitive states can influence perception. (...) All sixteen chapters were written especially for the book. The first chapters provide methodological and conceptual clarification of the topic and give an account of the relations between penetrability, encapsulation, modularity, and cross-modal interactions in perception. Assessments of psychological and neuroscientific evidence for cognitive penetration are given by several chapters. Most of the contributions analyse the impact of cognitive penetrability and impenetrability on specific philosophical topics: high-level perceptual contents, the epistemological consequences of penetration, nonconceptual content, the phenomenology of late perception, metacognitive feelings, and action. The book includes a comprehensive introduction which explains the history of the debate, its key technical concepts (informational encapsulation, early and late vision, the perception-cognition distinction, hard-wired perceptual processing, perceptual learning, theory-ladenness), and the debate's relevance to current topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

In 1984, John W. Yolton published Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. His most recent book builds on that seminal work and greatly extends its relevance to issues in current philosophical debate. Perception and Reality examines the theories of perception implicit in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers which centered on the question: How is knowledge of the body possible? That question raises issues of mind-body relation, the way that mentality links with physicality, and the nature of the (...) known world. In contrast to commonsense realism, which suggests that the world is as it appears to be, a more complex theory developed throughout this period. Yolton traces its evolution from Descartes to Kant, via Arnauld, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Yolton explains that the new theory postulated two interactive relations between perceivers and the physical world, one physical and causal, the other cognitive. An understanding of this double relation is important for an accurate construction of the history of philosophy. It is also important for contemporary thought because it suggests a way to account for representation (cognitivity) and realism at the same time. (shrink)

In this book John Ziman seeks the answers to crucial questions facing scientists who need to change the direction of their careers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Concept of Experience in Locke and Hume JOHN W. YOLTON THE EMPIRICISTPROGRAM has been designed to show that all conscious experience "comes from" unconscious encounters with the environment, and that all intellectual contents (concepts, ideas) derive from some conscious experiential component. Some empiricists, but not all, have also argued that experience reports about the world. A strict empiricism would have to reject this latter claim, as Hume (...) did, although even to consider the possibility of knowledge being related to an external world is to operate on a reflective level, to seek to make sense of experience. The distinction between an account of the nature of experience--its structure, relations, and contents-and explanations of experience--its causal antecedents, its reference--is an important one. The phrase "the concept of experience" refers to the use made of some account of experience. The concept of experience need not be restricted to the experiential contents. Thus, Locke sought to show how experience is of the world, Hume tried to show how experience restricts our valid conceptual contents to certain sorts of ideas, eliminating others. Any account of experience will already be a conceptualization of experience: it must be made from the reflective level. But the account need be no more than a careful record of how the organism comes to the conscious level. Of course, such an account cannot be a straightforward description, since we cannot directly observe all of the processes operating in the production of awareness. The psychology of awareness is forced to extrapolate and conjecture. Nevertheless, we can still distinguish the psychological or descriptive account of experience from the metaphysical use made of that account. It is my purpose here to explore the accounts given and the uses made of experience by two representative empiricists, that is, by philosophers whom we look upon as advancing the empiricist metaphysic of experience. Locke's Derivation o[ Ideas From Experience Locke claimed that all mental contents come from two sources, sensory experience of the world and introspective awareness of our mental processes. The program of Book II of his Essay was to exemplify, by reference to a [53] 54 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY number of different ideas and concepts, this derivation of our mental contents. The counter claim for Locke was innatism, the view held by many of his contemporaries and refuted in the first book of his Essay. In order to appreciate what Locke's alternative to innatism was, we must try to discover what the program of derivation of ideas amounts to in his epistemology and what precisely he understood by the term "experience." We must first note that he offers the program of derivation in conjunction with a complex theory of mental operations. H. H. Price has remarked that it is "historically false that the empiricist thought the human mind passive. It would be more just to criticize them for making it more active than it can possibly be.''1 Mental processes play a most active and decisive role in the genesis of all ideas in Locke's account. In the case of simple ideas of sense even, the mind must be attentive to what the senses report, else that report will go unrecorded, or be recorded only at the neural level (II, I, #6, #8, and II, IX, #3). Locke frequently draws the distinction between mental contents or processes and physical processes. In the "Epistle to the Reader," where he defines "idea," he is careful to distinguish idea from the sound we "use as a sign of it." In I, I, #2 he draws a distinction between the "physical consideration of the mind" and the non-physical consideration, although he does not have a name for the latter. He also speaks there of "sensations by our organs" and "ideas in our understanding." Locke disclaimed any intention of going into the physical account of sensation. He simply accepted the current corpuscular theory. But although he is not always as precise as we would be about the physical and physiological levels of encounter, in distinction from the mental levels, he does hold to this division. II, I, #3, for instance, speaks of the senses conveying "into the mind" several "distinct perceptions... (shrink)

I want to discuss a doctrine and a concept in theory of knowledge which has various manifestations from at least the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The concept is that of direct or immediate cognition, the doctrine says that only what is like mind can be directly or immediately present to mind. This doctrine raises the question of how we can know things other than ourselves and our experiences: the concept of direct presence most usually had the consequence of (...) making our knowledge of the world indirect, uncertain, or impossible. The directly present must in some way inform us about the indirectly present. (shrink)

Studie over leven en werk van de Engelse wijsgeer en opvoedkundige (1632-1704).

Yolton insists that Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding marks the beginning of the great empirical tradition in British philosophy.

ABSTRACTRheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw (...) extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science. (shrink)

Two medical essays in the hand of John Locke survive amongst the Shaftesbury Papers in the National Archives (National Archives PRO 30/24/47/2, ff. 31r–38v and ff. 49r–56r). Since the 1960s their authorship has been disputed. Some scholars have attributed them to the London physician Thomas Sydenham, others have attributed them to Locke. Detailed analyses of their contents and the context of their composition provide very strong evidence for Lockean authorship. This is reinforced by the application of the most recent (...) techniques of computational stylistics. (shrink)

Robert John Ackermann deals decisively with the problem of relativism that has plagued post-empiricist philosophy of science. Recognizing that theory and data are mediated by data domains (bordered data sets produced by scientific instruments), he argues that the use of instruments breaks the dependency of observation on theory and thus creates a reasoned basis for scientific objectivity. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished (...) backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

John Dillon presents an English translation of Alcinous' Handbook of Platonism, accompanied by an introduction and a philosophical commentary which explain the ideas in the work and show their intellectual and historical context. The Handbook purports to be an introduction to the doctrines of Plato, but in fact gives us an excellent survey of Platonist thought in the second century AD.

Using Geach’s Principle of the Relativity of Identity, the doctrine of the trinity is defended against charges of inconsistency put forward by David Wiggins and Richard Cartwright.

Western thought since the seventeenth century has been dominated by methodological solipsism (Krieger, 1991). The famous sound-bite of René Descartes 'cogito, ergo sum': 'I think, therefore I am', became the starting point for most discourse on the nature of things. This dictum does not advocate idealism. It does not assert that everything is necessarily a construct of the human mind. But it assumes that the world of things and beings is surveyed and interpreted from the point of view of a (...) single individual. Nowhere is this stance more entrenched than in the philosophy of science. To a remarkable degree the scientist is represented as studying the natural world as if alone in it, served only by mindless assistants who might as well be replaced by machines. Scientific theories are presented as systems of thought conjured up and tested by that same individual in a further series of single-headed operations. Research results are formulated and treated philosophically as the independent findings of lone explorers, each reporting the evidence of their own eyes and their rational inferences concerning the hidden mechanisms by which these personal percepts might be generated. Our epistemological role models are Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes, self-sufficient intellectuals to whom their human companions, Friday and Watson, are mere stooges. (shrink)

I argue that there is no distinction between allographic and autographic representations. One consequence of this is that replicative forgeries have the same aesthetic and artistic value as originals, and are accurate records of actions. I end with some reflections on the pragmatic structure of forgery.

There are two main groups of essays in this volume. The first centres on Locke's theories of religion and their relation to contemporary scientific thought and the work of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. The second group explores the relation between biology and physiology, and the science of man.

Will enable the ordinary person to discover his or her own unique life myth and live it from moment to moment.

Roth claims that in constituting the sorts of events they want to connect, historians conceive matters that may not correlate with any inventory of elements eligible for admission by natural science. Given “the liabilities incurred by the very questions historians choose to ask,” the question of historical explanation is a problem of our own making. “Previous challenges to the epistemic legitimacy of historical explanations lose their point,” for no one can ask what kind of science or what kind of explanation (...) history is, since it is none! This is, unsurprisingly, an unacceptable outcome for me. A case can be made for intersubjective assertability of a historical interpretation and the contestation of it - however tentatively, fallibly, partially - without a complete collapse into the aesthetics of form or the politics of the formulator. The task of the philosophy of history is to work out the reconciliation of the performative with the constative in historical writing and in historical appraisal. (shrink)

The principle of "organism"—of intrinsic and dynamic unity—and the existence of "organized bodies"—of living things—in the physical world represented crucial preoccupations for philosophers of nature and experimental naturalists across the eighteenth century. How to make sense of these in a manner consistent with a unified scientific understanding of the physical world became the inevitable challenge that accompanied these recognitions. In just this theoretical enterprise, Leibniz emerges to historical scrutiny as an indispensable and pervasive influence. Thus, we are very fortunate to (...) have the body of scholarship that François Duchesneau has devoted to this topic over the course of his illustrious career. In this... (shrink)

Among the book's arguments: Aesthetic property relativism, as described by Alan Goldman, requires subjects to make judgments based on prima facie preferences for determinable properties (eg being curved, being blue). These judgments are not bona fide because they do not require acquaintance with objects. Value concepts and aesthetic (thick) concepts relate contingently. We can be aesthetic property realists, or quasi-realists, without being aesthetic value realists. Contains epistemological arguments against neuro-aesthetics (Ramachandran), aesthetic sense theory (Hutcheson), physiological theories (Burke), and Hume's realism.