Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought (...) processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs - BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL - are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. "Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science. Pat Langley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.Herbert Simon is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University. Gary L. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jan M. Zytkow is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wichita State University. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was one of the most powerful influences on contemporary philosophy, yet he shunned publicity and was essentially a private man. This remarkable, vivid, personal memoir is written by one of his friends, the eminent philosopher Norman Malcolm. Reissued in paperback, this edition includes the complete text of fifty-seven letters which Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm over a period of eleven years. Also included is a concise biographical sketch by another of Wittgenstein's philosopher friends, Georg Henrik von Wright. 'A (...) reader does not need to care about philosophy to be excited by Mr Malcolm's book; it is about Wittgenstein as a man, and its interest is human interest'. (shrink)

Auth: University College London, Distributed by Viking.

It has often been claimed, and frequently denied, that music derives some or all of its artistic value from the relation in which it stands to the emotions. This book presents and subjects to critical examination the chief theories about the relationship between the art of music and the emotions.

All aesthetic judgements, whether descriptive, evaluative or some combination of the two, and whatever they might be about, whether works of art, artefacts of other kinds, or natural things, declare themselves to be, not mere announcements or expressions of personal responses to the objects of judgement, but claims meriting the agreement of others. Despite the frequent appeal in everyday life to the nihilistic interpretation of the saying ‘It's all a matter of taste’, the doctrine of aesthetic nihilism—the view that such (...) claims are never warranted—does not merit serious attention. What is needed is an articulation of the various kinds of content of aesthetic judgements, one that will reveal what their claim to intersubjective validity amounts to and enable an assessment of what the proper limits of the claim might be. This clarification is what I attempt to provide. After some introductory definitions and classifications, the principal focus of the first part of the paper is descriptive aesthetic judgements, and one issue that figures large is the proper understanding of those judgements of this kind which are expressed in sentences that are intended to be understood metaphorically. A short bridge passage identifies an aesthetic judgement whose content is indicative of the content of evaluative aesthetic judgements of all kinds, and in particular evaluative aesthetic judgements about works of art, which the second part of the paper focuses on. Real illumination of these requires an identification of the aim of art (as such): I offer an account of this aim, which I defend against certain objections that it is liable to attract, and I use it to throw light not just on singular but also on comparative judgements of artistic value. I conclude with some remarks about purely aesthetic value and specifically artistic value and about similarities and differences between evaluative aesthetic judgements of works of art and evaluative aesthetic judgements of works of nature. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that faith is a virtue. To what extent faith is a virtue depends on what faith is. One construal of faith, which has been popular in both recent and historical work on faith, is that faith is a matter of taking oneself to have been spoken to by God and of trusting this purported divine testimony. In this paper, I argue that when faith is understood in this way, for faith to be virtuous then it must (...) be accompanied by intellectual humility. I defend this view by showing how someone ought to respond to purported divine testimony if her faith is to be intellectually humble, and how, if it fails in this respect, it will instead be accompanied by the vices of either servility or arrogance. (shrink)

If you are interested in art, you engage in artistic evaluation, thinking of one work as being better than another; one artist as being better than another; some works and some artists as being great, mediocre, or poor; and, perhaps, thinking of some forms or genres of art as being superior to others in that works within the favored form or genre have achieved or can aspire to a higher artistic value than is possible for those less favored. The greatest (...) philosophical challenge to this practice—a challenge that, if successful, would have wide-ranging consequences outside philosophy, in particular in undermining the status of the practice of art criticism—would maintain that it is, all of it, taken at face value.. (shrink)

Page's “localist” code, a population code with occasional, maximally firing elements, does not seem to us usefully or testably different from sparse population coding. Some of the evidence adduced by Page for his proposal is not actually evidence for it, and coding by maximal firing is challenged by lower firing observed in neuronal responses to natural stimuli.

In the space of two decades, social rights have emerged from the shadows and margins of human rights jurisprudence. The authors in this book provide a critical analysis of almost two thousand judgments and decisions from twenty-nine national and international jurisdictions. The breadth of the decisions is vast, from the resettlement of evictees to the regulation of private medical plans to the development of state programs to address poverty and illiteracy. The jurisprudence not only implicates our understanding of economic, social, (...) and cultural rights, but also challenges the philosophical debates that question whether these rights can and should be justiciable. (shrink)

I should say a preliminary word about the method I am adopting in this article, mainly to point out that there is nothing whatever remarkable about it. I take myself to be approaching the Politics in accordance with the interpretative canons standard in mainstream historical and Aristotelian scholarship. Compare the study of Aristotle's metaphysics. Everyone would grant that before we start considering whether hule or indeed any other Aristotelian concept anticipates or maps onto some modern notion of matter in any (...) interesting or important way, it is imperative to acquire a full understanding of the way the idea functions within the whole matrix of concepts, analyses, and theses which make up Aristotle's physics and metaphysics. I am simply pursuing the same method with respect to that matrix of concepts in Aristotle's political philosophy within which Miller hopes to locate an anticipation of the idea of rights. My references to the work of John Pocock in section V have suggested to some readers that I am espousing a form of historical or cultural or Kuhnian relativism which rules Miller's project out of court ab initio. The only form of relativism to which I think this essay commits me is the methodological relativism that I have just described. (shrink)

How can we make moral sense of the international humanitarian law doctrine of combatant immunity? The doctrine is morally shocking to many: It holds soldiers on both sides of a war immune from criminal prosecution for their otherwise criminal acts of killing, maiming, destroying property, etc., carried out as part of their country's war effort. That is, soldiers who kill as part of an attack benefit from the immunity just as much as those defending their country. Traditionally, just war theorists (...) have tried to provide situation‐specific arguments to show that soldiers on both sides had a good moral justification for their actions. Recently, self‐styled “revisionist just war theorists” have suggested that the doctrine of combatant immunity is just a convention designed to minimize harm. In this article, I suggest that the moral foundation of the doctrine lies in the status of soldiers as public officials in the service of their country. The reason why we hold them immune from prosecution for their war‐making acts is that such acts are properly thought of as acts of a state, rather than as acts of a particular individual. And the reason why states are immune from prosecution for their acts is one of moral standing: No other state has the moral standing to tell another how to carry out the matters that define its jurisdiction. So as long as a country deems (however implausibly) that it must use force to defend itself from aggression, then it may do what is required to defend itself. No other state has the standing to prohibit such acts or to punish those who carry them out. This argument is rooted in an understanding of how individuals may interact as free and equal under law. It does not aim at the perfection of human action, but it does serve to eliminate the worst forms of tyranny. (shrink)

Barker influentially posited a development from an absolutist Republic hostile to the idea of the rule of law, through an absolutist Statesman which now engages more seriously and to a degree sympathetically with the idea, to a Laws in which the rule of law displaces the earlier absolutism. This paper demonstrates that Barker's construction is unsustainable. The Republic presents a political philosophy much more like the Laws than the absolutism of the Statesman. There is a lot of law and lawgiving (...) in the dialogue, and no more absolutism than in the Laws itself. (shrink)

The cultivation of intellectual character is an important goal within university education. This article focusses on cultivating intellectual humility. It first explores an account of intellectual humility from recent literature on the intellectual virtues. Then, it considers one recent pedagogical approach – Making Thinking Visible – as a means of teaching intellectual virtue. It assesses one particular technique for cultivating intellectual humility arising from this pedagogical literature, and applies it to the teaching of political philosophy. Finally, there is a discussion (...) concerning how to supplement these techniques to best teach political philosophy generally, and for the purposes of cultivating intellectual humility in particular. It is argued that, by introducing the technique of the Circle of Viewpoints, supplemented by techniques from the Compassion in Education literature, the modules I teach can better cultivate intellectual humility in my students. (shrink)

Wittgensteins "Philosophische Untersuchungen," von N. Malcolm.--Kritische Notiz zu einigen Begriffen in Wittgensteins Philosophie, von P. F. Strawson.--Wittgenstein über die Privatsprache, von N. Garver.--Der Zugang zu Wittgensteins Spätphilsophie, von S. Cavell.--Ausgewählte Bibliographie der Schriften über Ludwig Wittgenstein, zusammengestellt von Ulrich Steinvorth (p. 157-[171]).

The chief purpose of Peter Kivy’s latest book, which is written in his familiar civilised, leisurely manner, is to recommend to philosophers of art the pursuit of differences—the looking for differences—amongst the fine arts. This recommendation is not advanced in virtue of scepticism about the possibility of a unitary theory of the various art forms or conviction of the impossibility of a definition of the concept of fine art or a denial that the achievement of such a definition would be (...) of any real importance. Rather, Kivy argues that the pursuit of sameness across the arts has led time and time again to a misrepresentation of the nature of one or more of the arts through their assimilation to a supposed paradigmatic art form or the imposition on them of a favoured conception of the essence of art. Accordingly, the first chapter of the book sketches the history of aesthetic theory from the eighteenth to the first part of the twentieth century and represents it as dominated by the attempt to fit the recalcitrant art of absolute music into what was taken to be the essential nature of art or to replace this conception by one appropriate to music, neither attempt being successful. And the second chapter brings us up to the present through a critical examination of the Wittgensteinian repudiation of the traditional task of defining art—very familiar territory—and Arthur Danto’s continuation of the traditional task but with a radical change in the idea of the kind of property that binds the arts together. Kivy’s claim is not just that the pursuit of sameness has had deleterious effects in the past but that at the present time the task of defining the idea of a work of art still dominates discussion and “discourage[s] philosophers from the equally interesting task of studying the arts in their particularity”. The remaining five chapters of his book are case studies intended to act as an antidote to the obsession with the pursuit of sameness. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of learning postulate one or at most a small number of different learning mechanisms. However, people are capable of mastering a given task through qualitatively different learning paths such as learning by instruction and learning by doing. We hypothesize that the knowledge acquired through such alternative paths differs with respect to the level of abstraction and the balance between declarative and procedural knowledge. In a laboratory experiment we investigated what was learned about patterned letter sequences via either direct (...) instruction in the relevant patterns or practice in solving letter‐sequence extrapolation problems. Results showed that both types of learning led to mastery of the target task as measured by accuracy performance. However, behavioral differences emerged in how participants applied their knowledge. Participants given instruction showed more variability in the types of strategies they used to articulate their knowledge as well as longer solution times for generating the action implications of that knowledge as compared to the participants given practice. Results are discussed regarding the implications for transfer, generalization, and procedural application. Learning theories that claim generality should be tested against cross‐scenario phenomena, not just parametric variations of a single learning scenario. (shrink)

Why do some groups succeed where others fail? We hypothesise that collaborative success is achieved when the relationship between the dyad's prior expertise and the complexity of the task creates a situation that affords constructive and interactive processes between group members. We call this state the zone of proximal facilitation in which the dyad's prior knowledge and experience enables them to benefit from both knowledge-based problem-solving processes (e.g., elaboration, explanation, and error correction) andcollaborative skills (e.g., creating common ground, maintaining joint (...) attention to the task). To test this hypothesis we conducted an experiment in which participants with different levels of aviation expertise, experts (flight instructors), novices (student pilots), and non-pilots, read flight problem scenarios of varying complexity and had to identify the problem and generate a solution with either another participant of the same level of expertise or alone. The non-pilots showed collaborative inhibition on problem identification in which dyads performed worse than their predicted potential for both simple and complex scenarios, whereas the novices and experts did not. On solution generation the non-pilot and novice dyads performed at their predicted potential with no collaborative inhibition on either simple or complex scenarios. In contrast, expert dyads showed collaborative gains, withdyads performing above their predicted potential, but only for the complex scenarios. On simple scenarios the expert dyads showed collaborative inhibition and performed worse than their predicted potential. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of collaborative problem solving. (shrink)

A central goal of cognitive science is to develop a general theory of transfer to explain how people use and apply their prior knowledge to solve new problems. Previous work has identified multiple mechanisms of transfer including (but not limited to) analogy, knowledge compilation, and constraint violation. The central hypothesis investigated in the current work is that the particular profile of transfer processes activated for a given situation depends on both (a) the type of knowledge to be transferred and how (...) it is represented, and (b) the processing demands of the transfer task. This hypothesis was investigated in two laboratory training studies. The results from Experiment 1 show that each mechanism predicts specific behavioural patterns of performance across a common set of transfer tasks. The results from Experiment 2 show that people can adaptively shift between transfer mechanisms depending on their prior knowledge and the characteristics of the task environment. A framework for the development of a general theory of transfer based on multiple mechanisms is proposed and implications of the theory are discussed for measuring and understanding knowledge transfer. (shrink)

Gender diversity is seemingly prevalent among asexual people. Drawing on qualitative research, and focusing on agender identities in particular, this article explores why this might be the case. I argue that previous explanations that center biologistic understandings of sexual development, the liberatory potential of asexuality, or psycho-cognitive conflict, are insufficient. Instead, I offer a sociological perspective in which participants’ agender subjectivities can be understood as arising from an embodied meaning-making process where gender was understood to be fundamentally about sexuality. I (...) emphasize the importance of understanding asexuality and agender in the broader structural context, as particular subjectivities were shaped and sometimes necessitated in navigating hetero-patriarchy. However, these entangled understandings of sexuality and gender were sometimes rendered unintelligible within LGBTQ+ discursive communities, where there is often a rigid ontological distinction between gender and sexuality arising from histories of misrecognition and erasure. I complicate this, arguing that already-invisible subjectivities may be made even more invisible by this distinction. The article illustrates the need to empirically explore the meanings of the categories “gender” and “sexuality,” and the relationship between them, rather than siloing them in our methodological and conceptual frameworks. (shrink)