Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other sorts, data about languages may (...) be of use to researchers in a number of areas, including biomedical research. Data on the languages used in clinical encounters are typically included in medical records, and capture an important factor in patient-provider interactions. Like many types of patient and demographic data, data on a person’s preferred and primary languages are organized in different ways by different systems. This can be a barrier to data integration. We believe that a robust framework for representing language in general and preferred and primary language in particular – which has been lacking in ontologies thus far – can promote more successful integration of language-related data from disparate data sources. (shrink)

We consider a deterministic rewrite system for combinatory logic over combinators , and . Terms will be represented by graphs so that reduction of a duplicator will cause the duplicated expression to be "shared" rather than copied. To each normalizing term we assign a weighting which is the number of reduction steps necessary to reduce the expression to normal form. A lambda-expression may be represented by several distinct expressions in combinatory logic, and two combinatory logic expressions are considered equivalent if (...) they represent the same lambda-expression (up to --equivalence). The problem of minimizing the number of reduction steps over equivalent combinator expressions (i.e., the problem of finding the "fastest running" combinator representation for a specific lambda-expression) is proved to be NP-complete by reduction from the "Hitting Set" problem. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Marcello Di Bello’s criticisms of the ‘normic account’ of the criminal standard of proof. In so doing, I further elaborate on what the normic account predicts about certain significant legal categories of evidence, including DNA and fingerprint evidence and eyewitness identifications.

Alexander Miller objects to the argument for moral judgement internalism that I provide in _The Moral Problem. Miller's objection suggests a misunderstanding of the argument. In this reply I take the opportunity to restate the argument in slightly different terms, and to explain why Miller's objection betrays a misunderstanding.

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable (...) quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

Whilst previous observational studies have linked negative thought processes such as an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles with depression, the directionality of these associations and the potential role that these factors play in the transition to adulthood and parenthood has not yet been investigated. This study examined the association between locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression in young adulthood and whether parenthood moderated these associations. Using a UK prospective population-based birth (...) cohort study: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, we examined the association between external locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence with odds of depression in 4,301 young adults using logistic regression models unadjusted and adjusted for potential confounding factors. Interaction terms were employed to examine whether parenthood moderated these associations. Over 20% of young adults in our sample were at or above the clinical threshold indicating probable depression. For each standard deviation increase in external locus of control in adolescence, there was a 19% higher odds of having probable depression in young adulthood, after adjusting for various confounding factors including baseline mood and different demographic and life events variables. Similarly, for each SD increase in negative cognitive styles in adolescence, there was a 29% higher odds of having probable depression in the adjusted model. We found little evidence that parenthood status moderated the relationship between external locus of control or negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression following adjustment for confounding factors. Effect estimates were comparable when performed in the complete case dataset. These findings suggest that having an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles in mid- to late adolescence is associated with an increased likelihood of probable depression in young adulthood. (shrink)

Whatever we take “life” to mean, it must involve an attempt to describe the objective reality beyond scientists’ biases. Traditionally, this is thought to involve comparing our scientific categories to “natural kinds.” But this approach has been tainted with an implicit metaphysics, inherited from Aristotle, that does not fit biological reality. In particular, we must accept that biological categories will never be specifiable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or shared underlying physical structures that produce clean boundaries. Biology blurs (...) all lines and failure to embrace this unique feature has blocked attempts to reach consensus on the meaning of “life.” Thus, while the three classical accounts all fall short of offering a complete definition, their advocates fail to realize that they share the same view of life’s ultimate, functional hallmark: its uniquely rich adaptive capacity. I develop an account of life as adaptive capacity that sidesteps debates about the relative importance of specific mechanisms and the precise location of boundaries to bring the three classical accounts together under a shared conceptual framework. (shrink)

Methods and goals in philosophy are discussed by first describing an ideal, and then looking at how the ideal might be approached. David Lewis’s work in metaphysics is critically examined and compared to analogous work by Mackie and Carnap. Some large-scale philosophical systematic work, especially in metaphysics, is best treated as model-building, in a sense of that term that draws on the philosophy of science. Models are constructed in a way that involves deliberate simplification, or other imaginative modification of reality, (...) in order to make relationships visible or problems tractable. (shrink)

In this paper we present an equivalence between the category of commutative regular rings and the category of Boolean-valued fields, i.e., Boolean-valued sets for which the field axioms are true. The author used this equivalence in [12] to develop a Galois theory for commutative regular rings. Here we apply the equivalence to give an alternative construction of an algebraic closure for any commutative regular ring.Boolean-valued sets were developed in 1965 by Scott and Solovay [10] to simplify independence proofs in set (...) theory. They later were applied by Takeuti [13] to obtain results on Hilbert and Banach spaces. Ellentuck [3] and Weispfenning [14] considered Boolean-valued rings which consisted of rings and associated Boolean-valued relations. To the author's knowledge, the present work is the first to employ the Boolean-valued sets of Scott and Solovay to obtain results in algebra.The idea that commutative regular rings can be studied by examining the properties of related fields is not new. For several years algebraists and logicians have investigated commutative regular rings by representing a commutative regular ring as a subdirect product of fields or as the ring of global sections of a sheaf of fields over a Boolean space. These representations depend, as does the work presented here, on the fact that the set of central idempotents of any ring with identity forms a Boolean algebra. The advantage of the Boolean-valued set approach is that the axioms of classical logic and set theory are true in the Boolean universe. Therefore, if the axioms for a field are true for a Boolean-valued set, then other properties of the set can be deduced immediately from field theory. (shrink)

Increased scrutiny of corporate legitimacy has sparked an interest in “historic corporate social responsibility”, or the mechanism through which firms take responsibility for past misdeeds. Extant theory on historic CSR implicitly treats corporate engagement with historical criticism as intentional and dichotomous, with firms choosing either a limited or a high engagement strategy. However, this conceptualization is puzzling because a firm’s engagement with historic claims involves organizational practices that managers don’t necessarily control; hence, it might materialize differently than anticipated. Furthermore, multiple (...) motivations could jointly affect managers’ approach to organizational history, especially when dealing with conflicting stakeholder demands, rendering it difficult to historicize consistently. Examining the relationship between the legitimacy of critical historic claims, corporate engagement with these claims and corporate legitimacy, the present paper performs a historical case study of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) long term use of history in stakeholder relations. The data suggest that under conflicting internal and external pressures, the HBC’s engagement with historical criticism became “sedimented” over time, involving both open and stakeholder-inclusive practices of “history-as-sensemaking” and instrumental “history-as-rhetoric”. Enriching understanding of corporate-stakeholder interaction about the past, this finding may stimulate its generation of social value and corporate legitimacy. (shrink)

Rights have two properties which prima facie appear to be inconsistent. The first is that they are conditional in the sense that one some occasions it is always justifiable for someone to act in a way which appears to be inconsistent with someone else's rights, such as when the defence of necessity applies. The second is that rights are indefeasible in the sense that they are not subject to being defeated our outweighed by utilitarian or policy considerations. If we view (...) rules and the rights which they establish as being subject to a ceteris paribus clause, the form of which generates out the exceptions, the conditionality of rights becomes reconcilable with their nondefeasibility. Such a view of rules and rights would entail that the goals of the law and their orderings be considered as a part of the law. When so viewed, propositions about goals and their orderings become legitimate premises for legal reasoning, furnishing solutions to hard cases in the law of torts, without resort to balancing of interests or judicial discretion. (shrink)

Scholars debate whether the Buddha’s teachings preserved in the Pāli Canon can be considered philosophy, and whether the Buddha himself can be considered a philosopher. The existence of a philosophically tractable Buddhist soteriology is not in doubt; however, there is debate over the point at which this structure emerges in the tradition. In this essay we put forth several prominent objections to reading the Buddha as a philosopher, then offer responses to these objections based in part on the work of (...) Pierre Hadot. While we cannot claim to capture the definitive reading of the Buddha, we suggest that close attention to the Nikāyas gives reason to read him as a philosopher.1Paul.. (shrink)

James Lenman is critical of my claim that moral requirements are requirements of reason. I argue that his criticisms miss their target. More importantly, I argue that the anti-rationalism that informs Lenman's criticisms is itself implausible.

‘Food sovereignty’ plays an increasingly important political role as a focus for grassroots agri-food organisations, such as La Via Campesina, in their attempts to contest the social injustices, health impacts and ecological damage resulting from the increasing global dominance of corporate/industrial agriculture. While not seeking to detract from the successes of such movements, there remain ethical, political and ecological concerns about just how the ‘sovereignty’ in food sovereignty is to be interpreted and what, if any, its relation to previous histories, (...) definitions and applications of political sovereignty might be. Sovereignty's role, for example, in settler colonialism and environmental destruction is rarely addressed in the food sovereignty literature, with advocates focusing instead on its definitional malleability and contemporary political utility. Yet critical appropriations of Schmitt's infamous definition of sovereignty help to specify its colonial, anti-political and anti-ecological modus operandi, and make clear certain dangers inherent in uncritically adopting the term. (shrink)

where ds is the space-time interval between two events, a the scale factor representing the radius of the universe at a given time, and do is the line element of a space with constant curvature. The application of this metric to the field equations provides us with the Friedmann’s solutions, which are the heart of big bang cosmology. With the cosmological constant omitted, these solutions read.

Crispin Wright has argued that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident but non-co-extensive norms of assertoric practice and that this fact tends to inflate deflationary theories of truth. Wright’s inflationary argument has generated much discussion in the literature. By contrast, relatively little has been said about the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms. This paper will examine that claim. Wright’s argument for the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms is first clearly presented. It is (...) then suggested that the argument trades on an ambiguity in ‘justified’ and ‘warrantedly assertible’. Finally, it is argued that, once the ambiguity is removed, there is reason to reject the claim that truth and epistemic warrant are coincident norms of assertoric practice. One important result is that no epistemic theory of truth can satisfy what Wright takes to be a platitude about assertion. (shrink)

Purpose in American philosophy.--Radical empiricism.--Three types and two dogmas of empiricism.--William James as philosophical psychologist.--Charles S. Peirce: community and reality.--The contemporary significance of Royce's theory of the self.--The course of American philosophy.--The philosophy of religion in America.

This paper discusses the risk of gross negligence manslaughter (GNM) and corporate manslaughter charges (CM) when clinicians use an artificially intelligent system’s (AIS’s) outputs in their practice. I identify the elements of these offenses within the context of the law of England and Wales and explore how they could be applied in a potential scenario where a patient's death has followed AIS use by a clinician. The risk of a conviction due to making an AIS-augmented workplace mistake highlights the non-trivial (...) nature of AIS adoption in healthcare, and that the consequences of its use must be considered by all interested parties prior to AIS adoption. (shrink)

Attributed to Phil Smith ("the Crab Man") on the publisher's webite.

Immediacy and Meaning seeks to approach the odd uneasiness at root in all metaphysical meaning; that the human knower attempts to mediate what cannot be mediated; that there is a pre-cognitive immemorial immediacy to Being that renders its participants irreducible, incommunicable and personal. The dilemma of metaphysics rests on the relationship between the spectator and the player, both as essential responses to the immediacy of Being. Immediacy and Meaning is an attempt to pause, but without retreat, to be a spectator (...) within the game, to gain access into this immediate Presence, for a moment only perhaps, before the signatory failure into metaphysical language returns us to the mediated. J. K. Huysman's semi-autobiographical tetralogy anchors this book as a meditation, neither purely poetic nor only philosophical; it claims a unique territory when attempting to speak what cannot be spoken. The unnerving merits of nominalism, the difficulties of an honest appraisal of efficacious prayer, the mad sanity of the muse, the relationship between the uncreated and the created, and an originary ethics of antagonism, each serves to clarify the formation of a new epistemology. (shrink)

Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning brings together a collection of international authors to explore the possibilities, practices and implications that emerge from the union of punk and pedagogy. The punk ethos--a notoriously evasive and multifaceted beast--offers unique applications in music education and beyond, and this volume presents a breadth of interdisciplinary perspectives to challenge current thinking on how, why and where the subculture influences teaching and learning. As (punk) educators and artists, contributing authors grapple with punk's historicity, its pervasiveness, (...) its (dis)functionality and its messiness, making Punk Pedagogies relevant and motivating to both instructors and students with proven pedagogical practices. (shrink)

The value-fact or subject-object split recently defended by H. H. Kendler as necessary for a scientific psychology to establish facts, was rejected by Gestalt psychology as reducing the person to object status. The Gestalt solution correlating principles of perceptual organization with corresponding features of the object world has however answered poorly to the vast cultural differences found in values. Communal/dialectical psychology in agreement with a postmodern worldview, treats facts as intrinsically value-laden social constructions mediated by a society's particular social relations (...) . Examples of fact ambiguity are illustrated, and S⇔0 is recommended as ontologically preferable for psychology as social science and for turn-of-the-millenium psycho-ecology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Though William Lane Craig believes his anti-Platonism is compatible with objective, Christian morality, I argue that it is not. First, I survey the main contours of his nominalism. Second, I discuss how he sees those points in relation to objective, Christian morality. Then, I argue that his view cannot sustain the qualitative aspects of moral virtues or principles, or even human beings. Moreover, Craig’s view loses any connection between those morals and humans, thereby doing great violence to objective, Christian morals. (...) Finally, I sketch two advantages of a Platonic realism in regards to Christian morals. (shrink)

In Sartre and the Drug Connection, Carole Haynes-Curtis claims that previous commentators on the philosopher's writings have failed to recognize the significance of the impact of a mescalin experiment on Sartre's early philosophical perspective. ‘The residual effects of this nightmarish experience’, Haynes-Curtis claims, ‘haunted him for many years to come’, and was essentially the result of Sartre undergoing what, in modern parlance, is sometimes called a ‘Bad Trip’.

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus-a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing-when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers-Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )-and present evidence for an amodal component in the (...) representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle-temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance. (shrink)

The essays of The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss provide a comprehensive and non-partisan survey of the major themes and problems that constituted Strauss's work.

Providing balanced coverage of abortion, sexual harassment, censorship and pornography, and other timely and controversial subjects, this pathbreaking anthology is the first to offer a comprehensive introduction to feminist legal philosophy. An important resource for courses in women's studies, philosophy, law, sociology, and political science, it provides many stimulating insights into essential topics in jurisprudence, such as the nature and justification of law, judicial reasoning and the process of adjudication, the connection between law and equality, and freedom and justice.

In this paper I outline Donald Davidson’s account of two forms of irrationality, akrasia and self-deception, and relate this account to ethical action and belief. His view of irrationality is generally a Freudian one, to the effect that agents must compartmentalize both offending particular mental contents, and governing second order principles. Davidson also hints that his account of akrasia and self-deception might show certain normative and meta-ethical theories to be irrational, insofar as they too engender irrationality. I explore these hints, (...) and hopefully show both that Davidson is correct about irrationality and correct that certain ethical theories engender irrationality as well. I believe this to be no great loss to ethics generally, but will hopefully aid our understanding of how ethical action and belief actually happen. (shrink)

Ethical questions posed by emerging technologies call for greater understanding of their societal, economic, and environmental aspects by policymakers, citizens, and the engineers and applied scientists at the heart of their development and application. This article reports on the efforts of one research project that assessed the growth of critical thinking and awareness of these multiple aspects in undergraduate engineering and applied science students, with specific regard to nanotechnology. Students in two required courses, a first-year writing and engineering ethics course (...) and a second-year social science course, went through nanotechnology modules as a part of their regular coursework. In the first-year humanities course, we observed self-reported increases in risk awareness, significant educational impact of the module, and a greater awareness of nanotechnology’s applications and social context. In the second-year social science course, we noted changes in risk/benefit analysis as well as in the character and depth of students’ historical analysis, but no change in comparative awareness of other topics, including labor issues and corporate motivations. (shrink)

Preface 1 The First Theorem revisited 1.1 Notational preliminaries 1.2 Definitional preliminaries 1.3 A general version of G¨ odel’s First Theorem 1.4 Giving the First Theorem bite 1.5 Generic G¨ odel sentences and arithmetic truth 1.6 Canonical and standard G¨ odel sentences 2 The Second Theorem revisited 2.1 Definitional preliminaries 2.2 Towards G¨ odel’s Second Theorem 2.3 A general version of G¨ odel’s Second Theorem 2.4 Giving the Second Theorem bite 2.5 Comparisons 2.6 Further results about provability predicates 2.7 Back (...) to the First Theorem 2.8 Introducing Rosserized provability predicates.. (shrink)

In the Wednesday Logic Reading Group, where we are working through Sara Negri and Jan von Plato’s Structural Proof Theory – henceforth ‘NvP’ – I today introduced Chapter 6, ‘Structural Proof Analysis of Axiomatic Theories’. In their commendable efforts to be brief, the authors are sometimes a bit brisk about motivation. So I thought it was worth trying to stand back a bit from the details of this action-packed chapter as far as I understood it in the few hours I (...) had to prepare, and to try to give an overall sense of the project. These are the notes I wrote for myself. As often with such middle-of-term efforts dashed off in a couple of hours, I both would have liked to do better and do more justice to what we are reading, but I also just don’t have time to do more now than make a few corrections to the first version. So the usual warning applies: caveat lector. (shrink)

The first part of this book (“Social Waste and Non-Commodity Waste, and the Individual Circuit of Capital”) will probably be of most interest to readers of this journal. The author argues that Marx’s formula for individual circuits of capital does not allow a fully adequate comprehension of capitalism. Marx discusses the initial money capital invested (M), the commodity inputs purchased with investment capital (C), the production process (P), the new commodities produced (C’), and the money appropriated from sales of those (...) commodities (M’). Custers insists that two other elements must be included: the non-commodity waste produced in the course of commodity production, and the social waste that results when commodities have “negative use-values” (this occurs when their use inflicts net harm on society). He takes the pollution generated in the course of producing nuclear energy as the main example of non-commodity waste, while nuclear weapons provide the paradigmatic illustration of social waste. Custers adds symbols for these two phenomena (-W and =W, respectively) to Marx’s M-C-P-C’-M formula. The discussion of the profound environmental costs of each and every stage in the production of nuclear energy warrants special mention due to its clarity and comprehensiveness. Representatives of the nuclear industry and their allies are becoming increasingly emboldened to propose nuclear energy as the solution to global warming. Many of us suspect this is an insane idea. But it is important to know precisely why this.. (shrink)

Malcolm-Smith, Solms, Turnbull and Tredoux [Malcolm-Smith, S., Solms, M., Turnbull, O., & Tredoux, C. . Threat in dreams: An adaptation? Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1281–1291.] conducted a rigorous study that sampled two populations differentially exposed to threat in real life, and found that critical predictions from the Threat Simulation Theory of dreams [Revonsuo, A. . The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 877-901.; Revonsuo, A. . Did ancestral humans (...) dream for their lives? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 1063–1082.] were not supported. Specifically, we found no evidence of increased realistic threats to physical survival or enhanced threat avoidance in the dreams of those from the exposed population. Revonsuo and Valli’s [Revonsuo, A., & Valli, K. . How to test the threat simulation theory. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1292-1296.] commentary on our study argues that the methods we used are so flawed as to render the results meaningless. In this response article, we address the criticisms raised in their commentary. (shrink)