Graham Priest (1994) has argued that the following paradoxes all have the same structure: Russell’s Paradox, Burali-Forti’s Paradox, Mirimanoff’s Paradox, König’s Paradox, Berry’s Paradox, Richard’s Paradox, the Liar and Liar Chain Paradoxes, the Knower and Knower Chain Paradoxes, and the Heterological Paradox. Their common structure is given by Russell’s Schema: there is a property φ and function δ such that..

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry (...) Stapp. (shrink)

Prominent philosophers have argued that contradictions contain either too much or too little information to be useful. We dispute this with what we call the “Paradox of the Two Firefighters.” Suppose you are awakened in your hotel room by a fire alarm. You open the door. You see three possible ways out: left, right, straight ahead. You see two firefighters. One says there is exactly one safe route and it is to your left. The other says there is exactly one (...) safe route and it is to your right. While the two firemen are giving you contradictory information, they are also both giving you the perhaps useful information that there is a safe way out and it is not straight ahead. We give two analyses. The first uses the “Opinion Tetrahedron,” introduced by Dunn as a generalization of Audun Jøsang’s “Opinion Triangle.” The Opinion Tetrahedron in effect embeds the values of the “Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic” into a context of subjective probability generalized to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and two kinds of uncertainty—that in which the reasoner has too little information and that in which the reasoner has too much information. Jøsang had only a single value for uncertainty. We also present an alternative solution, again based on subjective probability but of a more standard type. This solution builds upon “linear opinion pooling.” Kiefer had already developed apparatus for assessing risk using expert opinion, and this influences the second solution. Finally, we discuss how these solutions might apply to “Big Data” and the World Wide Web. (shrink)

Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have all embraced Whitehead’s thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media. _The Lure of Whitehead_ offers readers not only a comprehensive introduction to (...) Whitehead’s philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch. Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana U; Nathan Brown, U of California, Davis; Peter Canning; Didier Debaise, Free U of Brussels; Roland Faber, Claremont Lincoln U; Michael Halewood, U of Essex; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Steven Meyer, Washington U; Luciana Parisi, U of London; Keith Robinson, U of Arkansas at Little Rock; Isabelle Stengers, Free U of Brussels; James Williams, U of Dundee. (shrink)

In his celebrated article on the contrary-to-fact conditional Roderick Chisholm makes the following astute observation.

Is it always better to be active than passive? Is passivity a sign of cowardice - or prudence? Are people who keep their thoughts to themselves passive, or might they be actively preparing for well-considered future actions? Seemingly simple concepts turn out to be deeper and more significant than they first appear.

Violence and reason are related, if only because violence is done to reason every single day. All it takes is to fail to listen. Everything else, all the real violence, starts right there, including tough talk in lieu of rational argument and the violence of not allowing us to think things through. In a virtual conversation with other thoughtful people, we can evaluate and refine our own positions, gaining clarity and confidence.

This entertaining discussion illustrates how to approach life decisions to get the most satisfaction out of their work and leisure. The themes include pleasure, pain, and the importance of choosing one's experiences in life. If you make good decisions, there's value in every day. And that's a pleasure!

We report evidence further supporting homology between proteins in the F1FO‐ATP synthetase and the bacterial flagellar motor (BFM). BFM proteins FliH, FliI, and FliJ have been hypothesized to be homologous to FO‐b + F1‐δ, F1‐α/β, and F1‐γ, with similar structure and interactions. We conduct a further test by constructing a gene order dataset, examining the order offliH,fliI, andfliJgenes across the phylogenetic breadth of flagellar and nonflagellar type 3 secretion systems, and comparing this to published surveys of gene order in the (...) F1FO‐ATP synthetase, its N‐ATPase relatives, and the bacterial/archaeal V‐ and A‐type ATPases. Strikingly, thefliHIJgene order was deeply conserved, with the few exceptions appearing derived, and exactly matching the widely conserved F‐ATPase gene orderatpFHAG, coding for subunits b‐δ‐α‐γ. The V/A‐type ATPases have a similar conserved gene order. Our results confirm homology between these systems, and suggest a rare case of synteny conserved over billions of years, predating the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). (shrink)

Postmodernism and poststructuralism challenge fundamental positions in social theory. This book sets out some of the components of a postmodern social theory of health and healing, deriving from theorists including Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Cixous and Kristeva. Nicholas J. Fox observes that the knowledge of the medical profession about the body, illness and health supplies the basis for medical dominance. The body of the patient is inscribed by discourses of professional `care,' an interaction which subjectifies the patient. Fox (...) explores the character of this power - and how it may be, and is, resisted. The book illustrates with detailed examples how the organization of health care and the caring relationship itself are sites for this contestation of power. Elements of feminist theory, and Derridean concepts of diffrance and intertextuality, supply the framework for the politics and ethics of the postmodern position on health. Deleuze and Guattari's radical challenge to psychoanalysis and familial repetitions within the healer/patient contact allows a re-reading of central ideas in medical sociology. While focusing upon the possibilities of postmodern social theory, the book demands a reappraisal of issues of structure, identity and knowledge in modernist medical sociology. Modernist sociology, Fox suggests, has been complicit in the creation of `the patient,' and of 'health' and 'illness.' Written with an emphasis on accessibility, this book explores the practical consequences of postmodern theory as well as familiarizing the reader with the concepts of postmodernism. (shrink)

A philosophical treatment of the idea of authority, this book is a dialogue between three characters. "Director," a philosopher, challenges the others to think through their ideas of authority, how it is established, how it works, and how it can be either subtle or bold.

Three characters with different skills and outlooks explore the idea of education, exploring what true education is, challenging common conceptions and putting forward rich definitions of education and what it ideally would be.

"Rule" adopts the tradition of political philosophy begun by Socrates, refined by Xenophon and Plato. The book concentrates on something the characters call life-without-rule. What would that be? Is it a sort of utopia? How does it differ from anarchy? What makes it so appealing and what are the trade-offs?

In this article I attempt to examine the justification for the mandatory drug testing of employees. The justification commonly assumes the form of the productivity argument which states that an employer has a proprietary right to regulate the purchased time of the employee. Since the employer may be rightfully concerned with the employee''s productive output, so this argument goes, the employer retains the right to motivate production. By extension, the employee''s behavior outside of the workplace which affects his or her (...) productive capacity may also be regulated, including drug use which may affect this capacity. Thus it is claimed that the employer has the right to test employees for drug use and to impose sanctions when it is discovered.I argue that the implications of the productivity argument lead to unacceptable consequences and thus must be rejected. The productivity argument can be examined in light of a thought-experiment in which the reader is asked to imagine the discovery of two drugs, both of which enhance employee productivity. Calling these drugs hedonine and pononine, I imagine the first to be pleasurable to the employee while the second is accompanied by a degree of pain and discomfort. Since the mandated use of both of these imagined drugs would be consistent with the productivity argument, I maintain that the productivity argument thereby fails and so must be rejected. As employee drug testing is justified by this argument, it must also be rejected. (shrink)

In advocating an extreme form of specification requiring the abolition of separate senses, Stoffregen & Bardy run the risk of diverting attention from the multisensory integration of perception and action they wish to champion.

In the context of classical (crisp, precise) sets, there is a familiar connection between the notions of counting, ordering and cardinality. When it comes to vague collections, the connection has not been kept in central focus: there have been numerous proposals regarding the cardinality of vague collections, but these proposals have tended to be discussed in isolation from issues of counting and ordering. My main concern in this paper is to draw focus back onto the connection between these notions. I (...) propose a natural generalisation to the vague case of the familiar process of counting precise collections. I then discuss the relationships between this process of counting and various notions of ordering and cardinality for vague sets. Some existing views concerning the cardinality of vague collections fit better than others with my proposal about how to count the members of such a collection. In particular, the idea that we should approach cardinality via certain formulas of a logical language -- which has been prominent in the recent literature -- is less attractive than other existing proposals. (shrink)

In VAGUENESS AND DEGREES OF TRUTH, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. -/- A predicate is said to be VAGUE if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates -- both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from (...) law to psychology to engineering -- are vague. -/- Smith argues, based on a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of belief and their relationships with degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy -- the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings -- into the degree-theoretic framework. -/- As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the area -- both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background. (shrink)

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates’ promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education—previously recognized as a universal guarantee—on the education consumer’s ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude (...) that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy. (shrink)

It is part of information theory folklore that, while quantum theory prohibits the generic cloning of states, such cloning is allowed by classical information theory. Indeed, many take the phenomenon of no-cloning to be one of the features that distinguishes quantum mechanics from classical mechanics. In this paper, we use symplectic geometry to argue that pace conventional wisdom, in the case where one does not include a machine system, there is an analog of the no-cloning theorem for classical systems. However, (...) upon adjoining a non-trivial machine system one finds that, pace the quantum case, the obstruction to cloning disappears for pure states. We then discuss the difference between this result and the quantum case, and show that it can be explained in terms of the rigidity of the theories' respective geometries. Finally, we discuss the relationship between this result and classical no-cloning arguments in the context of symmetric monoidal categories and statistical classical mechanics. (shrink)

Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris sets out to achieve three goals: to develop a version of Whiteheadian metaphysics that the authors call “relational realism”; to formalize relational realism in terms of category theory, in particular sheaf theory; and to use relational realism to solve the interpretative problems of quantum mechanics. These goals are ambitious, to say the least, and all this is leaving aside those (...) sections of FRR which argue that relational realism yields the key to understanding quantum gravity!The text is 388 pages long and comprises two parts. Part I, by Epperson, introduces relational realism and its application to quantum mechanics. Part II, by Zafiris, develops the sheaf theory formalism for relational realism. As the authors say, their exposition is “nonlinear”, and this feature of FRR, alon .. (shrink)

A philosophical treatment of ideas, the book presents a philosophical dialogue much in the spirit of classical philosophical dialogues, notably those of Plato and Xenophon. As those authors do in a number of their works, Nick Pappas adopts a light and playful tone to treat a serious topic. This contrast helps bring out the truth, in an approachable style that requires no prior exposure to philosophy and heavy intellectual work.

Life works best when people value us for more than our looks. In these pages, Model and a philosopher friend reflect on the subtleties of life, revealing insights and finding ways to develop deeper, more meaningful ties with our own inner self and the other people in our lives.

At Providence St. Joseph Health in Oregon, many factors contribute to the integration and success of the ethics services. There are three principal lenses through which one can understand the distinct way in which the ethics services are operationalized and integrated: the theological foundations of ethics as a service, the institutional ecology, and the professionalization of the field of health care ethics. The authors review key realities that have shaped their work through these three lenses and then describe the activities (...) of the Providence Center for Health Care Ethics regarding its strategic objectives and clinical and administrative integration. (shrink)