When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners' comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving (...) higher level goals such as changing the listener's beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness. (shrink)

Fundamental Theory has been called an "unfinished symphony" and "a challenge to the musicians among natural philosophers of the future". This book, written in 1944 but left unfinished because Eddington died too soon, proved to be his final effort at a vision for harmonization of quantum physics and relativity. The work is less connected and internally integrated than 'Protons and Electrons' while representing a later point in the author's thought arc. The really interested student should read both books together.The physical (...) and mathematical reasoning are very deep, but it is possible to enjoy much of the flavor of the book even without following everything. The tidbits given below illustrate Eddington's beautiful and mellifluous English style. This edition contains a clickable table of contents and some interesting illustrations.WARNING: Due to the complexity of the mathematical typesetting, the only way to reproduce this book has been as a series of scanned page images. We believe this work is scientifically and culturally important, and despite a few imperfections and the inevitably small print, have brought it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of Eddington's work. On a portable electronic reader the pages come out pretty small, but they are legible. On a desktop computer running the Amazon app, they are perfectly fine. We appreciate your understanding, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.TIDBITS:The number of protons and electrons in the universe would, in itself, be merely a matter of idle curiosity. But N has a more general significance as a fundamental constant which enters into many physical formulae. Its special interpretation as the number of particles in the universe arises in the following way. If we consider a distribution of hydrogen in equilibrium at zero temperature, the presence of the matter produces a curvature of space, and the curvature causes the space to close when the number of particles contained in it reaches a certain total; that number is N. The present investigation seeks to determine N directly from the principles of measurement. We have to show, not that there are N particles in the universe, but that anyone who accepts certain elementary principles of measurement must, if he is consistent, think there are. We have to express in mathematical symbolism what we think we are doing when we measure things; for if we had no conception of what we were doing, the results of the measurements would not persuade us to believe anything in particular. All our results are derived from the condition that the conceptual interpretation which we place on the results of measurement must be consistent with our conceptual interpretation of the process of measurement.If we play about with a pin and a meter standard, we do not become aware of any number in particular unless the standard has been graduated, or unless we use a process of displacement which we interpret as adding pin-extensions. The fact is that, although measurement is primarily a process involving four entities, the conceptual interpretation of measurement postulates in addition the existence (in the structure contemplated) as something referred to as Z. The existence of Z is the condition that makes graduation an exact concept. In the actual universe there exists a basis which is uniform to a very high approximation, and this serves for almost all purposes; but to the much higher approximation required in the calculation of N the ideal exact basis of uniformity does not exist. The finitude of N is, in fact, the cause of the failure of the approximation.It must be remembered that we are now working to what would ordinarily be considered a fantastically high approximation. For ordinary purposes a measurable has 16 eigenvalues; but under the super-magnification here employed (which is not content to overlook 1 part in 10E39) there is a fine structure which splits each of them into 16 components. (shrink)

This paper argues the case that tests of how investors value corporate social performance (CSP) based upon realised stock market returns are liable to be weak tests if markets are efficient and firms change CSP policies infrequently. We provide a theoretical explanation of why this will be the case using examples to illustrate. Subsequently, we set out an alternative theoretical framework for the purposes of investigating whether markets place a positive, or a negative, valuation on CSP, and show why this (...) is superior to tests based upon Tobin’s Q. Using US KLD data, we demonstrate that, as theorised, markets place a positive value on CSP that is not detected by conventional returns-based tests. Our conclusion is that researchers who are interested in the question of whether engagement with a corporate social responsibility agenda is a value-enhancing activity for a company (as argued by some stakeholder theorists) or value destructive (as argued by Friedman, The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, The New York Times Magazine, 1970), need to look beyond returns-based tests to answer the research question posed. (shrink)

In this essay, I sketch a preliminary, phenomenological definition of black horror cinema. I argue that black horror films are films in which blackness and antiblackness are depicted as unintelligible. I build this definition first by arguing that horror films generally evoke a mood of Heideggerian uncanniness, by which I mean that they create a global affective state in which the world is experienced as unintelligible. I then turn to the Afropessimist theorizing of Frank B. Wilderson, who proposes both that (...) blackness and antiblackness are phenomenologically graspable as unintelligible, and that cinema resists this unintelligibility by warping blackness and antiblackness. However, I thus contend that black horror is an exception to this rule. Black horror films take advantage of horror’s uncanny mood to craft a filmic world in which blackness and anti blackness are unintelligible. (shrink)

Fundamental Theory has been called an "unfinished symphony" and "a challenge to the musicians among natural philosophers of the future". This book, written in 1944 but left unfinished because Eddington died too soon, proved to be his final effort at a vision for harmonization of quantum physics and relativity. The work is less connected and internally integrated than 'Protons and Electrons' while representing a later point in the author's thought arc. The really interested student should read both books together.The physical (...) and mathematical reasoning are very deep, but it is possible to enjoy much of the flavor of the book even without following everything. The tidbits given below illustrate Eddington's beautiful and mellifluous English style. This edition contains a clickable table of contents and some interesting illustrations.WARNING: Due to the complexity of the mathematical typesetting, the only way to reproduce this book has been as a series of scanned page images. We believe this work is scientifically and culturally important, and despite a few imperfections and the inevitably small print, have brought it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of Eddington's work. On a portable electronic reader the pages come out pretty small, but they are legible. On a desktop computer running the Amazon app, they are perfectly fine. We appreciate your understanding, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.TIDBITS:The number of protons and electrons in the universe would, in itself, be merely a matter of idle curiosity. But N has a more general significance as a fundamental constant which enters into many physical formulae. Its special interpretation as the number of particles in the universe arises in the following way. If we consider a distribution of hydrogen in equilibrium at zero temperature, the presence of the matter produces a curvature of space, and the curvature causes the space to close when the number of particles contained in it reaches a certain total; that number is N. The present investigation seeks to determine N directly from the principles of measurement. We have to show, not that there are N particles in the universe, but that anyone who accepts certain elementary principles of measurement must, if he is consistent, think there are. We have to express in mathematical symbolism what we think we are doing when we measure things; for if we had no conception of what we were doing, the results of the measurements would not persuade us to believe anything in particular. All our results are derived from the condition that the conceptual interpretation which we place on the results of measurement must be consistent with our conceptual interpretation of the process of measurement.If we play about with a pin and a meter standard, we do not become aware of any number in particular unless the standard has been graduated, or unless we use a process of displacement which we interpret as adding pin-extensions. The fact is that, although measurement is primarily a process involving four entities, the conceptual interpretation of measurement postulates in addition the existence (in the structure contemplated) as something referred to as Z. The existence of Z is the condition that makes graduation an exact concept. In the actual universe there exists a basis which is uniform to a very high approximation, and this serves for almost all purposes; but to the much higher approximation required in the calculation of N the ideal exact basis of uniformity does not exist. The finitude of N is, in fact, the cause of the failure of the approximation.It must be remembered that we are now working to what would ordinarily be considered a fantastically high approximation. For ordinary purposes a measurable has 16 eigenvalues; but under the super-magnification here employed (which is not content to overlook 1 part in 10E39) there is a fine structure which splits each of them into 16 components. (shrink)

Originally published in 1904, Whittaker’s A Treatise on the Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies soon became a classic of the subject and has remained in print for most of these 108 years. In this paper, we follow the book as it develops from a report that Whittaker wrote for the British Society for the Advancement of Science to its influence on Dirac’s version of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and beyond.

Contemporary philosophy of art generally assumes that aesthetic experience is constituted by a certain ontological-phenomenological structure: the apprehension by a subject of an object. This article explores an underexamined critique of this philosophical model found within the black intellectual and artistic tradition. I will specifically focus on the version of this critique proposed by the similarly underexamined black philosophers Adrian Piper and Fred Moten. This critique, which I dub the subjectivizing concern, takes issue with the notion of ontological distance that (...) I argue defines the subject-object model. I define ontological distance as the removal and alienation of the subject’s fundamental sense of self from that of so-called objects. The subjectivizing concern holds that this distance is not value neutral. Rather, the subject-object model is considered to be directly entwined with projects and practices of aesthetic and extraesthetic racism and antiblackness. After offering Piper’s own model of aesthetic experience—which she dubs catalysis—as an alternative, I propose three possible ways in which the subject-object model can be conceived as tied to antiblack racism. (shrink)

Relations between perceiving and knowing are well-worn problems that become visceral encounters with doubt and ambiguity in ‘mixed-reality’ environments. Locative narrative situates participants within stories where existent places function as the setting. Experiential confusion, between what is talked of as real and as imagined, is an often-reported phenomenon. Classical pragmatisms, and more broadly the writings of William James, understand the functioning of the body to be for the production of action, from which flows a naturalistic epistemology. for James, a thought’s (...) reference to an object occurs in the medium of an ‘experienceable environment’ and is a condition of it being known; what something is known-as is how it functions in a particular context and the consequences that follow. Contemporary pragmatists express varying positions on the function of representation in perception at different levels of cognitive awareness, and the extent to which intentionality is derivative of linguistic norms. In the locative narrative iOS application The Lost Index No.1 – Landscape with Figures strategies of directing participant attention, movement, cognitive tasks and propositional content are used to guide the interpretation of events. The complex environment that is created plays with the multi-stability of perception and the ‘multi-stability meaning’ between terms, resulting in ambiguity and an enhanced flexibility of interpretation. (shrink)

Originally published in 1934, this book presents a series of essays on various important figures and ideas in the development of philosophy. The essays cover the following subjects: 'Reason'; 'Comte and Mill'; 'Schopenhauer'; 'Vico's new science of humanity'; and 'Transcendence in Spinoza'. An index of names is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of philosophy.

The Middle Platonic tradition forms the main focus of these studies, many of which derive from Professor Whittaker's work on the writings of Alcinous (formerly attributed to Albinus) and their place and importance in that tradition. He follows the transmission of different texts, and the development of the commentaries upon them, from Classical times through the Byzantine world up to the Renaissance and beyond. Most of the articles, however, deal with the evolution of Platonic thought in the first centures (...) A.D., its interaction with other schools of thought, such as Neopythagoreanism, and the influence of Hellenistic philosphy upon the growth of Early Christian thought and theology. Additional notes and references have now been supplied. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited Additional recommended readings.

Remarkable in the range that it covers, The Possibilities of Sense testifies to an equally remarkable philosopher. In essays on ethics and thephilosophy of religion, on literature and education, the contributors displaynot only the breadth of D.Z. Phillips's work but also its power. This powercomes largely from Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose significance as a moral and religious philosopher rivals his reputation as a philosopher of language.

Over a decade ago, Grant Tavinor’s first book, The Art of Videogames (2009), brought academic philosophy face to face with a seemingly alien artform. With The A.

Kierkegaard occasionally mentions a type of belief which he calls an “existence communication,” and his discussion of such beliefs parallels his discussion of subjective truths (in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Existence communications include religious beliefs. I suggest that it is less misleading to focus on this term than it is to wrestle with the difficult and overworked notion of subjective truths; ultimately, his view of religious beliefs can be seen more clearly.His view does not fully emerge, however, without the assistance (...) of some other concepts. My thesis is that existence communications are comparable in their resistance to objective forms of adjudication to first principles, and comparable in their “self-involving” characteristics to teleological principles about the “raison d’etre of existence.This account not only helps to clarify Kierkegaard’s discussion, but it also offers two important hints about modern problems regarding religious belief. It suggest that religious claims may indeed be truth claims, and it suggests that there is more to the justification than comes out in a consideration of evidence. (shrink)

Specific studies of the “situated ethics” of international surrogacy that address the structural conditions and local moral economies that sustain the trade are needed. In this essay, I describe the intimate industry of surrogacy in Thailand, exploring the local moral economy in which surrogacy is described as a form of Buddhist merit making and an opportunity to provide for one’s own children. This offers a further example of how other ethical values beyond the strictly economic are negotiated in commercial surrogacy (...) relationships. Situated ethics allow us to locate and understand the tensions, competing logics, and contradictions within ethical practices. (shrink)

What conclusions do the facts of cosmic and organic evolution require or permit on the origin and destiny of the world and the individual? From 1881 to 1925 Thomas Whittaker, an Oxford-trained scientist turned philosopher, grappled with this question, which he tried to answer by metaphysical interpretation of the sciences. The majority of the essays in this volume first appeared in Mind, and a few in other journals, while three had not been previously published. Whittaker ranges widely over (...) some of the most daring theories of the past, from the early centuries of the common era (including Apollonius of Tyana and Origen), to the middle ages (including John Scotus Erigena and Nicholas of Cusa), the renaissance (Giordano Bruno, Shakespeare) and the early modern period. Whittaker's own view is that hypothesis and imagination are legitimate aids in the search for truth in both science and philosophy in a new synthesis. (shrink)

François Laruelle's writing on Non-Photography is examined from its ontological condition to its desired form of a unity derived from the work of Kant, discussing precisely how the logic of transcendence and the ontology of immanence central to Laruelle's theory impact on how the photographic image is incontrovertibly involved with Kant's paradox of appearance and reality. In a context of burgeoning technoscience, which lays bare the meaning of Non-Photography for the seemingly impossible reversion to actual photography, the article goes on (...) to consider Photo-Fiction in the context of the Real of science now yoked to an economy of technical models. But by foreclosing the Kantian Real by fractal‐virtual ratio, does not this science reify the Real of Identity and displace real photography with a photography in the Real? The article thus questions how Laruelle's' thesis hangs together in terms of its cause and the contingency of effect that infuses Laruelle's radical aesthetic. (shrink)

Books reviewed: Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: There – Like our Life, D. Z. Phillips (ed.), (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 195 pp. incl. Index; $29.95; referred to in the text as Rhees. Danièle Moyal‐Sharrock, The Third Wittgenstein: The Post‐Investigations Works (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 225 pp. incl. Index; $99.95; referred to in the text as Third Witt. Danièle Moyal‐Sharrock (ed.), Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 250 pp. incl. Index; $75.00; referred to in the text as M‐S. Reviewed by Louisiana (...) State University Baton Rouge Louisiana 70803 USA. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the source of Plutarch's inspiration for the impressive discourse which he presents from the lips of Ammonius in the De E apud Delphos, and in particular for the following much-quoted passage.

This article examines and presents examples of contemporary advertising within the medical and health professions that continue the process and organisation of knowledge about women and their reproductive bodies. It draws on feminist and poststructural perspectives to inform a critical evaluation of the visual representations of menopausal women and hormone replacement therapy. These representations work to construct certain definitions of the feminine that sustain and support existing contradictory cultural meanings and values about menopause. I argue that the images continue to (...) misrepresent and define what forms of femininity and sexual gender are desirable and acceptable for menopausal women. The article addresses the problems of gender discrimination and bias within the advertising industry, and illustrates the ways in which readers of visual texts may be influenced by stereotypic assumptions concerning a woman's lived experience of menopause. It illustrates how specific symbolic images directed towards men and women for hormone replacement therapy, testosterone deficiency and sexual dysfunction influence the viewer's decision making and action responses. (shrink)

As an illustration of what Phillips called the "heterogeneity of sense," this essay concentrates on differences in what is meant by a "reason for belief." Sometimes saying that a belief is reasonable simply commends the belief's unquestioned acceptance as a part of what we understand as a sensible outlook. Here the standard picture of justifying truth claims on evidential grounds breaks down; and it also breaks down in cases of fundamental moral and religious disagreement, where the basic beliefs that we (...) hold affect our conception of what counts as a reliable ground of judgment. Phillips accepts the resultant variations in our conceptions of rational judgment as a part of logic, just as Wittgenstein did. All objective means of determining the truth or falsity of an assertion presume some underlying conceptual agreement about what counts as good judgment. This means that the possibility of objective justification is limited. But no pernicious relativism results from this view, for as Wittgenstein said, "After reason comes persuasion." There is, moreover, a non-objective criterion of sorts in the moral and religious requirement that one be able to live with one's commitments. In such cases, good judgment is still possible, but it differs markedly from the standard model of making rational inferences. (shrink)

One of the most peculiar features of the belief in God is the accompanying claim that God is an indescribable mystery, an object of faith but never an object of knowledge. In certain contexts – in worship, for example – this claim undoubtedly serves a useful purpose; and so I do not want to dismiss the idea altogether. But when pious remarks about the ineffable nature of God are taken out of context and turned into philosophy, the result is usually (...) an epistemological muddle. The trouble, of course, is that those who insist on God's mysteriousness still manage to say all sorts of things about him; he is an incorporeal spirit, he created the world, he loves his creatures, and so on. To assert these things is to presume some understanding of God, but no understanding is possible if God is completely incomprehensible. So if that is how it is, if the object of religious belief is utterly incomprehensible, then it makes no sense to say – or believe – anything about God. (shrink)

One persistent element of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work is his insistence on self-honesty as a condition for doing logical or sense-oriented philosophy.This gives his work a spiritual weight that is not often appreciated. Yet the connection between self-honesty and logical insights is unclear, and this paper attemptsto clarify it. The paper includes brief introductions to Wittgenstein’s earlier and later thought, along with some religiously relevant examples.

This article investigates the issue of secondary school pupils asking questions. This is an important topic on which very little has been published to date. The article reviews the current literature, which almost exclusively reports the lack of student initiated, content related questioning in classrooms. A small study is described that challenges this view, finding a significantly greater level of student participation, a high percentage of inquiry driven questions and little reluctance on the part of pupils to participate actively in (...) lessons. However, when these questioning patterns, which appear to indicate exemplary lessons on paper, are examined in terms of pupil learning, it is found that large numbers of student questions can lead to severe disruption unless adequately controlled. For effective learning to take place, it is a vital that the learner has the opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. The vast bulk of the literature explores this topic through quantitative analysis of questioning patterns and suggested strategies for increasing the quality and frequency of pupil?s questions. This article reviews this research and explores the issue further through classroom observations, pupil questionnaires and interviews with teachers. The findings are compared with the current paradigm and the issue is discussed in terms of impact on pupil learning. (shrink)

In the early 1930s W. O. Kermack and W. H. McCrea published three papers in which they attempted to prove a result of E. T. Whittaker on the solution of differential equations. In modern parlance, their key idea consisted in using quantized contact transformations over an algebra of differential operators. Although their papers do not seem to have had any impact, either then or at any later time, the same ideas were independently developed in the 1960–1980s in the framework (...) of the theory of modules over rings of microdifferential operators. In this paper we describe the results of Kermack and McCrea and discuss possible reasons why such promising papers had no impact on the mathematics of the twentieth century. (shrink)