Ceteris Paribus clauses in reasoning are used to allow for defeaters of norms, rules or laws, such as in von Wright’s example “I prefer my raincoat over my umbrella, everything else being equal”. In earlier work, a logical analysis is offered in which sets of formulas Γ, embedded in modal operators, provide necessary and sufficient conditions for things to be equal in ceteris paribus clauses. For most laws, the set of things allowed to vary is small, often finite, and so (...) Γ is typically infinite. Yet the axiomatisation they provide is restricted to the special and atypical case in which Γ is finite. We address this problem by being more flexible about ceteris paribus conditions, in two ways. The first is to offer an alternative, slightly more general semantics, in which the set of formulas only give necessary but not sufficient conditions. This permits a simple axiomatisation. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the relationship between norms of belief revision that may be adopted by members of a community and the resulting dynamic properties of the distribution of beliefs across that community. We show that at a qualitative level many aspects of social belief change can be obtained from a very simple model, which we call ‘threshold influence’. In particular, we focus on the question of what makes the beliefs of a community stable under various dynamical situations. We (...) also consider refinements and alternatives to the ‘threshold’ model, the most significant of which is to consider changes to plausibility judgements rather than mere beliefs. We show first that some such change is mandated by difficult problems with belief-based dynamics related to the need to decide on an order in which different beliefs are considered. Secondly, we show that the resulting plausibility-based account results in a deterministic dynamical system that is non-deterministic at the level of beliefs. (shrink)

We shed light on an old problem by showing that the logic LP cannot define a binary connective $\odot$ obeying detachment in the sense that every valuation satisfying $\varphi$ and $(\varphi\odot\psi)$ also satisfies $\psi$ , except trivially. We derive this as a corollary of a more general result concerning variable sharing.

Turing's (1936) analysis of effective symbolic procedures is a model of conceptual clarity that plays an essential role in the philosophy of mathematics. Yet appeal is often made to the effectiveness of human procedures in other areas of philosophy. This paper addresses the question of whether Turing's analysis can be applied to a broader class of effective human procedures. We use Sieg's (1994) presentation of Turing's Thesis to argue against Cleland's (1995) objections to Turing machines and we evaluate her proposal (...) to understand the effectiveness of procedures in terms of their reliability and precision. A number of conditions for effectiveness are identified and these are used to provide a general argument against the possibility of a Leibnizian decision procedure. (shrink)

Dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) extends purely modal epistemic logic (S5) by adding dynamic operators that change the model structure. Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) extends basic modal logic with programs that allow the de nition of complex modalities. We provide a common generalisation: a logic that is dynamic in both senses, and one that is not limited to S5 as its modal base. It also incorporates, and signi cantly generalises, all the features of existing extensions of DEL such as BMS [3] (...) and LCC [21]. Our dynamic operators work in two steps. First, they provide a multiplicity of transformations of the original model, one for each action in a purely syntactic action structure (in the style of BMS). Second, they specify how to combine these multiple copies to produce a new model. In each step, we use the generality of PDL to specify the transformations. The main technical contribution of the paper is to provide an axiomatisation of this general dynamic dynamic logic (GDDL). This is done by providing a computable translation of GDDL formulas to equivalent PDL formulas, thus reducing the logic to PDL, which is decidable. The proof involves switching between representing programs as terms and as automata. We also show that both BMS and LCC are special cases of GDDL, and that there are interesting applications that require the additional generality of GDDL, namely the modelling of private belief update. More recent extensions and variations of BMS and LCC are also discussed. (shrink)

History of Logic in China: 5 Questions is a collection of short interviews based on 5 questions presented to some of the most influential and prominent scholars in the field. We hear their views on the field, the aim, the scopes, the future direction of research and how their work fits in these respects. Interviews with Rens Bod, Chung-Ying Cheng, Cui Qingtian, Dong Zhitie, Chris Fraser, Yiu-Ming Fung, Jane Geaney, Chad Hansen, Christoph Harbsmeier, Ju Zhonglin, Hsien-Chung Lee, Jer-Shiarn Lee, Michiel (...) Leezenberg, Liu Peiyu, Thierry Lucas, Gregor Paul, Dan Robins, Shen Jianying, Sun Zhongyuan, Wang Kexi, Yang Wujin, Zhai Jincheng, Zheng Weihong, Zhou Shan and Zhou Yunzhi. (shrink)

I argue that there is a prima facie tension between solutions to the problem of fake news and solutions to the problem presented by various cognitive biases that dispose us to dismiss evidence against our prior beliefs (what might seem to be the driving force behind echo chambers). We can guard against fake news by strengthening belief. But we can exit echo chambers by becoming more sensitive to counterevidence, which seems to require weakening our beliefs. I resolve the tension by (...) arguing against an injunction to weaken belief in the required ways. In particular, there is no injunction to be open-minded in all circumstances toward various counterarguments, even those whose premises seem compelling and in which we can’t expose a flaw. On the contrary, there are circumstances in which you should, in the relevant sense, be closed-minded toward such counterarguments. (shrink)

Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility (...) relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement. (shrink)

In this paper we present a schema for describing dualities between physical theories, and illustrate it in detail with the example of bosonization: a boson-fermion duality in two-dimensional quantum field theory. The schema develops proposals in De Haro : these proposals include construals of notions related to duality, like representation, model, symmetry and interpretation. The aim of the schema is to give a more precise criterion for duality than has so far been considered. The bosonization example, or boson-fermion duality, has (...) the feature of being simple, yet rich enough, to illustrate the most relevant aspects of our schema, which also apply to more sophisticated dualities. The richness of the example consists, mainly, in its concern with two non-trivial quantum field theories: including massive Thirring-sine-Gordon duality, and non-abelian bosonization. This prompts two comparisons with the recent philosophical literature on dualities:--- Unlike the standard cases of duality in quantum field theory and string theory, where only specific simplifying limits of the theories are explicitly known, the boson-fermion duality is known to hold {\it exactly}. This exactness can be exhibited explicitly. The bosonization example illustrates both the cases of isomorphic and {\it non-isomorphic} models: which we believe the literature on dualities has not so far discussed. (shrink)

Practical cognitivism is the view that practical reason is our will, not an intellectual capacity whose exercises can influence those of our will. If practical reason is our will, thoughts about how I am to act have an essential tie to action. They are intentions. Thoughts about how others are to act, though, lack such a tie to action. They are beliefs, not intentions. How, then, can these thoughts form a unified class? I reject two answers which deny the differences (...) between such thoughts about myself and those about others, one of which says that all such thoughts are intentions, the other that all are beliefs. I then reject a shared assumption which says that a class of thoughts is unified only if all its elements are all of one type of thought. I instead argue that this class is unified even though some elements are intentions, others beliefs, because such beliefs depend on those intentions in various ways. (shrink)

Debates about the ethics and effects of placebos and whether ‘placebos’ in clinical trials of complex treatments such as acupuncture are adequate rage. Yet there is currently no widely accepted definition of the ‘placebo’. A definition of the placebo is likely to inform these controversies. Grünbaum’s characterization of placebos and placebo effects has been touted by some authors as the best attempt thus far, but has not won widespread acceptance largely because Grünbaum failed to specify what he means by a (...) therapeutic theory and because he does not stipulate a special role for expectation effects. Grünbaum claims that placebos are treatments whose ‘characteristic features’ do not have therapeutic effects on the target disorder. I show that with four modifications, Grünbaum’s definition provides a defensible account of placebos for the purpose of constructing placebo controls within clinical trials. The modifications I introduce are: adding a special role for expectations, insisting that placebo controls control for all and only the effects of the incidental treatment features, relativizing the definition of placebos to patients, and introducing harmful interventions and nocebos to the definitional scheme. I also provide guidance for classifying treatment features as characteristic or incidental. (shrink)

This paper presents a new argument for necessitism, the claim that necessarily everything is necessarily something. The argument appeals to principles about the metaphysics of quantification and predication which are best seen as constraints on reality’s fineness of grain. I give this argument in section 4; the impatient reader may skip directly there. Sections 1-3 set the stage by surveying three other arguments for necessitism. I argue that none of them are persuasive, but I think it is illuminating to consider (...) my argument in light of the others and vice versa. These interconnections should be of interest even to those who reject necessitism; of particular interest may be the new conception of validity proposed in section 5. (shrink)

The COVID-19 global pandemic has shone a light on several important ethical questions, ranging from fairness in resource allocation to the ethical justification of government mandates. In addition to these institutional issues, there are also several ethical questions that arise at the interpersonal level. This essay focuses on several of these issues. In particular, I argue that, despite the insistence in public health messaging that avoiding infecting others constitutes ‘saving lives’, virus transmission that results in death constitutes an act of (...) killing. Whether this killing is wrongful depends on several factors. I consider one intuitively plausible view—namely, that in many cases, killing via unintentional transmission is not wrongful, because the parties in question have implicitly waived their rights against this harm, often via reciprocal risk imposition. I argue that this view is mistaken, but that its central insight can be better captured by identifying the appropriate standards of blame that we ought to apply during a pandemic. I conclude by showing how these conclusions can be fruitfully applied to certain institutional questions, such as helping to justify restricting government mandates. (shrink)

AI, in the form of artificial carers, provides a possible solution to the problem of a growing elderly population Yet, concerns remain that artificial carers ( such as care-or chat-bots) could not emphathize with patients to the extent that humans can. Utilising the concept of empathy perception,we propose a Turing-type test that could check whether artificial carers could do many of the menial tasks human carers currently undertake, and in the process, free up more time for doctors to offer empathy. (...) -/- . (shrink)

I argue that racism is essentially a civic character trait: to be a racist is to have a character that rationally reflects racial supremacist sociopolitical values. As with moral vice accounts of racism, character is my account’s primary evaluative focus: character is directly evaluated as racist, and all other racist things are racist insofar as, and because, they cause, are caused by, express or are otherwise suitably related to racist character. Yet as with political accounts of racism, sociopolitical considerations provide (...) my account’s primary evaluative standard: satisfying the sociopolitical standard of racial supremacy is what makes racist character racist. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce an account of aesthetic understanding. Recent discussions of aesthetic understanding have associated it with aesthetic justification and with understanding why, for example, a given object is aesthetically valuable. I introduce a notion of aesthetic understanding as a form of objectual understanding, which I refer to as ‘appreciative understanding’. Appreciative understanding is related to and partly constituted by an agent’s capacity to comprehend and experience an artwork holistically and to communicate effectively regarding its particular aesthetic character (...) and value. I then argue for the understanding account of aesthetic judgement on which the paradigmatic form of aesthetic judgement is grounded on appreciative understanding. This argument partly consists in demonstrating how the understanding account can explain the autonomy of aesthetic judgement. In closing, I explore the potential of the understanding account to explain the structure of our appreciative practices. That is, I put forward the view that our appreciative practices are structured so as to promote appreciative understanding. (shrink)

For a quarter of a century, the Council for Responsible Genetics has provided a unique historical lens into the modern history, science, ethics, and politics of genetic technologies. Since 1983 the Council has had leading scientists, activists, science writers, and public health advocates researching and reporting on a broad spectrum of issues, including genetically engineered foods, biological weapons, genetic privacy and discrimination, reproductive technologies, and human cloning. Biotechnology in Our Lives examines how these issues affect us daily whether we realize (...) it or not. Written for the nonscientist, it looks at the many applications of genetics on the world around us by posing questions such as: What should we know about genetics and childbirth? Can our genes keep us from qualifying for health insurance? Can gene therapy cure cancer? Is behavior genetically determined? Why would the FBI want our genes? Are foreign genes in our food? And much more Ultimately, this definitive book on the subject also encourages us to think about the social, environmental, and moral ramifications of where this technology is taking us. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the long-standing public health practice of contact tracing into the public spotlight. While contact tracing and case investigation have been carefully designed to protect privacy, the huge volume of tracing which is being carried out as part of the pandemic response in the United States is highlighting potential concerns around privacy, legality, and equity. Contact tracing during the pandemic has gained particular attention for the new use of digital technologies—both on the consumer side in the (...) form of Exposure Notification applications, and for public health agencies as digital case management software systems enable massive scaling of operations. While the consumer application side of digital innovation has dominated the news and academic discourse around privacy, people are likely to interact more intensively with public health agencies and their use of digital case management systems. Effective use of digital case management for contact tracing requires revisiting the existing legal frameworks, privacy protections, and security practices for management of sensitive health data. The scale of these tools and demands of an unprecedented pandemic response are introducing new risks through the collection of huge volumes of data, and expanding requirements for more adept data sharing among jurisdictions. Public health agencies must strengthen their best practices for data collection and protection even in the absence of comprehensive or clear guidance. This requires navigating a difficult balance between rigorous data protection and remaining highly adaptive and agile. (shrink)

No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s fixed master molecule, DNA is a dynamic script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about genetic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance.

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter--what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make (...) and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is the theory according to which the entities within a specified domain are best understood as composed of both matter and form. Contemporary discussions of hylomorphism have found philosophers revisiting classic points of contention concerning the theory’s scope, application, and utility, but it has also led philosophers to carefully reconsider how best to understand hylomorphism’s most basic claims. In this introduction, I begin by providing a brief overview of some of these main points of discussion in the contemporary literature (...) on hylomorphism and some of the main hylomorphic views currently on offer. After that, I provide an overview of some of the main topics discussed in this special issue, offering a brief summary of each contribution. (shrink)

Rationale and objectives: Medical humanities are becoming increasingly recognized as positively impacting medical education and medical practice. However, the extent of medical humanities teaching in medical schools is largely unknown. We reviewed medical school curricula in Canada, the UK and the US. We also explored the relationship between medical school ranking and the inclusion of medical humanities in the curricula. -/- Methods: We searched the curriculum websites of all accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US to check (...) which medical humanities topics were taught, and whether they were mandatory or optional. We then noted rankings both by Times Higher Education and U.S. News and World Report and calculated the average rank. We formally explored whether there was an association between average medical school ranking and medical humanities offerings using Spearman's correlation and inverse variance weighting meta-analysis. -/- Results: We identified 18 accredited medical school programmes in Canada, 41 in the UK, and 154 in the US. Of these, nine (56%) in Canada, 34 (73%) in the UK and 124 (80%) in the US offered at least one medical humanity that was not ethics. The most common medical humanities were medical humanities (unspecified), history, and literature (Canada); sociology and social medicine, medical humanities (unspecified), and art (UK); and medical humanities (unspecified), literature and history (US). Higher ranked medical schools appeared less likely to offer medical humanities. -/- Conclusions: The extent and content of medical humanities offerings at accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US varies, and there appears to be an inverse relationship between medical school quality and medical humanities offerings. Our analysis was limited by the data provided on the Universities' websites. Given the potential for medical humanities to improve medical education and medical practice, opportunities to reduce this variation should be exploited. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers Mary Kate McGowan's contention that no account of hate speech is adequate if it does not explain how such speech constitutes harm to those targeted by it. ‘Constitutes’ is suppose dot mean something different than ‘causes.’ McGowan's suggestion that the speech enacts a norm offers an interesting dimension to our understanding of the harm of hate speech. But I argue that it is important to distinguish carefully between ‘norm-enactment’ and ‘norm-application’ in this model. Failure to attend (...) to that distinction blunts the force of the normative account. (shrink)

In Plato's Laws, the Athenian Visitor says that the best constitution is a mixture of monarchy and democracy. This is the theoretical basis for the institutions of Magnesia, and it helps the citizens to become virtuous. But what is meant by ‘monarchy’ and ‘democracy’, and how are they mixed? I argue that the fundamental relations in Plato's discussion of constitutions are those of authority and equality. These principles are centrally about the extent to which citizens submit to the judgment of (...) an authority and the extent to which they decide for themselves respectively—the extent to which they are ruled by themselves or ruled by another. The institutions of Magnesia reflect these principles in practice and provide a more nuanced way to understand Plato’s assessment of democratic institutions. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 3, Page 33-34, March 2012.

The overall goal of the approach developed in this paper is to estimate the likelihood of a given kinetic kill scenario between hostile spacebased adversaries using the mathematical framework of Complex Conceptual Spaces Single Observation. Conceptual spaces are a cognitive model that provide a method for systematically and automatically mimicking human decision making. For accurate decisions to be made, the fusion of both hard and soft data into a single decision framework is required. This presents several challenges to this data (...) fusion framework. The first is the challenge involved in handling multiple complex terminologies, which is addressed by drawing on a set of Space Domain Ontologies. Another challenge is the complex combinatorics involved when considering all possible feature combinations. This can be mitigated by using integer linear programming optimization that is outlined by the Complex Conceptual Spaces Single Observation mathematical model framework. A third challenge is the complicated physics that is involved in a spacecraft collision that must be addressed to obtain a better understanding of threat assessment. Overcoming these various challenges allows for a quantitative ranking for the potential of a kinetic kill collision across multiple spacecraft pairs. In addition to overcoming these challenges this paper will break down threat assessment into four domains and identify a ranking of threat both for each individual domain and for the four domains combined. Simulation results are shown to verify the developed concepts. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron; XV*—Participation: The Right of Rights, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 June 1998, Pages 307–338, https://doi.org.

Commentators have often been puzzled by the structure of the _Symposium_; in particular, it is unclear what the relationship is between Socrates’ speech and that of the other symposiasts. This chapter seeks to make a contribution to that debate by highlighting parallels between the first four speeches of the _Symposium_ and the goals of the early education in the Republic. In both dialogues, I contend, we see Plato concerned with educating people through (a) activating and cultivating spirited motivations, (b) becoming (...) lawful and taking virtue as a goal, (c) harmonizing the opposing forces in their soul, and (d) minimizing the appetites and making them orderly. While these are familiar points from the moral education of the Republic, I argue that they also map onto the first four speeches of the _Symposium_ respectively. Because in the _Republic_ this moral education is necessary to make progress on the epistemic ascent, we can speculate that there is a similar point to be made in the _Symposium_ – without first training our character adequately, we will not be able to climb the ladder of love. While the positive effects of Eros described in the early speeches of the _Symposium_ are only imitations of the ideal education regime of Kallipolis, they nevertheless improve one’s character in such a way that better prepares the soul for philosophy. Finally, I argue that the importance of this moral education is dramatized at the end of the _Symposium_ through Agathon’s amicable refutation by Socrates on the one hand, and the drunken entrance of Alcibiades on the other. Agathon shows potential for philosophy whereas Alcibiades is the exemplar of what happens when somebody comes to philosophy without a harmonized soul. (shrink)

Concord describes a natural language phenomenon in which a single logical meaning is expressed syntactically on multiple lexical items. The canonical example is negative concord, in which multiple negative expressions are used, but a single negation is interpreted. Formally similar phenomena have been observed for the redundant marking of distributivity and definiteness. Inspired by recent dynamic analyses of these latter two phenomena, we extend a similar dynamic analysis to negative concord. We propose that negative concord items introduce a discourse referent, (...) but then test that no discourse referent has been introduced in any assignment. These apparently contradictory requirements are licensed with split scope around negation: introduction occurs below negation; the test appears above it. The analysis successfully predicts that negative concord items must be licensed by a sufficiently local negative operator. We further show that modulation of what is at-issue can account for cases in which NC items themselves carry negative force. (shrink)