Cancer chemotherapy has been the most common cancer treatment. However, it has side effects that kill both tumor cells and immune cells, which can ravage the patient’s immune system. Chemotherapy should be administered depending on the patient’s immunity as well as the level of cancer cells. Thus, we need to design an efficient treatment protocol. In this work, we study a feedback control problem of tumor-immune system to design an optimal chemotherapy strategy. For this, we first propose a mathematical model (...) of tumor-immune interactions and conduct stability analysis of two equilibria. Next, the feedback control is found by solving the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. Here, we use an upwind finite-difference method for a numerical approximate solution of the HJB equation. Numerical simulations show that the feedback control can help determine the treatment protocol of chemotherapy for tumor and immune cells depending on the side effects. (shrink)

For the last several decades, dispositional properties have been one of the main topics in metaphysics. Still, however, there is little agreement among contemporary metaphysicians on the nature of dispositional properties. Apparently, though, the majority of them have reached the consensus that dispositional ascriptions cannot be analysed in terms of simple counterfactual conditionals. In this paper it will be brought to light that this consensus is wrong. Specifically, I will argue that the simple conditional analysis of dispositions, which is generally (...) thought to be dead, is in fact an adequate analysis of dispositions. I will go on to discuss Mumford’s view of dispositions from the perspective of the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. (shrink)

The Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, University of Pennsylvania, was built in 1965 as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Interdisciplinary Laboratories program intended to foster interdisciplinary research and training in materials science. The process that led to the construction of the four-story structure served as the focus of intense debates over the meaning and process of interdisciplinary research in universities. The location of the building, its size, internal design, and functionalities were all subject to heated (...) negotiations among patrons, scientists, and university administrators, to find the proper place of interdisciplinary materials science on the University of Pennsylvania's campus. Building on the recent work on laboratory architecture, this paper argues that the negotiations and controversies over the LRSM building were concrete representations of the broader struggle over the appropriate place of interdisciplinary research and training within a university. (shrink)

The central theme of this paper is the dispositional/categorical distinction that has been one of the top agendas in contemporary metaphysics. I will first develop from my semantic account of dispositions what I think the correct formulation of the dispositional/categorical distinction in terms of counterfactual conditionals. It will be argued that my formulation does not have the shortcomings that have plagued previously proposed ones. Then I will turn my attention to one of its consequences, the thesis that dispositional properties are (...) not susceptible to intrinsic finks. This thesis was first advanced by me and has ever since stirred up a big controversy, endorsed by some philosophers like Handfield, Bird, and Cohen but rejected by others like Clarke and Fara. Against this background, I will remedy my defense of the impossibility of intrinsically finkable dispositions and then refute some of apparently powerful criticisms of it. And so the upshot is that it is much more reasonable to hold on to the thesis that dispositions are intrinsically unfinkable. This will have the effect of putting the dispositional/categorical distinction on firmer and more secure ground. (shrink)

The idea that dispositions are an intrinsic matter has been popular among contemporary philosophers of dispositions. In this paper I will first state this idea as exactly as possible. I will then examine whether it poses any threat to the two current versions of the conditional analysis of dispositions, namely, the simple and reformed conditional analysis of dispositions. The upshot is that the intrinsic nature of dispositions, when properly understood, doesn't spell trouble for either of the two versions of the (...) conditional analysis of dispositions. Along the way, I will propose an extensionally correct and practically useful criterion for identifying nomically intrinsic dispositions and criticize one objection raised by Lewis against the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. (shrink)

Ideological indoctrination is explicit and pervasive in China, with the school curriculum used to mould the spirit and character of adolescents, fulfilling ideological and political purposes. But the exact content varies over time. Comparing two versions of textbooks published in 1997 and 2005, this paper depicts the continuities and change in the curricular discourses centred on the notion of ‘good citizen’. While keeping the official status of socialism and the Party leadership untouched, the new textbooks soften the presentation and packaging (...) of the ideological content, very much in tandem with the soft authoritarianism practised since the post‐Deng era when China has been deeply involved in the processes of marketisation, liberalisation and globalisation. The new textbooks also adopt a stance of greater reconciliation with human rights and global citizenship. While being granted more autonomy and rights, young citizens are still expected to shoulder the mission of national revival and socialist modernisation—very much derived from official policies. (shrink)

Is it possible that one and the same object x has opposing dispositions at the same time? One's first reaction might be that it is evidently impossible. On the assumption that x is incombustible, it seems to follow that it is not combustible. Surprisingly enough, however, it is claimed that there are a number of examples in support of the possibility of simultaneous co-instantiation of opposing dispositions. In this paper, I will bring under scrutiny some of the examples and come (...) to the conclusion that none of them achieve the desired goal. This will give support to the initial intuition that opposing dispositions cannot be co-instantiated by one and the same object at the same time. (shrink)

This article argues that while Charles Taylor's commitment to anti-naturalism in the human sciences has been constant, the grounds for that commitment have changed significantly over time. What began as his critique of naturalism on empirical grounds was refashioned into a commitment on moral grounds, or more accurately, on the basis of there being no distinctly separable grounds between the scientific and the moral. Taylor shifted his descriptive phenomenological defence of anti-naturalism to cast a much broader critique against an empiricist (...) epistemology he saw underpinning all naturalist approaches in the human sciences. He calls attention to the speciousness of the ontological commitments of an empiricist epistemological outlook that tries to separate human agency from moral ontology, which he argues is itself a moral position. Whether we want to go along with Taylor's specific moral outlook or not, what his arguments about the human sciences teach us is twofold: (1) Taylor's descriptive phenomenology shows how the scientific language of the natural sciences often cannot explain human phenomena without contradiction; (2) Taylor's hermeneutic realism teaches us the extent to which defending an anti-naturalist philosophy of human sciences today necessitates moral argument. (shrink)

Why would God institute the practice of efficacious petitionary prayer? Why would God not simply give us what we need before we ask? I examine recently proposed solutions to this puzzle and argue that they are inadequate to explain why an omniscient and perfectly good God would act differently in response to prayer. I propose that God has reasons to not always maximize a creature’s good, even in a sinless world, and that petitionary prayer functions as a means to reward (...) those who trust God, to enable us to actively love those we cannot otherwise help, and to give the petitioner personal evidence of God’s existence and care for her, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing faith. I refine this proposal by responding to several objections involving human responsibility and the epistemology of divine action. Along the way, I offer several ways petitioners can recognize God’s having answered a prayer and how God might help us with some common obstacles to prayer. (shrink)

The lack of attention to sustainability, as a concept with multiple dimensions, has presented a developmental gap in green marketing literature, sustainability, and marketing literature for decades. Based on the established premise of customer–corporate (C–C) identification, in which consumers respond favorably to companies with corporate social responsibility initiatives that they identify with, we propose that consumers would respond similarly to companies with sustainability initiatives. We postulate that consumers care about protecting and preserving favorable economic environments (an economic dimension of sustainability) (...) as much as they care about natural environments. Thus, we investigate how two sustainability dimensions (i.e., environmental and economic) and price can influence consumer responses. Using an experimental method, we demonstrate that consumers favor sustainability in both dimensions by giving positive evaluations of the company and purchase intent. In addition, consumers respond more negatively to poor company sustainability than to high company sustainability. In comparison, consumers respond more negatively to the company’s poor commitment to caring for the environment than to the company’s poor commitment to economic sustainability. We also find that consumers do not respond favorably to low prices when they have information about the firm’s poor environmental sustainability. Finally, we find support for an interaction effect between consumer support for sustainability and corporate sustainability; that is, consumers evaluate a company more favorably if the company shares the consumers’ social causes. Overall, we conclude, from our empirical study, support for the idea that consumers do respond to multiple dimensions of sustainability. (shrink)

What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal (...) and entropy reduction values in a theory-neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that increases in surprisal and entropy reduction were both associated with increases in reading times. Furthermore, these effects did not depend on the global difficulty of the text. The findings suggest that surprisal and entropy reduction independently contribute to variation in reading times, as these metrics seem to capture different aspects of lexical predictability. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire's early engagements with logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy are examined as historical and philosophical reference points for locating an alternative – interpretive and humanist – tradition that developed within analytic philosophy at Oxford in the 20th C. Berlin and Hampshire's writings show the legacy of an enduring Idealist philosophy, one that nonetheless had to be revised and reinvented against the new empiricist challenges brought on by the rise of analytic philosophy. Berlin and Hampshire rejected (...) idealism's metaphysical pretensions of the Absolute in favor of the new empiricism's insistence on grounding philosophy in experience, but staunchly opposed applying the latter's narrowly ‘scientistic’ view of knowledge to human experience, re-affirming the indivisible connections between epistemological issues and moral and political issues. The idealist themes they expounded are most clearly evident in their arguments for an interpretive philosophy in opposition to the reductivist tendencies of logical positivism, and in their defense of humanist liberalism against the drive of analysis toward naturalism where inquiry into human life is concerned. Such themes include: (i) an anti-naturalist, vitalist, philosophy of human sciences, (ii) an insistence on the intrinsic force and importance of human values against moral relativism, and (iii) the recognition of the political significance of the plurality of human values. As such, Berlin and Hampshire reveal the strong interpretive and humanist ways of reasoning from within the analytic tradition itself. Moreover, these interpretive and humanist themes continue to have strong echoes, this paper argues, in the development of post-analytic political theory in the latter half of the 20th century through today, as further evinced in the ideas of Bernard Williams (1929–2003) and Charles Taylor (b. 1931). By calling attention to such continuities, this paper reveals how moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone world lay not moribund but continued to develop in the heyday of analytic philosophy from the late ‘30s to the ‘50s and onward, thereby challenging the commonplace of the ‘death’ of normative political theorizing until Rawls reinvigorated it in the ‘70s. ☆ Special thanks are owed to Amy McCready, an astute reader of a preliminary draft of this paper. Also, the fearless members of the Contemporary Histories of Political Theory Working Group and participants of the Post-Analytic Political Theory Workshop at University of California, Berkeley provided useful insights and even more useful criticisms. (shrink)

Manley and Wasserman criticize the conditional analysis of dispositions, arguing that whilst it invites the ‘strategy of getting specific’, this strategy creates more problems than it solves. I show that their understanding both of the phenomenon of masking and also of the strategy of getting specific is deeply defective, which wreaks havoc with their principal critique of the conditional analysis of dispositions.

In this paper I will first consider Bird's cases against the conditional analysis of dispositions and defend them from Gundersen's objection. This does not mean that I believe that Bird's cases are successful. To the contrary, I take it that we can save the conditional analysis from Bird's cases by taking Lewis's two-step approach to dispositions. However, I will go on to argue that if Bird's cases are supplemented with the assumption that dispositions are intrinsic matter, they are able to (...) do what they are intended to do. (shrink)

Choi and Murphy seek to analyze the key facets of the debate over PC. Until now, PC has tended to be treated in news stories, magazines articles, and reports where the examination of PC has been short and under developed--rarely have the writers looked beyond single issues. Choi and Murphy provide a comprehensive examination of PC, from its philosophical underpinnings and historical background, through the significance of post-structural philosophy and postmodern literary criticism.

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two (...) features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space. (shrink)

Stephen Mumford, in his book on dispositions, argues that we can distinguish between dispositional and categorical properties in terms of entailing his 'conditional conditionals', which involve the concept of ideal conditions. I aim at defending Mumford's criterion for distinguishing between dispositional and categorical properties. To be specific, no categorical ascriptions entail Mumford's 'conditional conditionals'.

This study explores how and when ethical leadership predicts three forms of team-level creativity, namely team creativity, average of member creativity, and dispersion of member creativity. The results, based on 230 members of 44 knowledge work teams from Chinese organizations, showed that ethical leadership was positively related to team creativity and average of member creativity but was negatively related to dispersion of member creativity. Consistent with the predictions of uncertainty reduction theory, psychological safety climate mediated the relationship between ethical leadership (...) and the three forms of team-level creativity. Furthermore, supervisor support for creativity positively moderated the effect of ethical leadership on psychological safety climate and the indirect effects of ethical leadership on the three forms of team-level creativity through psychological safety climate. The analysis offers significant theoretical and practical implications on ethical leadership and creativity in organizations. (shrink)

Joseon neo-Confucianism critically reviewed Chinese Chu Zi Studies and transformed it as Joseon seonglihak through intense debates occurred in the process of trying to settle down the problems raised in the contemporary Joseon society. The representative theories of Joseon seonglihak includes sadanchiljeongron(四端七情論, the theory of the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings), inmulseongdongiron (人物性同異論, the theory of whether human nature and animal nature are the same or different), seongbeomsimdongbudongron (聖凡心同不同論, the theory of whether the mind of the nobler man and (...) that of the inferior man arethe same or different), mibalon (未發論, the theory of not-yet-aroused). Among these, this article traces the originality of Joseon seonglihak by means of comparing the sadanchiljeongron of Lee Hwang(Toegye, 1501-1570) with the mibalon of Lee Gan (Oeam, 1677-1727). The clause that 'the nature is li [性卽理]' is the central proposition in Chu Zi Studies, whereas the clause that 'the Four Beginnings are the arousal of li [四端理之發]' is the central proposition in Lee Hwang's theory. The clauses that 'the nature is identified with the mind [心性一致]', that 'the nobler man takes li to be the mind', and that 'the mind is the nature and the nature is the mind' are the main claims made by Lee Gan. Chu Hsi takes the nature (the original nature) to be li, Lee Hwang takes the feeling (the Four Beginnings) to be li, and Lee Gan takes the mind (the original mind) to be li. These claims made by Lee Hwang and Lee Gan are fundamentally different from Chu Hsi's theory of mind and nature. (shrink)

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and the use of (...) explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. (shrink)

Horizontal gene transfer advances bacterial evolution. To benefit from horizontally acquired genes, enteric bacteria must overcome silencing caused when the widespread heat‐stable nucleoid structuring (H‐NS) protein binds to AT‐rich horizontally acquired genes. This ability had previously been ascribed to both anti‐silencing proteins outcompeting H‐NS for binding to AT‐rich DNA and RNA polymerase initiating transcription from alternative promoters. However, we now know that pathogenic Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium and commensal Escherichia coli break down H‐NS when this silencer is not bound to (...) DNA. Curiously, both species use the same protease – Lon – to destroy H‐NS in distinct environments. Anti‐silencing proteins promote the expression of horizontally acquired genes without binding to them by displacing H‐NS from AT‐rich DNA, thus leaving H‐NS susceptible to proteolysis and decreasing H‐NS amounts overall. Conserved amino acid sequences in the Lon protease and H‐NS cleavage site suggest that diverse bacteria degrade H‐NS to exploit horizontally acquired genes. (shrink)

Elizabeth Prior claims that dispositional predicates are incomplete in the sense that they have more than one argument place. To back up this claim, she offers a number of arguments that involve such ordinary dispositional predicates as ‘fragile’, ‘soluble’, and so on. In this paper, I will first demonstrate that one of Prior’s arguments that ‘is fragile’ is an incomplete predicate is mistaken. This, however, does not immediately mean that Prior is wrong that ‘fragile’ is an incomplete predicate. On the (...) contrary, I maintain that she has offered another valid argument that does indeed establish the claim that ‘fragile’ is an incomplete predicate. I will argue further that Prior is right that ‘soluble’ is an incomplete predicate. Then does this mean that all dispositional predicates are incomplete? I don’t think so. I will suggest that there are complete dispositional predicates that have no more than one argument place. Finally, by relying on my discussion of the incompleteness of dispositional predicates, I will attempt to provide a better understanding of the context-dependence and intrinsic nature of dispositional ascriptions. (shrink)