Lockheed Martin Corp. has funded research to generate a framework and methodology for developing semantic reasoning applications to support the discipline oflntelligence Analysis. This chapter outlines that framework, discusses how it may be used to advance the information sharing and integrated analytic needs of the Intelligence Community, and suggests a system I software architecture for such applications.

Research and engineering in the quantum domain involve long chains of activity involving theory development, hypothesis formation, experimentation, device prototyping, device testing, and many more. At each stage multiple paths become possible, and of the paths pursued, the majority will lead nowhere. Our quantum metascience approach provides a strategy which enables all stakeholders to gain an overview of those developments along these tracks, that are relevant to their specific concerns. It provides a controlled vocabulary, built out of terms that are (...) designed to be maximally comprehensible to all groups of stakeholders and across all the sub-fields of the quantum domain. (shrink)

Understanding Computers and Cognition presents an important and controversial new approach to understanding what computers do and how their functioning is related to human language, thought, and action. While it is a book about computers, Understanding Computers and Cognition goes beyond the specific issues of what computers can or can't do. It is a broad-ranging discussion exploring the background of understanding in which the discourse about computers and technology takes place. Understanding Computers and Cognition is written for a wide audience, (...) not just those professionals involved in computer design or artificial intelligence. It represents an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about what it means to be a machine, and what it means to be human. Book jacket. (shrink)

A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence (...) Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos, which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy. (shrink)

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is _different_ from, perhaps in some sense _better_ than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge.¹ At the same time, self- knowledge has also encountered its (...) share of skeptics – philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one _species_ of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences _phenomenal knowledge_. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other. (shrink)

Twenty-first century critics frequently misread Quinean ontological commitment as a toothless doctrine of anti-metaphysical pragmatism. Janssen-Lauret's historical investigations reveal that they misinterpret the influence of Quine's naturalism. His naturalistic view of philosophy as continuous with science informs a much more interesting conception of ontological commitments as generated by indispensable explanatory roles. But Janssen-Lauret uncovers a previously undetected weakness in Quine's meta-ontology. Careful examination of his debate with another naturalistic nominalist, Ruth Barcan Marcus, reveals that his holism leaves him (...) blind to her acquaintance-based ontological commitment via proper names. Janssen-Lauret examines some crucial misunderstandings between Barcan Marcus and Quine, centring on their wildly different interpretations of proper names, quantification and identity, and argues that these are motivated by their diametrically opposed positions on epistemology. (shrink)

This volume is the first systematic presentation of the work of Albert Einstein, comprising fourteen essays by leading historians and philosophers of science that introduce readers to his work. Following an introduction that places Einstein's work in the context of his life and times, the book opens with essays on the papers of Einstein's 'miracle year', 1905, covering Brownian motion, light quanta, and special relativity, as well as his contributions to early quantum theory and the opposition to his light quantum (...) hypothesis. Further essays relate Einstein's path to the general theory of relativity and the beginnings of two fields it spawned, relativistic cosmology and gravitational waves. Essays on Einstein's later years examine his unified field theory program and his critique of quantum mechanics. The closing essays explore the relation between Einstein's work and twentieth-century philosophy, as well as his political writings. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing’s work on incomplete symbols and analysis was instrumental in clarifying, sharpening, and improving the project of logical constructions which was pivotal to early analytic philosophy. She dispelled use-mention confusions by restricting the term ‘incomplete symbol’ to expressions eliminable through analysis, rather than those expressions’ purported referents, and distinguished linguistic analysis from analysis of facts. In this paper I explore Stebbing’s role in analytic philosophy’s development from anti-holism, presupposing that analysis terminates in simples, to the more holist or foundherentist (...) analytic philosophy of the later 20th century. I read Stebbing as a transitional figure who made room for more holist analytic movements, e.g., applications of incomplete symbol theory to Quinean ontological commitment. Stebbing, I argue, is part of a historical narrative which starts with the holism of Bradley, an early influence on her, to which Moore and Russell’s logical analysis was a response. They countered Bradley’s holist reservations about facts with the view that the world is built up out of individually knowable simples. Stebbing, a more subtle and sympathetic reader of the British idealists, defends analysis, but with important refinements and caveats which prepared the way for a return to foundherentism and holism within analytic philosophy. (shrink)

When we use a directly referential expression to denote an object, do we incur an ontological commitment to that object, as Russell and Barcan Marcus held? Not according to Quine, whose regimented language has only variables as denoting expressions, but no constants to model direct reference. I make a case for a more liberal conception of ontological commitment—more wide-ranging than Quine’s—which allows for commitment to individuals, with an improved logical language of regimentation. The reason for Quine’s prohibition on commitment to (...) individuals, I argue, is that his choice of regimented language is heavily informed by his holist epistemology, in which objects are introduced via a description of their explanatory role. But non-holists can coherently attempt to commit to individuals using directly referential expressions, modelled in a formal language as constants. While holding on to the insight that a logical language is a helpful medium for ontology, I propose instead a more permissive language of regimentation, one expanded to permit the use of constants to record attempts to commit to individuals, which allows us to make sense of non-holist theories with alternative name-based or name-and-variable-based criteria of ontological commitment as well as Quinean theories. (shrink)

According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. (...) One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments. (shrink)

In "Milk, Honey, and the Good Life on Moral Twin Earth", David Copp explores some ways in which a defender of synthetic moral naturalism might attempt to get around our Moral Twin Earth argument. Copp nicely brings out the force of our argument, not only through his exposition of it, but through his attempt to defeat it, since his efforts, we think, only help to make manifest the deep difficulties the Moral Twin Earth argument poses for the synthetic moral naturalist.

Political decision-makers in the European Union are currently discussing the introduction of a mandatory uniform labelling scheme for meat and milk that provides information on husbandry systems similar to the already existent labelling scheme in the EU egg market. The objective of this paper was to assess whether such information is relevant to consumers when buying meat and milk. The paper was based on a systematic synthesis of 53 scientific journal articles on empirical consumer studies. The review revealed that consumers (...) perceived the aspects of outdoor access, stocking density and floor type as important factors influencing animal welfare. On average, consumers not only had a positive attitude towards more animal welfare-friendly husbandry systems with outdoor access and space allowance but were also willing to pay a price premium for products from such systems. All studies on consumer segmentation identified at least one consumer segment that placed great importance on animal welfare-friendly husbandry systems. Interestingly, many studies identified one or more other segments who still had a significant preference for animal welfare-friendly products even though other product attributes were more important to them. Based on the findings, the paper presents conclusions regarding the labelling of husbandry systems for meat and milk. (shrink)

The notion of “responsible luxury” may appear as a contradiction in terms. This article investigates the influence of two defining characteristics of luxury products—scarcity and ephemerality—on consumers’ perception of the fit between luxury and corporate social responsibility (CSR), as well as how this perceived fit affects consumers’ attitudes toward luxury products. A field experiment reveals that ephemerality moderates the positive impact of scarcity on consumers’ perception of fit between luxury and CSR. When luxury products are enduring (e.g., jewelry), a scarce (...) product is perceived as more socially responsible than a more widely available one and provokes positive attitudes. However, this effect does not appear for ephemeral luxury products (e.g., clothing). The perceived fit between luxury and CSR mediates the combined effects of scarcity and ephemerality on consumers’ attitudes toward luxury products. This study provides valuable insights that luxury brand managers can use to design their CSR and marketing strategies. (shrink)

By now “continental” philosophy has long since ceased to be a geographical term; there are “continental” philosophers in the Midwestern United States. Likewise, “analytical” philosophy is now widely practiced in most areas where academic philosophy is practiced. Moreover, many of the old jabs at each side have lost much of their force. The idea of a pox on both their houses—that analytical philosophers are a bunch of small-minded logic choppers, and continental philosophers are a bunch of wooly minded gasbags—has long (...) since failed to carry the punch it once did. What I want to suggest here is that they are both the same type of philosophy in one crucial, determining aspect: That one of the key experiences of modern philosophy, maybe even the great motivating experience of modern philosophy, is that of a certain type of skepticism, the idea that “we” both collectively and individually are prone to fool ourselves, be misled by conclusions that are attractive but unsupportable, or be misled even by our own experience and ways of thought to come to conclusions that turn out later to be insupportable. Certainly something like this underwrites the motivational power in those parts of contemporary philosophy that can be called “analytic” or are at least inspired by the analytical philosophers of the first two thirds of the twentieth century. Why else the careful attention to argument, the constant recasting of theses so that their implications can be better viewed, the deep ethos of attacking papers given by colleagues with a barrage of counter-examples, and of subjecting our colleagues to ruthless, sometimes unforgiving examination? What often seems perhaps petty to those more irritated than enlightened by analytic philosophy—that it is only tedious logic-chopping or “academic in the worst sense” niggling—is inspired by a brooding sense of skepticism, a sense that without such very intensely rigorous policing of our arguments and our explications, we are simply too prone to slide off into assertions that feel good, that may even seem to some of us like really very deep matters, but which, alas, may on closer inspection or in the light of later hindsight just turn out to be dreadfully false. Better to jump on the arguments now than to be embarrassed by them later. (shrink)

C. I. Lewis’s version of pragmatism, which he called “conceptualistic pragmatism,” has been little studied and is nowadays overlooked, eclipsed by the more famous pragmatisms of Dewey and James. However, it was Lewis’s version that came to dominate the formation of post-1945 pragmatism in the United States. It provided the framework in which Quine (his former student), Sellars, Davidson, Rorty and Brandom operated. Roughly, that structure involved a passive, sensory ineffable given and an ordering and classification of the given by (...) a priori categories. Comprehending those categories was a matter of apprehending a priori truths, but those categories were also changeable. Rational change involved giving some up and substituting others to meet certain basic human interests. We thus have the picture of mind and world that culminates in a certain sense in Brandom’s philosophy: External causal inputs linked to an internal normative inferential network which then results in causal outputs of linguistic shape. This is very different from the classical German idealist conception of mind and world, which takes the distinguishability-but-inseparability of concept and sensory intuition as its core. (shrink)

For the last 20 years or so, philosophers of mind have been using the term ‘qualia’, which is frequently glossed as standing for the “what-it-is-like” of experience. The examples of what-it-is-like that are typically given are feelings of pain or itches, and color and sound sensations. This suggests an identification of the experiential what-it-islike with such states. More recently, philosophers have begun speaking of the “phenomenology“ of experience, which they have also glossed as “what-it-is-like”. Many say, for example, that any (...) acceptable materialism—or any acceptable account of the relation of mind and body—must “respect the phenomenology.”1 Typically, no examples beyond those mentioned in the first paragraph are offered. This suggests that the picture of the phenomenology that ”must be respected” is the what-it-is-like of bodily sensations, of sensations that occur in perception, and perhaps of certain analogous nonperceptual states, such as imaginings and image-like rememberings. According to the suggested picture, all there is to phenomenology is such states; intentional mental states—as such— have no phenomenology; there is nothing that it is like to undergo them. Although beliefs and desires are intentionally directed—i.e., they have aboutness—these mental states allegedly are not inherently phenomenal. On this view, there is nothing that it is like to be.. (shrink)

Consumer surveys repeatedly suggest that corporate social responsibility and products’ social, environmental, or ethical attributes enhance consumers’ purchase intentions. The realization that CSR still has only a minor impact on consumers’ actual purchase decisions thus represents a puzzling paradox. Whereas prior literature on consumer decision making provides valuable insights into the factors that impede or facilitate consumers’ socially responsible consumption decisions, such elements may be only the tip of the iceberg. To gain a fuller understanding of the CSR–consumer paradox, this (...) study proposes investigating the phenomenon through additional theoretical lenses, namely, a clinical psychology, an evolutionary psychology/biology, a social psychology, and an economic and economic psychology lens. From these four unique theoretical lenses, the authors derive an integrative framework and draw several propositions for further research. (shrink)

Moral phenomenology is (roughly) the study of those features of occurrent mental states with moral significance which are accessible through direct introspection, whether or not such states possess phenomenal character – a what-it-is-likeness. In this paper, as the title indicates, we introduce and make prefatory remarks about moral phenomenology and its significance for ethics. After providing a brief taxonomy of types of moral experience, we proceed to consider questions about the commonality within and distinctiveness of such experiences, with an eye (...) on some of the main philosophical issues in ethics and how moral phenomenology might be brought to bear on them. In discussing such matters, we consider some of the doubts about moral phenomenology and its value to ethics that are brought up by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Michael Gill in their contributions to this issue. (shrink)

Tesón's “humanitarian rationales” for the war in Iraq strain the traditional understanding of humanitarian intervention: The first, that the war was fought to overthrow a tyrant. The second, that it was a defense strategy establishing democratic regimes peacefully, but by force if necessary.

Causal compatibilism claims that even though physics is causally closed, and even though mental properties are multiply realizable and are not identical to physical causal properties, mental properties are causal properties nonetheless. This position asserts that there is genuine causation at multiple descriptive/ontological levels; physics-level causal claims are not really incompatible with mentalistic causal claims. I articulate and defend a version of causal compatibilism that incorporates three key contentions. First, causation crucially involves robust patterns of counterfactual dependence among properties.Second, often (...) several distinct such patterns, all subsuming a single phenomenon, exist at different descriptive/ontological levels (e.g., microphysical, neurobiological, macrobiological, and psychological). Third, the concept of causation is governed by an implicit contextual parameter that normally determines a specific descriptive/ontological level as the contextually relevant level, for the context-sensitive semantic evaluation of causal statements. (shrink)

I maintain, in defending “thirdism,” that Sleeping Beauty should do Bayesian updating after assigning the “preliminary probability” 1/4 to the statement S: “Today is Tuesday and the coin flip is heads.” (This preliminary probability obtains relative to a specific proper subset I of her available information.) Pust objects that her preliminary probability for S is really zero, because she could not be in an epistemic situation in which S is true. I reply that the impossibility of being in such an (...) epistemic situation is irrelevant, because relative to I, statement S nonetheless has degree of evidential support 1/4. (shrink)

Reinforcement learning approaches to cognitive modeling represent task acquisition as learning to choose the sequence of steps that accomplishes the task while maximizing a reward. However, an apparently unrecognized problem for modelers is choosing when, what, and how much to reward; that is, when (the moment: end of trial, subtask, or some other interval of task performance), what (the objective function: e.g., performance time or performance accuracy), and how much (the magnitude: with binary, categorical, or continuous values). In this article, (...) we explore the problem space of these three parameters in the context of a task whose completion entails some combination of 36 state–action pairs, where all intermediate states (i.e., after the initial state and prior to the end state) represent progressive but partial completion of the task. Different choices produce profoundly different learning paths and outcomes, with the strongest effect for moment. Unfortunately, there is little discussion in the literature of the effect of such choices. This absence is disappointing, as the choice of when, what, and how much needs to be made by a modeler for every learning model. (shrink)

Though the impetus for psychoanalytic and group analytic in-patient psychotherapy largely came from Britain, it is in Germany that this work has been supported, developed and researched to a greater extent than elsewhere. In _Psychoanalytic Therapy in the Hospital Setting_ Paul Janssen describes the different models which have been tried and evaluated and explains his own integrative model in detail, illustrating it with vivid clinical vignettes. The author also shows that in-patient groups are particularly effective in the treatment of (...) severe personality disorders, borderline conditions and psychosomatic illness. Not previously available in the English language, this book will be invaluable reading to psychiatrists, psychotherapists, nurses, social workers and anyone working in health care. (shrink)

In early 1927, Pascual Jordan published his version of what came to be known as the Dirac-Jordan statistical transformation theory. Later that year and partly in response to Jordan, John von Neumann published the modern Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics. Central to both formalisms are expressions for conditional probabilities of finding some value for one quantity given the value of another. Beyond that Jordan and von Neumann had very different views about the appropriate formulation of problems in the new (...) theory. For Jordan, unable to let go of the analogy to classical mechanics, the solution of such problems required the identification of sets of canonically conjugate variables, i.e., p’s and q’s. Jordan ran into serious difficulties when he tried to extend his approach from quantities with fully continuous spectra to those with wholly or partly discrete spectra. For von Neumann, not constrained by the analogy to classical physics and aware of the daunting mathematical difficulties facing the approach of Jordan ), the solution of a problem in the new quantum mechanics required only the identification of a maximal set of commuting operators with simultaneous eigenstates. He had no need for p’s and q’s. Related to their disagreement about the appropriate general formalism for the new theory, Jordan and von Neumann stated the characteristic new rules for probabilities in quantum mechanics somewhat differently. Jordan was the first to state those rules in full generality, von Neumann rephrased them and then sought to derive them from more basic considerations. In this paper we reconstruct the central arguments of these 1927 papers by Jordan and von Neumann and of a paper on Jordan’s approach by Hilbert, von Neumann, and Nordheim. We highlight those elements in these papers that bring out the gradual loosening of the ties between the new quantum formalism and classical mechanics. (shrink)

JANSSEN: DAS ERLEBENDE ICH UND SEIN DASEIN.

In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain (...) natural properties, a recipe that we believe is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario we call Moral Twin Earth. (shrink)

This article summarizes the multitude of empirical studies that test ethical decision making in business and suggests additional research necessary to further theory in this area. The studies are categorized and related to current theoretical ethical decision making models. The studies are related to awareness, individual and organizational factors, intent, and the role of moral intensity in ethical decision making. Summary tables provide a quick reference for the sample, findings, and publication outlet. This review provides insights for understanding organizational ethical (...) decision constructs, where ethical decision making theory currently stands, and provides insights for future empirical work on organizational ethical decision making. (shrink)