While most Christians have come to accept that there should be no attempt on the part of the state to coerce strict matters of conscience, many actively support the state coercively interfering with certain modes of conduct that violate God’s moral law. The development of this stance occurred during the seventeenth century English toleration debates. Then, tolerationists argued that there should be toleration for dissenting Protestant denominations, and eventually for Catholics, heretics, and atheists, too. But very few strict biblical Christians, (...) even today, endorse extending legal toleration, for example, to homosexual conduct or same-sex marriage. Two strategies, attributable to Locke, fail to support this asymmetry between religious error and the characteristic types of ‘Christian immorality’. I draw on arguments from the toleration debates to show that the boundaries of legal toleration should be extended to include these violations of divine moral law, and that strict biblical Christians should agree. (shrink)

Purpose: Tolerance for ambiguity (TFA) is a character trait that is associated with a multitude of benefits for physicians, including increased empathy, greater desire to work in underserved areas, fewer medical errors, enhanced psychological well-being, and lower rates of burnout. Furthermore, it has been shown that TFA is a malleable trait that can be enhanced with interventions such as art courses and group reflection. This study describes the utility of a six-week medical ethics elective course in increasing TFA in (...) first- and second-year medical students.Methods: First- and second-year medical students were enrolled in an elective medical ethics course at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University that guided students in critical thinking, group discussion, and respectful debate regarding various ethical dilemmas in medicine. Students took a validated survey before and after course completion to measure TFA. The average pre- and post-course scores for each semester, as well as the total cohort of 119 students, were compared using paired t-tests.Results: A statistically significant improvement in TFA scores was observed in the overall cohort, as well as in each individual semester of the medical ethics elective course offering.Conclusion: A six-week elective course in medical ethics can significantly improve medical students’ TFA. (shrink)

Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on “popular errors,” a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid-seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology (...) of natural philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne’s formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. Pseudodoxia Epidemica was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon’s theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon’s refutations of “natural human reason” distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of “theories,” his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error – from physicians’ efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne’s work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society’s Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production. (shrink)

Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) contains two main arguments for toleration, one theological, the other political. In light of the latter, the capacity for judging is embedded in each individual’s power and cannot be overcome or dismissed. The individual, not the state, is the subject par excellence of judgment concerning the true and the good. In the Political Treatise (TP), however, multiplicity takes centre stage. The multitude, a concept that Spinoza had seldom used until then, appears to emphasise that the more (...) powerful individuals become with others, the more likely they are to avoid error in judgment. Does this contrast mean that the TP’s argument from multiplicity undermines the TTP’s political argument for toleration? In this paper, I demonstrate that the strain under which the political argument for toleration seems to be due to the TP’s emphasis on the epistemic competencies of the many is only apparent. To achieve this, I show that Spinoza, under Machiavelli’s influence, endorses a particular form of epistemic democracy, which in turn requires both multiplicity and diversity. The upshot is that we find a third argument for toleration in the TP embedded in the argument from epistemic democracy. (shrink)

The tolerance principle, the idea that vague predicates are insensitive to sufficiently small changes, remains the main bone of contention between theories of vagueness. In this paper I examine three sources behind our ordinary belief in the tolerance principle, to establish whether any of them might give us a good reason to revise classical logic. First, I compare our understanding of tolerance in the case of precise predicates and in the case of vague predicates. While tolerance (...) in the case of precise predicates results from approximation, tolerance in the case of vague predicates appears to originate from two more specific sources: semantic indeterminacy on the one hand, and epistemic indiscriminability on the other. Both give us good and coherent grounds to revise classical logic. Epistemic indiscriminability, it is argued, may be more fundamental than semantic indeterminacy to justify the intuition that vague predicates are tolerant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sozzini’s Ghost: Pierre Bayle and Socinian TolerationBarbara Sher TinsleyPierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary (1686–87), a Huguenot exile’s response to the Revocation of Nantes, established its author as a defender of free conscience for pagans, Muslims, Jews, atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Anabaptists, and Socinians. 1 The virtues of Pagans and Atheists are most fully treated in Bayle’s work on the comet. 2 In this work pagans, Catholics (whom Bayle equated with pagan (...) idolators), and atheists were compared to the advantage of the latter, a conclusion that caused widespread scandal and for which Bayle was obliged by his church to write an apology or clarification found in his Dictionary. 3 In toleration there was no juste milieu. 4 Everyone must act according to conscience no matter how errant. Bayle reiterated a position taken in his criticism of the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg’s History of Calvinism. 5 In it Bayle first enunciated the principle that he noted frightened readers and caused a scandal, namely, that error disguised as truth must be allowed all the privileges of truth, i.e., must be permitted to be believed by those convinced they had found truth. This doctrine of errant conscience was basic to Bayle’s understanding of God and man’s search for Him; and after his death it became basic to concepts of individualism, free [End Page 609] inquiry, free speech, and inalienable rights, concepts which were all made concrete during the Enlightenment. Forcing conscience was wrong. 6Bayle’s lack of partisanship in treating religious history invited criticism from Calvinists in Holland. He wrote to Mr. Pecher, a minister at Emmerick, that in his Dictionary he had avoided passionate prejudice with respect to Jesuits or to any other subject. 7 But had he also avoided an indifference to dogma? Not according to his chief critic who was his erstwhile patron turned enemy, Pierre Jurieu, Pastor of the Reformed church of Rotterdam and theologian in the Ecole Illustre. This school, founded expressly for Bayle and Jurieu by the city council of Rotterdam, 8 allowed Bayle to teach philosophy and history. Since Jurieu thought Bayle “indifferent” to dogma, he believed him to be a covert Socinian or atheist. In 1693 he managed to have Bayle dismissed from his teaching post.Indifference was a concept that started with the ancients, particularly Stoics, Skeptics, and Cynics, who regarded everything except virtue as matters of indifference, a posture with which many of Bayle’s writings, though not all, seemed to agree. In scholastic logic indifferentism meant that things were neither particular nor universal but indifferently so according to the viewpoint from which they were regarded. Jurieu made the charge of indifferentism in 1687. 9 He remarked then of Bayle’s concept of the erring conscience that it was “developed with a view to establishing tolerance and a general indifference of all sects and even of all religions.” 10 Bayle was not indifferent to doctrine. He remained loyal to the Reformed faith, defended orthodoxy, and in a letter to his cousin protested that he was ready to show that his work on comets contained nothing that was contrary to right reason, Scripture, or the Confession of faith of the Reformed Church. 11 Paul Dibon noted that Bayle was especially consistent in his concern for divine transcendance rather than indifference. 12 Henry Kamen wrote that Bayle wrote in “complete theological indifference,” 13 a statement ignoring Bayle’s disapproval of much theological heterodoxy, the orthodoxy of others. While Bayle was usually non-partisan, he was never indifferent. Kamen’s remark contrasts [End Page 610] with Theodore Rabb’s, who wrote that Jean Bodin and Bayle took their stand on “the equality of all beliefs” 14 a statement suggesting indifference, but in a positive rather than negative way.Bodin’s own religion was particularly problematic. Tolerant for his age, a whole century before Bayle, Bodin, a Carmelite friar for several years, had already repudiated forcing conscience. In his book on the state he warned that those who do so merely create more intransigence among their already alienated subjects. 15 He also insinuated that a multiplicity of religions—“all the religions of all people”—including natural religion, Jupiter’s... (shrink)

For hundreds of years, Muslim Spain was the most tolerant place in Europe. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were able to live together there more or less peacefully. The three religious groups maintained a tolerant convivencia, or coexistence, thanks partly to a twofold distinction among kinds of people that was essential to the particularist doctrine of Islam influential in Spain. Islamic doctrine distinguishes first between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples and second between those non-Muslims who are, like Muslims themselves, “Peoples of the (...) Book” and those non-Muslims who are “pagan.” These two distinctions, taken together, could amount to the difference between life and death. For example, Muslim courts ruled on the basis of the Koran that those “others” who were Peoples of the Book could not legally be put to the sword for refusing to convert to Islam while those “others” who were pagan could be. Christians and Jews had to be put up with, and usually were.2 1. Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries , p. 264; my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated I.2. The Koran grounds the series of divisions outlined and is consistent with the well-known Pact of Umar I, which established special regulations for Christians and Jews living in Muslim lands: “’There is to be no compulsion in religion. Rectitude has been clearly distinguished from error. So whoever disbelieves in idols and believes in Allah has taken hold of the firmest handle. It cannot split. Allah is All-hearing and All-knowing’” . See also Sura 109:6: “To you your religion, to me my religion.” Marc Shell, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow for 1990-95, is head of the department of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His books include The Economy of Literature , Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era , and The End of Kinship: “Measure for Measure,” Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood . Children of the Earth is forthcoming. (shrink)

In this study, an adaptive output feedback fault tolerant control scheme is proposed for a class of multi-input and multioutput nonlinear systems with multiple constraints. The neural network is adopted to handle the unknown nonlinearity by means of its superior approximation capability. Based on it, the state observer is designed to estimate the unmeasured states, and the nonlinear disturbance observer is constructed to tackle the external disturbances. In addition, the Nussbaum function is utilized to cope with the actuator faults, which (...) are coupled with the unknown control directions. Combining with the Lyapunov theory, a NN-based output feedback FTC law is developed for the MIMO nonlinear systems, and the boundedness of all closed-loop system error signals is proved. Simulation results on the unmanned helicopter are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTaking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s comment that ‘truth gets lost in the Enlightenment’ and Lessing’s parable of God’s ‘left hand’, this paper traces a historical shift in moral and religious thought: roughly from truth to sincerity. From traditional conceptions of conscience as conditional on the objective truth of its content, the paper moves on, via the Reformation and seventeenth-century Augustinian turn, to early modern debates on toleration and the ‘erring conscience’. It is argued that Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique of (...) 1686 can be read as a crucial catalogue for understanding the substitution of truth with sincerity : so that not truth but truthfulness is considered to be essential for moral and religious justification. Moving from Bayle to Immanuel Kant, the paper then shows how many of the same questions rise in Kant’s late essay on theodicy, which is also an essay on sincerity or integrity, via the Book of Job. Through these two thinkers, various themes are connected: from conscience and sincerity to the problem of the conscientious persecutor. Finally, these themes of truth, error and integrity are linked to the modern debate on authenticity, and a framework is proposed for conceptualising these various shifts. (shrink)

Quantum computers are hypothetical quantum information processing (QIP) devices that allow one to store, manipulate, and extract information while harnessing quantum physics to solve various computational problems and do so putatively more efficiently than any known classical counterpart. Despite many ‘proofs of concept’ (Aharonov and Ben–Or 1996; Knill and Laflamme 1996; Knill et al. 1996; Knill et al. 1998) the key obstacle in realizing these powerful machines remains their scalability and susceptibility to noise: almost three decades after their conceptions, experimentalists (...) still struggle to maintain useful quantum coherence in QIP devices with more than a pair of qubits (e.g., Blatt and Wineland 2008). This slow progress has prompted debates on the feasibility of quantum computers, yet the quantum information community has dismissed the skepticism as “ideology” (Aaronson 2004), claiming that the obstacles are merely technological (Kaye et al. 2007, 240). In a recent paper (Hagar 2009) I’ve argued that such a skepticism with respect to the feasibility of quantum computers need not be deemed ideological at all, and that the aforementioned ‘proofs of concept’ are physically suspect. Using analogies from the foundations of classical statistical mechanics (SM), I’ve also argued that instead of active error correction, the appropriate framework for debating the feasibility of large–scale, fault–tolerant and computationally superior quantum computers should be the project of error avoidance: rather than trying to constantly ‘cool down’ the QIP device and prevent its thermalization, one should try to locate those regions in the device’s state space which are thermodynamically ‘abnormal’, i.e., those regions in the device’s state space which resist thermalization regardless of external noise. This paper is intended as a further contribution to the debate on the feasibility of large–scale, fault–tolerant and computationally superior quantum computers. Relying again on analogies from the foundations of classical SM, it suggests a skeptical conjecture and frames it in the ‘passive’, error avoidance, context.. (shrink)

Current trends toward increased pace, more complex substance and lower tolerance of error have caused the financial marketplace to rely more heavily on the integrity of financial data and, therefore, of those who prepare the financial statements. At the same time, these trends place higher challenges before professional accountants and it is essential that they have excellent ethical guidance to live up to modern expectations. However, in view of the current codes of conduct, an accountant may not have (...) a clear understanding of what priority of interests to satisfy, who can be consulted for advice, to whom to report misdeeds, what protection is offered a right-doer and what sanction will be forthcoming for doing wrong. Possible solutions are offered to these problems in ways that ought to strengthen the accounting profession and prevent unscrupulous companies from taking advantage of both members of the profession and the unsuspecting public. To provide the appropriate quality of service to society in the future, the Canadian accounting profession should offer its members the improved guidance and enhanced mechanisms for confidential consultation, assistance and protection outlined herein. (shrink)

A fuzzy predictive fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed for a wide class of discrete-time nonlinear systems with uncertainties, interval time-varying delays, and partial actuator failures as well as unknown disturbances, in which the main opinions focus on the relevant theory of FPFTC based on Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model description of these systems. The T-S fuzzy model represents the discrete-time nonlinear system in the form of the discrete uncertain time-varying delay state space, which is firstly constructed by a set of local linear (...) models and the nonlinear membership functions. The novel improved state space model can be further obtained by extending the output tracking error to the constructed model. Then the fuzzy predictive fault-tolerant control law based on this extended model is designed, which can increase more control degrees of freedom. Utilizing Lyapunov-Krasovskill theory, less conservative delay-range-dependent stable conditions in terms of linear matrix inequality constraints are given to ensure the asymptotically robust stability of closed-loop system. Meanwhile, the optimized cost function and H-infinity performance index are introduced to the stable conditions to guarantee the robust performance and antidisturbance capability. The simulation results on the temperature control of a strong nonlinear continuous stirred tank reactor show that the proposed control scheme is feasible and effective. (shrink)

Current debate over the motives, ideological justifications, and outcomes of the war with Iraq have been strident and polarizing. _A Matter of Principle _is the first volume gathering critical voices from around the world to offer an alternative perspective on the prevailing pro-war and anti-war positions. The contribu-tors—political figures, public intellectuals, scholars, church leaders, and activists—represent the most powerful views of liberal internationalism. Offering alternative positions that challenge the status quo of both the left and the right, these essays claim (...) that, in spite of the inconsistent justifications provided by the United States and its allies and the conflict-ridden process of social reconstruction, the war in Iraq has been morally justifiable on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, a flagrant violator of human rights, a force of global instability and terror, and a threat to world peace. The authors discuss the limitations of the current system of global governance, which tolerates gross violations of human rights and which has failed to prevent genocide in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda. They also underscore the need for reform in international institutions and international law. At the same time, these essays do not necessarily attempt to apologize for the mistakes, errors, and deceptions in the way the Bush administration has handled the war. Disputing the idea that the only true liberal position on the war is to be against it, this volume charts an invaluable third course, a path determined by a strong liberal commitment to human rights, solidarity with the oppressed, and a firm stand against fascism, totalitarianism, and tyranny. (shrink)

Current precursors in the development of lethal, autonomous systems (LAS) point to the use of biometric devices for assessing, identifying, and verifying targets. The inclusion of biometric devices entails the use of a probabilistic matching program that requires the deliberate targeting of noncombatants as a statistically necessary function of the system. While the tactical employment of the LAS may be justified on the grounds that the deliberate killing of a smaller number of noncombatants is better than the accidental killing of (...) a larger number, it may nonetheless contravene a reemerging conception of right intention. Originally framed by Augustine of Hippo, this lesser-known formulation has served as the foundation for chivalric code, canon law, jus in bello criteria, and the law of armed conflict. Thus it serves as a viable measure to determine whether the use of lethal autonomy would accord with these other laws and principles. Specifically, examinations of the LAS through the lenses of collateral damage, the principle of double effect, and the principle of proportionality, reveal the need for more attention to be paid to the moral issues now, so that the promise of this emerging technology—that it will perform better than human beings—might actually come to pass. (shrink)

In the context of clinical and non-clinical biomedical practices, negligence is usually understood as a lapse of a specific professional duty by a healthcare worker or by a medical facility. This paper tries to delineate systemic negligence as another kind of negligence in the context of health systems, particularly in developing countries, that needs to be recognized and addressed. Systemic negligence is not just a mere collection of stray incidences of medical errors and system failures in a health system, but (...) is proposed in this paper as a more pervasive kind of neglect. Several non-medical factors, such as lack of social and political will, also contribute to it and hence is more difficult to address in a health system. This paper argues that recognizing systemic negligence and including it research agenda have special moral importance for researchers in developing world bioethics, public health ethics and for health activists in the developing world. For, it can be a potent health system barrier, and can seriously impair efforts to ensure patient safety, particularly in the weaker health systems. As it erodes accountability in a health system, addressing it is also important for the twin goals of ensuring patient safety and improving health system performance. Above all, it needs to be addressed because the tolerance of its persistence in a health system seems to undervalue health as a social good. (shrink)

The potential for scalable quantum computing depends on the viability of fault tolerance and quantum error correction, by which the entropy of environmental noise is removed during a quantum computation to maintain the physical reversibility of the computer’s logical qubits. However, the theory underlying quantum error correction applies a linguistic double standard to the words “noise” and “measurement” by treating environmental interactions during a quantum computation as inherently reversible, and environmental interactions at the end of a quantum (...) computation as irreversible measurements. Specifically, quantum error correction theory models noise as interactions that are uncorrelated or that result in correlations that decay in space and/or time, thus embedding no permanent information to the environment. I challenge this assumption both on logical grounds and by discussing a hypothetical quantum computer based on “position qubits.” The technological difficulties of producing a useful scalable position-qubit quantum computer parallel the overwhelming difficulties in performing a double-slit interference experiment on an object comprising a million to a billion fermions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ted Gioia associated the “aesthetics of imperfection” with improvised music. In an earlier article, I extended it to all musical performance. This article reconceives my discussion, offering more precise analyses: The aesthetics of imperfection is now argued to involve open, spontaneous response to contingencies of performance or production, reacting positively to idiosyncratic instruments; apparent failings in performance, and so on. Perfectionists, in contrast, prefer a planning model, not readily modified in face of contingencies. Imperfection is not toleration of errors (...) and imperfections, as Gioia assumes, but a positive aesthetic, as in Japanese wabi-sabi. Imperfections can become new styles or kinds of perfection—and so true imperfectionism is a constant striving for new contingencies to respond to. A subtler, more complex relation between composition and improvisation is proposed, in which both have broad and narrow senses. Composition involves works, usually desk produced and notated; or more generally, putting things together in an aesthetically rewarding form. Thus, improvisation is a compositional method. Improvisation and composition are interdependent; both involve structure and spontaneity. Imperfectionism is an aesthetics of performance—of compositions as well as improvisations. Improvisation is no risker, or prone to mistakes, than performance of compositions. (shrink)

Contrary to the incommensurability thesis, I argue that the referents of theoretical terms can remain stable under theory change, if they are associated with “sparse meaning spaces.” In them, reference is error tolerant, for there are no alternatives in the neighborhood to which terms in altered descriptions can shift their reference.

Tolerance spaces are sets equipped with a reflexive, symmetric, but not necessarily transitive, relation of indistinguishability, and are useful for describing vagueness based on error-prone measurements. We show that any tolerance space can be embedded in one generated by comparisons using prototypical objects. As a result propositions, definable on a tolerance space can be translated into propositions behaving classically.

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

A sample of college women and men responded to a survey assessing attitudes, beliefs, experiences, and behaviors relevant to sexual harassment and assault. Men were more tolerant of sexual harassment, more likely to believe that heterosexual relationships were adversarial, more likely to subscribe to rape myths, and more likely to admit that they might sexually assault someone under some circumstances. Data from the present study support the proposition that relevant affective, cognitive, and behavioral indices of hostile sexuality directed against women (...) are linked, supporting the assumption of a continuum of misogyny. Significant positive correlations were predicted and found among men's self-reported tolerance for sexual harassment, adversarial sexual beliefs, rape-myth acceptance, likelihood to rape, and experience as a sexual victimizer. Among women, belief and attitude measures were positively correlated but, as predicted, experience of sexual victimization was not reliably related to any other measure, supporting the conclusion that personal characteristics are not relevant to college women's sexual victimization. (shrink)

The Cartesian thesis that some justifications are infallible faces a gradation puzzle. On the one hand, infallible justification tolerates absolutely no possibility for error. On the other hand, infallible justifications can vary in evidential force: e.g. two persons can both be infallible regarding their pains while the one with stronger pain is nevertheless more justified. However, if a type of justification is gradable in strength, why can it always be absolute? This paper explores the potential of this gradation challenge (...) by rejecting Fumerton's recent ‘semantic decision' solution. On Fumerton's suggestion, the putative gradation of infallible justifications is essentially semantic. It concerns only how we use the relevant term but not how well we perceive the truth. Regardless of its intuitive appeal, Fumerton's solution does not cover all the related situations. There is an irreducibly epistemic sense in which infallible justifications vary in degrees. (shrink)

A common reaction to the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems is that Einstein's general theory of relativity contains the seeds of its own destruction. This attitude is critically examined. A more tolerant attitude toward spacetime singularities is recommended.

The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what determines the content of the context? Many theorists would include among these determinants aspects of the speaker’s intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the determinants of the context never include the speaker’s intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication. To (...) illustrate an alternative approach, I present an original theory of the reference of demonstratives according to which the referent of a demonstrative is the object that adequately and best satisfies certain accessibility criteria. Although I call my thesis zero tolerance for pragmatics, it is not an expression of intolerance for everything that might be called “pragmatics.”. (shrink)

Relying on the universality of quantum mechanics and on recent results known as the “threshold theorems,” quantum information scientists deem the question of the feasibility of large‐scale, fault‐tolerant, and computationally superior quantum computers as purely technological. Reconstructing this question in statistical mechanical terms, this article suggests otherwise by questioning the physical significance of the threshold theorems. The skepticism it advances is neither too strong (hence is consistent with the universality of quantum mechanics) nor too weak (hence is independent of technological (...) contingencies). *Received June 2009; revised August 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

A joint modelling of objective worlds and subjective perceptions within two-dimensional semantics eliminates the margin for error principle and solves the epistemic sorites paradox. Two objective knowledge modalities can be defined in two-dimensional frames accounting for subjective perceptions: “necessary knowledge” (NK) and “possible knowledge” (PK), the latter being better suited to the interpretation of knowledge utterances. Two-dimensional semantics can in some cases be reduced to one-dimensional ones, by defining accessibility relations between objective worlds that reflect subjective perceptions: NK and (...) PK are respectively equivalent to ${\square \square }$ and ${\lozenge \square }$ in some one-dimensional frame, and to ${\square }$ and another modality in some other. (shrink)

In chapter 5 of Knowledge and its Limits, T. Williamson formulates an argument against the principle (KK) of epistemic transparency, or luminosity of knowledge, namely “that if one knows something, then one knows that one knows it”. Williamson’s argument proceeds by reductio: from the description of a situation of approximate knowledge, he shows that a contradiction can be derived on the basis of principle (KK) and additional epistemic principles that he claims are better grounded. One of them is a reflective (...) form of the margin for error principle defended by Williamson in his account of knowledge. We argue that Williamson’s reductio rests on the inappropriate identification of distinct forms of knowledge. More specifically, an important distinction between perceptual knowledge and non-perceptual knowledge is wanting in his statement and analysis of the puzzle. We present an alternative account of this puzzle, based on a modular conception of knowledge: the (KK) principle and the margin for error principle can coexist, provided their domain of application is referred to the right sort of knowledge. (shrink)

Error theorists hold that, although our first-order moral thought and discourse commits us to the existence of moral truths, there are no such truths. Holding this position in metaethics puts the error theorist in an uncomfortable position regarding first-order morality. When it comes to our pre-theoretic moral commitments, what should the error theorist think? What should she say? What should she do? I call this the ‘Now What’ Problem for error theory. This paper suggests a framework (...) for evaluating different approaches to the ‘Now What’ Problem, and goes on to evaluate the three most common responses to this problem. All three are found to have noteworthy problems. Finally, I present my own solution, and argue that it presents the most appealing solution to the ‘Now What’ Problem. (shrink)

Williamson (2000a) has argued that posi- tive introspection is incompatible with in- exact knowledge. His argument relies on a margin-for-error requirement for inexact knowledge based on a intuitive safety prin- ciple for knowledge, but leads to the counter- intuitive conclusion that no possible creature could have both inexact knowledge and posi- tive introspection. Following Halpern (2004) I put forward an alternative margin-for-error requirement that preserves the safety require- ment while blocking Williamson’s argument. I argue that the infallibilist conception (...) of knowledge that underlies the new require- ment provides a better account of inexact knowledge and higher-order knowledge than both Williamson’s and Halpern’s. (shrink)

Epistemicists say there is a last positive instance in a sorites sequence-we just cannot know which is the last. Timothy Williamson explains that knowledge requires a margin for error and this ensures that the last heap will not be knowable as a heap. However, there is a class of disjunctive predicates for which knowledge at the thresholds is possible. They generate sorites paradoxes that cannot be diagnosed with the margin for error principle.

HIV infection and AIDS create many dilemmas in Chinese AIDS/HIV prevention policy. A strategy of clinical tolerance is proposed to address these dilemmas. The immediate purpose of the strategy of clinical tolerance is to win the cooperation of members of stigmatized groups at high risk for contracting HIV infection and AIDS, which occurs as a result of acts done in private and thus beyond the reach of regulation. The strategy of clinical tolerance differs from both tolerance (...) as liberal tolerance and tolerance as a moral ideal of tolerance. A strategy of clinical tolerance does not ask the government, health worker, health official or the public to change either laws or the disapproval of prostitution, homosexuality and drug use. A strategy of clinical tolerance asks, instead, that we weigh what we may regard as the wrong involved in prostitution, homosexuality, and drug use against the greater evil of an HIV/AIDS epidemic. A strategy of clinical tolerance offers the most effective and practical way to confront a growing and significant public health problem in China. (shrink)

Epistemicism seems to be the most dominating approach to vagueness in the recent twenty years. In the logical and philosophical tradition, e.g. Peirce, vagueness does not depend on human knowledge. Epistemicists deny this fact and contend that vagueness is merely the result of our imperfect mind, our dearth of knowledge, sort of phantom, finally, that it simply does not exist. In my opinion, such a stance not only excludes vagueness comprehended in terms of human knowledge, but which is worse, stems (...) from spurious logical arguments. The part of arguments called Sorensen’s Arguments or even Proofs were the subject of my analysis in the book Paradoksy and in the paper “Epistemicism and Roy Sorensen Arguments” published in the Bulletin of the Section of Logic. Here I shall only briefly refer to these works and focus mainly on the arguments launched by Tymothy Williamson. One of them is to uncover why we are not able to recognize the alleged sharp boundary between positive and negative extensions of any vague predicates. Williamson’s reasoning is based on his margin for error principle. Another argumentation of Williamson aims at the refutation of the principle I know that I know. It should be emphasized that all the aforementioned arguments are fundamental for epistemicism and all of them are fallacious because of either formal or false-premise fallacy. There is the circumstance that we cannot deem epistemicism logical. Finally, we show that within the epistemic frame the following thesis is valid: if what epistemicism states is the case, then what epistemicism states is not the case. This immediately implies → ¬p’) that it is not the case what epistemicism states. So, either epistemicism or logic. (shrink)

I address Peter Mott's 'Margins for Error and the Sorites Paradox' , pp. 494–503). Mott criticizes my account of inexact knowledge, on which it satisfies margin for error principles of the form 'If one knows in a given case, one avoids false belief in sufficiently similar cases'. Mott's arguments are shown to be fallacious because they ignore the fact that our knowledge of inexact knowledge is itself inexact. In the examples discussed, the first-level inexact knowledge is perceptual. Since (...) my defense of an epistemicist theory of vagueness explains our ignorance of truth-values in borderline cases as the result of knowledge the inexactness of which has a conceptual source, the paper also contributes to the defense of epistemicism about vagueness. (shrink)

Let us say that the proposition that p is transparent just in case it is known that p, and it is known that it is known that p, and it is known that it is known that it is known that p, and so on, for any number of iterations of the knowledge operator ‘it is known that’. If there are transparent propositions at all, then the claim that any man with zero hairs is bald seems like a good candidate. (...) We know that any man with zero hairs is bald. And it also does not seem completely implausible that we know that we know it, and that we know that we know that we know it, and so on. (shrink)

A pathogenic connection between autoreactive T cells, fungal infection, and carcinogenesis has been demonstrated in studies of human autoimmune polyendocrinopathy-candidiasis-ectodermal dystrophy as well as in a mouse model in which kinase-dead Ikkα knock-in mice develop impaired central tolerance, autoreactive T cell–mediated autoimmunity, chronic fungal infection, and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, which recapitulates APECED. IκB kinase α is one subunit of the IKK complex required for NF-κB activation. IKK/NF-κB is essential for central tolerance establishment by regulating the development of (...) medullary thymic epithelial cells that facilitate the deletion of autoreactive T cells in the thymus. In this review, we extensively discuss the pathogenic roles of inborn errors in the IKK/NF-κB loci in the phenotypically related diseases APECED, immune deficiency syndrome, and severe combined immunodeficiency; differentiate how IKK/NF-κB components, through mTEC, T cells/leukocytes, or epithelial cells, contribute to the pathogenesis of infectious diseases, autoimmunity, and cancer; and highlight the medical significance of IKK/NF-κB in these diseases. IKK/NF-κB regulates the expression of many genes that encode proteins involved in many crucial biological functions, such as immunity, tissue homeostasis, and fungal/bacterial/viral infections. Also, IKKα plays anti-tumor activities in many organs independently of NF-κB pathways. Thus, an inborn error in one of these gene loci can cause severe human diseases through these complicated mechanisms. (shrink)

In their paper “Vagueness, Ignorance, and Margins for Error” Kenton Machina and Harry Deutsch criticize the epistemic theory of vagueness. This paper answers their objections. The main issues discussed are: the relation between meaning and use; the principle of bivalence; the ontology of vaguely specified classes; the proper form of margin for error principles; iterations of epistemic operators and semantic compositionality; the relation or lack of it between quantum mechanics and theories of vagueness.

Because of its practical advantages, machine learning (ML) is increasingly used for decision-making in numerous sectors. This paper demonstrates that the integral characteristics of ML, such as semi-autonomy, complexity, and non-deterministic modeling have important ethical implications. In particular, these characteristics lead to a lack of insight and lack of comprehensibility, and ultimately to the loss of human control over decision-making. Errors, which are bound to occur in any decision-making process, may lead to great harm and human rights violations. It is (...) important to have a principled way of assigning responsibility for such errors. The integral characteristics of ML, however, pose serious difficulties in defining responsibility and regulating ML decision-making. First, we elaborate on these characteristics and their epistemic and ethical implications. We then analyze possible general strategies for resolving the assignment of moral responsibility and show that, due to the specific way in which ML functions, each potential solution is problematic, whether we assign responsibility to humans, machines, or using hybrid models. Then, we shift focus on an alternative approach that bypasses moral responsibility and attempts to define legal liability independently through solutions such as informed consent and the no-fault compensation system. Both of these solutions prove unsatisfactory because they leave too much room for potential abuses of ML decision-making. We conclude that both ethical and legal solutions are fraught with serious difficulties. These difficulties prompt us to re-weigh the costs and benefits of using ML for high-stake decisions. (shrink)