Evidence that confirms a scientific hypothesis is said to be ‘novel’ if it is not discovered until after the hypothesis isconstructed. The philosophical issues surrounding novel confirmation have been well summarized by Campbell and Vinci [1983]. They write that philosophers of science generally agree that when observational evidence supports a theory, the confirmation is much stronger when the evidence is ‘novel’... There are, nevertheless, reasons to be skeptical of this tradition... The notion of novel confirmation is beset with a theoretical (...) puzzle about how the degree of confirmation can change without any change in the evidence, hypothesis, or auxiliary assumptions... There have not yet appeared any obviously satisfactory solutions to these problems Much of the literature on novel confirmation relies on the Bayesian analysis of conditional probabilities. Let H represent a hypothesis, E an event that confirms the hypothesis, and B some relevant background information. Denote by Pr the conditional probability of x given y. There are various plausible measures of the degree of support that E lends to H. Among these are: Degree of support = Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pt In the work cited, Campbell and Vinci offer a somewhat more involved Bayesian interpretation. Formula is discussed by Gardner [1981] who points out that under this formulation there can be no role for novelty. 'The function Pr contains no third slot in which to insert a temporal relation between the invention of H and the inventor's learning E. Obviously, then, this relation could not possibly affect E's support of H.' Formula, on the other hand, suggests a role for novelty. Bayes's Theorem allows us to rewrite the formula as Degree of support = Pr x [Pr – 1] We can use 1/Pr as a measure of the novelty of E. Then shows that the degree of support increases with novelty of E. In the paper already cited, Campbell and Vinci discuss shortcomings of this analysis. Formula expresses an alternative offered by Howson [1984]. In that formula, Pr represents the probability of H assuming that only B – {E} is known. This allows for the possibility of non-novel facts generating support for hypotheses. Niiniluoto [1984] argues for a variant along the lines of, in which we account for the possibility that the theorist was unaware that his hypothesis entails E. One problem in deciding among these approaches is that the choice of a definition for the degree of support appears arbitrary. What kind of argument could justify the choice of one definition over another? It is our position that there can be no basis for addressing this question in the absence of an explicit model of the process by which hypotheses are generated. Only in the presence of such a model can the various conditional probabilities be given meaningful interpretations. We provide such models in Sections 1, 2 and 4. The simple model of Section 1, incorporating strong assumptions, yields the conclusion that novelty is irrelevant. When these assumptions are relaxed in the later sections, novelty becomes relevant for a variety of reasons. It is at least potentially the case that scientists have more information about their own abilities than is publicly available, and this information might influence their decisions about whether even to attempt novel prediction. If this is so, then it should be incorporated into the model of hypothesis generation. This requires an explicit discussion of how scientists respond to incentives and how the incentives themselves evolve, which in turn takes us into the realm of economic theory. We have addressed these issues in another paper, written for an audience of economists. The results of this research are summarized in Section 3. (shrink)

The sciences are too important to be left exclusively to scientists, and indeed they have not been. The structure of scientific knowledge, the role of the sciences in society, the appropriate social contexts for the pursuit of scientific inquiry, have long been matters for reflection and debate about the sciences carried on both within academe and outside it. Even within the universities this reflection has not been the property of any single discipline. Philosophy might have been first in the field, (...) but history and the social sciences have also entered the fray. For the latter, new problems came to the fore, since reflection on the sciences is, in the case of the social sciences, necessarily also reflection on themselves as sciences. Reflection on the natural sciences and self-reflection by the social sciences came to be dominated in the 1960s by the term 'positivism'. At the time when this word had been invented, the sciences were flourishing; their social and material environment had become increasingly favourable to scientific progress, and the sciences were pointing the way to an optimistic future. In the later twentieth century, however, 'positivism' came to be a word used more frequently by those less sure of nineteenth century certainties. In both sociology and philosophy, 'positivism' was now something to be rejected, and, symbolizing the collapse of an earlier consensus, it became itself the shibboleth of a new dissensus, as different groups of reflective thinkers, in rejecting 'positivism', rejected something different, and often rejected each other. (shrink)

Misinformation, disinformation, or fake news pose a new societal challenge. Through Kantian philosophy, we postulate this as an ethical challenge, one driven by social forces that shape social media’s use towards unethical knowledge production. However, automated or intelligent technologies can also be a solution in acting as a polygraph on social media platforms. We propose such technology could be ethical-by-design if we bring moral philosophy into a software architecture. Kant’s philosophical formalism is well-aligned with computing logic, especially blockchain applications. However, (...) we must also remain highly vigilant to the conceptual complexities, the existing critiques on Kantian ethics and deontology, and the general approach of imbuing moral thinking into a machine-especially if based on only one, rather hard-lined philosophy. While the principled nature of Kant’s propositions make for a suitable architecture, it poses in itself critical ethical concerns and considerations. (shrink)

This is a short note on a problem arising from lewis's account of 'truth in fiction'. In the case of the unreliable narrator, A writer, On lewis's view, Must pretend to pretend. An explanation is offered for this in terms of mimicry or impersonation, And some consequences drawn about fictional ontology.

‘Isn’t it clear that a man must have the right to warn the majority, to argue with the majority, to fight with the majority if he believes he holds the truth? Before many can know something, one must know it!’ The words are Dr Stockman’s of An Enemy of the People1 and in a competitive market building upon a Smithian self-interest there might seem to be no room for people like him. Whatever the personal attitudes of the owners, managers (...) and employees, they would feel forced to behave in business like all of their competitors. Such is the logic of the basic driving forces in Western societies. It is a logic that necessitates lean and mean production, the substitution of labour with capital, relocation of production to places with low labour costs — also known as social dumping — or to places with less stringent environmental demands and/or less costly safety regulations. The traditional way to prevent this happening has been to use state intervention and regulation to curb the worst cases. But today many of the traditional harnesses on an unbridled market economy have been removed, such as controls on capital movements, trade across borders or regulation of sectors like transport, telecommunication, energy, utilities and so on. With this in mind we may ask whether there exists an alternative to state intervention that would contain or change the direction of the logic from within the logic itself. In other words, is it possible for a single or a few entrepreneurs to change the logic in such a way that external regulation is avoided or reduced, while finding answers to the problems and concerns caused by that logic? Of course there is a risk that these answers may consist of just a kind of exploitative riding of the waves of concerns and offering strange, Potemkin-like answers to for instance the clamour for environmental responsibility. Responsible entrepreneurship is something else, though. It consists in understanding genuine concerns and using one’s special knowledge in a certain field, to experiment and develop constantly improving answers to these concerns, giving a concrete form to emerging values, and raising the expectations of all those having these concerns. (shrink)

Predictivism holds that, where evidence E confirms theory T, E confirms T more strongly when E is predicted on the basis of T and subsequently confirmed than when E is known in advance of T's formulation and used, in some sense, in the formulation of T. Predictivism has lately enjoyed some strong supporting arguments from Maher (1988, 1990, 1993) and Kahn, Landsberg, and Stockman (1992). Despite the many virtues of the analyses these authors provide it is my view that (...) they (along with all other authors on this subject) have failed to understand a fundamental truth about predictivism: the existence of a scientist who predicted T prior to the establishment that E is true has epistemic import for T (once E is established) only in connection with information regarding the social milieu in which the T-predictor is located and information regarding how the T-predictor was located. The aim of this paper is to show that predictivism is ultimately a social phenomenon that requires a social level of analysis, a thesis I deem social predictivism. (shrink)

A structure which generalizes formulas by including substitution terms is used to represent proofs in classical logic. These structures, called expansion trees, can be most easily understood as describing a tautologous substitution instance of a theorem. They also provide a computationally useful representation of classical proofs as first-class values. As values they are compact and can easily be manipulated and transformed. For example, we present an explicit transformations between expansion tree proofs and cut-free sequential proofs. A theorem prover which represents (...) proofs using expansion trees can use this transformation to present its proofs in more human-readable form. Also a very simple computation on expansion trees can transform them into Craig-style linear reasoning and into interpolants when they exist. We have chosen a sublogic of the Simple Theory of Types for our classical logic because it elegantly represents substitutions at all finite types through the use of the typed -calculus. Since all the proof-theoretic results we shall study depend heavily on properties of substitutions, using this logic has allowed us to strengthen and extend prior results: we are able to prove a strengthen form of the firstorder interpolation theorem as well as provide a correct description of Skolem functions and the Herbrand Universe. The latter are not straightforward generalization of their first-order definitions. (shrink)

Ethical issues arising from public administration are quite complex and difficult. Using a monistic normative ethical approach to these issues may not be very helpful. Thus James Svara’s three-pronged approach to public administration ethics is proposed in order to show its plausibility. The case of Dr Stockman in Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People is examined as a way of demonstrating the significance of Svara’s model.

Comment penser le rapport du droit universel au droit particulier? Au regard du droit universel, la Conférence épiscopale et le Synode diocésain semblent des réalités résiduelles. Cependant, du point de vue ecclésiologique, «particularité» et «universalité» ne sont pas deux réalités différentes mais deux dimensions formelles de la catholica. La catholicité doit s’exprimer dans le droit particulier, sans quoi la pluralité n’est plus honorée et l’unité se mue en uniformité.

В книге говорится о творце, генерирующем творческие акты – непредсказуемые решения and (озарения and ), феномены, которыми обладает только человек-личность. Общественные институты, как и само общество в целом, не могут исключительно своими социальными усилиями генерировать творческий акт. Таким образом, без этого личностного, практически абсолютно автономного, творческого решения общество не может ни обойтись, ни чем-либо его заменить. Используя творческие акты, эти феномены, имманентные только человеку, общество консолидируется и развивается, и, таким образом, человек-творец становится двигателем истории человечества. В этом смысле категория личность (...) имеет не меньшую значимость, чем категория производительные силы или категория общество. Рассматривается концепция природы творчества по Вифляеву, с полным философским обоснованием. (shrink)

Appearing in the “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” as an undefined referent for the limits on freedom of expression in Islam, Shariah is still to be chased as an indefinable referent which restricts freedom of the expression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Press Law as well as Constitution unveil Shariah’s referent to be a person: the Jurist-Ruler around whom a cult of personality is legalized in terms of “Imamate” and around whom all the limits on freedom (...) of expression revolve. Interpretation of Shariah is not a solution but part of the problem in Iran. Such problem can be dealt in terms of three modes of self-expression which were invented by the Iranian Reformists to avoid self-censorship. The notion of master-signifier can be the key to unraveling the problem of self-referentiality in freedom of expression and its Reformist solution in Iran’s legal system. (shrink)

Brain tumor classification plays a niche role in medical prognosis and effective treatment process. We have proposed a combined feature and image-based classifier for brain tumor image classification in this study. Carious deep neural network and deep convolutional neural networks -based architectures are proposed for image classification, namely, actual image feature-based classifier, segmented image feature-based classifier, actual and segmented image feature-based classifier, actual image-based classifier, segmented image-based classifier, actual and segmented image-based classifier, and finally, CFIC. The Kaggle Brain Tumor Detection (...) 2020 dataset has been used to train and test the proposed classifiers. Among the various classifiers proposed, the CFIC performs better than all other proposed methods. The proposed CFIC method gives significantly better results in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy with 98.86, 97.14, and 98.97%, respectively, compared with the existing classification methods. (shrink)