The percentage of female entrepreneurs is far below the level of males, although it has increased over the past several years. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the purpose of this article is to specify a model in which the relationship among entrepreneurial potential, gender and entrepreneurial intention are explored, by analyzing how perceived behavioral control (PBC) and perceived entrepreneurial skills, as exogenous variables, affect expression of intention for business, and how these are mediated by their entrepreneurial motivations (...) and risk taking propensity. Control variables where also included in this model, such as necessity-driven motives for business, in order to observe whether these are an influential factor. An implementation of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze data collected from 677 students. Variables within the model were compared by gender using t-Test, and all multivariate analysis were done by each one separately as well in order to better gauge their perceptions. Results showed that mean differences between males and females are not abundant, and come only from intentions, PBC and subjective norm, which are higher in males; and motives for business higher in females. Multivariate analysis shows gender differences at the mediation level and that necessity-driven motives are an influencing factor, more so in males, and it hampers the significance of subjective norm. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the results within the framework of entrepreneurship in Spain and future alternatives to improve the entrepreneurial potential are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss what I will call “skeptical pragmatic invariantism” as a potential response to the intuitions we have about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. SPI, very roughly, is a form of epistemic invariantism that says the following: The subject in the bank cases doesn’t know that the bank will be open. The knowledge ascription in the low standards case seems appropriate nevertheless because it has a true implicature. The goal of this paper is to (...) show that SPI is mistaken. In particular, I will show that SPI is incompatible with reasonable assumptions about how we are aware of the presence of implicatures. Such objections are not new, but extant formulations are wanting for reasons I will point out below. One may worry that refuting SPI is not a worthwhile project given that this view is an implausible minority position anyway. To respond, I will argue that, contrary to common opinion, other familiar objections to SPI fail and, thus, that SPI is a promising position to begin with. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy by Trevor PearceAlexander KleinTrevor Pearce. Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 384. Paperback, $35.00.Pragmatist pioneers were young lions in the days of Darwin. Evolutionary-biological thinking infused this philosophical movement from the start. And yet the last time a major monograph appeared on classic pragmatism and evolutionary biology—Philip Wiener's Evolution and (...) the Founders of Pragmatism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949)—the author could personally thank Ralph Barton Perry, William James's junior colleague and eventual biographer. John Dewey himself wrote the foreword.Almost seventy-five years later, we have Trevor Pearce's painstakingly researched Pragmatism's Evolution. The author has graduate training in both biology and philosophy and is a former student of William Wimsatt and Robert Richards's (343). The book offers an intricate portrait of how debates about evolutionary biology informed the thinking of a loose-knit group of pragmatists between the years 1860 and 1910. While a remarkable variety of figures are discussed, ten pragmatists command the most attention: Chauncey Wright, C. S. Peirce, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, John Fiske, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, G. H. Mead, and W. E. B. Du Bois (18). Call them "the American Ten."Without downplaying Darwin, an overarching theme is the special significance of Herbert Spencer. Despite many specific disagreements with him (see e.g. 74, 207–8, 253–54, 281), the American Ten all accepted something more fundamental from Spencer: an intellectual framework that explains mind and morality in terms of functional relationships between organism and environment.After an introduction outlining what Pearce identifies as four chronological "cohorts" of pragmatists (more on this concept below), he examines the 1860s and 1870s reception of Darwin (chapter 1) and Spencer (chapter 2), showing how senior pragmatists like Wright, Peirce, and James defended evolution during this period. In chapter 2, we meet the Metaphysical Club's arch Spencerian, John Fiske, and we get a reading of James's critique of Spencer's psychology and sociology. Chapter 3 gives a highly detailed, reference-work-like portrait of the second cohort's training in evolutionary biology during the 1880s—chiefly Royce, Dewey, Addams, Mead, and Du Bois. In chapter 4, we learn that in the 1880s and 1890s, idealists like Edward Caird, Samuel Alexander, David George Ritchie, and Josiah Royce all co-opted ideas from evolutionary biology, which they apparently thought compatible with Hegelian dialectics. Chapter 5 shows that central planks of Peirce's metaphysics and Dewey's ethics are responsive to an 1890s dispute over the causes of the biological variation upon which selection acts (the so-called "factors" debate). The final two chapters show how pragmatist ethics (chapter 6) and epistemology (chapter 7) were infused with substantive ideas about evolution and about scientific experiment more generally.The depth and use of historical scholarship on offer here are both remarkable. On depth, Pearce draws from nineteen special collections and archives housed at institutions from California to Manchester, UK. The reference list (published on Pearce's website) runs [End Page 160] to 118 pages and was apparently too long for inclusion in the book. Archival research and lengthy bibliographies are to be expected in today's history of philosophy. But the sheer range of sources Pearce draws from is, by any measure, impressive.The use to which he puts those sources is provocative. Close reading, and in particular argument reconstruction, is usually the stock in trade for historians of philosophy. Pearce takes a different approach (7), seeking interpretive insight through a kind of philosophical network analysis. The nodes are mainly philosophers, scientists, and social critics. Unlike digital network analyses, Pearce connects his nodes by hand, via a great multiplicity of social, educational, and intellectual relations. We learn who studied evolution where, with whom, and when; what specific texts were assigned in classes taken, in classes taught; who attacked whom, who sided with whom; and so on.The resulting networks are rich, though they can be difficult to track due to their complexity. At its best, the book uses networks to produce genuine insights that... (shrink)

Hackles have been raised in biosemiotic circles by T. L. Short’s assertion that semiosis, as defined by Peirce, entails “acting for purposes” and therefore is not found below the level of the organism (2007a:174–177). This paper examines Short’s teleology and theory of purposeful behavior and offers a remedy to the disagreement. Remediation becomes possible when the issue is reframed in the terms of the complexity sciences, which allows intentionality to be understood as the interplay between local and global aspects (...) of a system within a system. What is called “acting for purposes” is not itself a type of behavior so much as a relationship between a dynamic system that “exists for a purpose” and its microprocesses that “serve purposes.” The “intentional object” of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts’ behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A “system” can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious “intentional object.” If emergent self-causation is not disallowed, creative originality, as well as directionality, becomes part of the definition of purposeful behavior. Thus, key tools used here, required for understanding emergence, come from poetics rather than semoitics. In the microprocesses of self-organization, I find what I call “accidental” indices and icons — which are poetic in the sense that they involve mere metonymic contiguity and metaphoric similarity — and which are preferentially selected under constrained conditions allowing radically new connections to habituate into an “intentional” self-organized system that, not coincidentally, has some of the emergent characteristics of a conventional symbolic system. (shrink)

The 10th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2019), was held at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University at Buffalo, in Buffalo, NY, USA. It was the 10-year anniversary of the ICBO series, and the return of the conference to Buffalo after the first two ICBO conferences were held in Buffalo in 2009 and 2011. ICBO 2019 was well attended, with 115 registered attendees and additional walk-ins from the local academic community. The program included excellent (...) keynote talks by Barry Smith, “International Standard Ontology,” and Bjoern Peters, “Putting principles into practice: OBO ontologies and applications in immunology,” as well as 23 oral presentations, 26 posters, and one software presentation. There were 53 papers and abstracts submitted for peer-review to ICBO 2019. Each submission was reviewed by three members chosen from the Program Committee. Of these submissions, 43 were accepted for this volume: 19 full papers, 23 poster abstracts, and 1 software demonstration extended abstract. We thank our program committee for their thoughtful reviews. There were also three workshops and four tutorials (listed below) held in conjunction with the main ICBO 2019 meeting. (shrink)

This article examines interconnections between politics and culture in the early Soviet era, using Leon Trotsky’s activities in the campaign for a new everyday life (novyi byt) in 1923 as a case-study. Traditionally, scholars pay attention primarily to Trotsky’s writings on literature and art. In contrast, this article shows the important role of Trotsky’s brochure ‘Problems of Everyday Life’ in the development of a new field of political communication that became the space for criticism of different political and cultural aspects (...) of Soviet power and Bolshevik rule. Using archival and press sources, it shows how the campaign was spread both from below and above, and what were the reasons for its failure to become an alternative cultural revolution. (shrink)

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be (...) sick. This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s, Simon Blackburn published a number of much-discussed works in which he argued that the supervenience of the moral on the natural generates a serious problem for moral realism, a problem which his own brand of moral projectivism can avoid. As we will see below, Blackburn construed moral supervenience in terms of what is known as weak supervenience. Partly in response to Blackburn, a number of philosophers have argued that weak supervenience is too weak to (...) capture the intuitive sense in which the moral supervenes on the natural. Instead, it is argued, we should opt for strong supervenience, and, further, that strong supervenience completely disables Blackburn's argument against moral realism. This idea – that strong supervenience undermines Blackburn's argument – is very common in recent metaethics, and the purpose of the present paper is to develop a challenge to this near-orthodoxy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Quine on Indeterminacy of Translation: The Argument from Below Quine on Indeterminacy of Translation: The Argument from Above Kripke's Wittgenstein's Attack on Meaning Conclusion.

In recent times, representatives of American management science have been arguing increasingly for a functionalization of ethics to change economic thinking: what they are seeking is the systematic integration of ethics into the economic paradigm. Using the insights developed by Hirschman, I would like to show how one must first expose the rhetoric of those critics of change in order then to implement that which is new. Such an 'unmasking' works particularly well when one can defuse the arguments of the (...) reactionaries — which is precisely what one achieves by strategically integrating ethics into economics. In his work The Rhetoric of Reaction Hirschman examines three basic forms of reactionary thought: the perversity thesis, the futility thesis, and the jeopardy thesis. According to the perversity thesis, intended goals are transformed into their opposites. The futility thesis argues that the setting of goals is useless since history runs its own course independent of those goals. The jeopardy thesis claims to preserve what already exists since change might substantially endanger that which has already been achieved. The importance of Hirschman's ideas for the strategic interplay between the academic disciplines can be seen quite clearly in the example of German business ethics. This will be displayed below with reference to Hirschman's three theses. Finally, implications will be drawn for business ethics in general and for management theory in particular. (shrink)

In a homogeneous jury, the votes are exchangeable correlated Bernoulli random variables. We derive the bounds on a homogeneous jury’s competence as the minimum and maximum probability of the jury being correct, which arise due to unknown correlations among the votes. The lower bound delineates the downside risk associated with entrusting decisions to the jury. In large and not-too-competent juries the lower bound may fall below the success probability of a fair coin flip—one half, while the upper bound may (...) not reach a certainty. We also derive the bounds on the voting power of an individual juror as the minimum and maximum probability of her/his casting a decisive vote. The maximum is less than one, while the minimum of zero can be attained for infinitely many combinations of distribution moments. (shrink)

In this article I take a loose, functional approach to defining induction: Inductive forms of reasoning include those prima facie reasonable inference patterns that one finds in science and elsewhere that are not clearly deductive. Inductive inference is often taken to be reasoning from the observed to the unobserved. But that is incorrect, since the premises of inductive inferences may themselves be the results of prior inductions. A broader conception of inductive inference regards any ampliative inference as inductive, where an (...) ampliative inference is one where the conclusion ‘goes beyond’ the premises. ‘Goes beyond’ may mean (i) ‘not deducible from’ or (ii) ‘not entailed by’. Both of these are problematic. Regarding (i), some forms of reasoning might have a claim to be called ‘inductive’ because of their role in science, yet turn out to be deductive after all—for example eliminative induction (see below) or Aristotle’s ‘perfect induction’ which is an inference to a generalization from knowledge of every one of its instances. Interpretation (ii) requires that the conclusions of scientific reasoning are always contingent propositions, since necessary propositions are entailed by any premises. But there are good reasons from metaphysics for thinking that many general propositions of scientific interest and known by inductive inference (e.g. “all water is H2O”) are necessarily true. Finally, both (i) and (ii) fail to take account of the fact that there are many ampliative forms of inference one would not want to call inductive, such as counter-induction (exemplified by the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ that the longer a roulette wheel has come up red the more likely it is to come up black on the next roll). Brian Skyrms (1999) provides a useful survey of the issues involved in defining what is meant by ‘inductive argument’. Inductive knowledge will be the outcome of a successful inductive inference. But much discussion of induction concerns the theory of confirmation, which seeks to answer the question, “when and to what degree does evidence support an hypothesis?” Usually, this is understood in an incremental sense and in a way that relates to the rational credibility of a hypothesis: “when and by how much does e add to the credibility of h?”, although ‘confirms’ is sometimes used in an absolute sense to indicate total support that exceeds some suitably high threshold.. (shrink)

Although the individual mandate was upheld and the Commerce Clause may have been cabined, the decision to strike down a significant element of the “Medicaid expansion” may prove to be the most significant aspect of the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), States were required to extend Medicaid coverage to all individuals under the age of 65 with incomes below 133 percent of the poverty line, a new “essential health benefits” package was (...) required for all new Medicaid recipients, and the increased costs due to the expansion would be entirely covered by the Federal government through 2016, with the Federal payment gradually decreasing to a minimum of 90 percent of the total cost from the expanded coverage. The element found to be unconstitutional was §1396c of the ACA, which permitted the withdrawal of all Federal Medicaid funds from those States that did not comply with the ACA’s requirements for Medicaid expansion. The effect on access to health care may be significant: roughly half of those expected to gain coverage under the ACA were going to gain it through the Medicaid expansion; it is unclear how many States will choose to opt into that expansion in the absence of §1396c.1 Additionally, the argument offered by the Court to strike down that provision might be used to attack other federal programs—concerning transportation, social services, environmental protection, and others—that have a similar structure. This paper will demonstrate that the argument rests on a theoretical mistake concerning the relationships between coercion, compulsion, and political accountability and that, further, this mistake is not one legally forced upon the Court. (shrink)

We generalize Shelah's analysis of cardinality quantifiers for a superstable theory from Chapter V of Classification Theory and the Number of Nonisomorphic Models. We start with a set of bounds for the cardinality of each formula in some general invariant family of formulas in a superstable theory (in Classification Theory, a uniform family of formulas is considered) and find a set of derived bounds for all formulas. The set of derived bounds is sharp: up to a technical restriction, every model (...) that satisfies the original bounds has a sufficiently saturated elementary extension that satisfies the original bounds and such that for each formula the set of its realizations in the extension has arbitrarily large cardinality below the corresponding derived bound of the formula. (shrink)

In a homogeneous jury, in which each vote is correct with the same probability, and each pair of votes correlates with the same correlation coefficient, there exists a correlation-robust voting quota, such that the probability of a correct verdict is independent of the correlation coefficient. For positive correlation, an increase in the correlation coefficient decreases the probability of a correct verdict for any voting rule below the correlation-robust quota, and increases that probability for any above the correlation-robust quota. The (...) jury may be less competent under the correlation-robust rule than under simple majority rule and less competent under simple majority rule than a single juror alone. The jury is always less competent than a single juror under unanimity rule. (shrink)

Krueger & Funder (K&F) see social psychologists as driven to demonstrate that people's behavior falls below relevant moral and intellectual standards. We suggest that social psychologists search for demonstrations of when it is that people's actual behaviors and decisions deviate from expected or ideal behaviors and decisions, and what these “deviations” tell us about general decision processes, including those that do not produce unexpected actions. Often the discoveries are of positive rather than negative behaviors.

Imagine that only the state can meet the need for housing but decides not to do so. Unsurprisingly, participants in a vignette experiment deem this scenario unjust. Hence, justice ratings increase when the living situation improves. To a lesser extent, this also holds beyond the need threshold, understood as the minimum amount necessary for a decent life. Surprisingly, however, the justice evaluation function is highly convex below this point. The resulting S-shaped curve is akin to the value function in (...) prospect theory, with the need threshold providing the point of reference and inflection. A control treatment without needs-information supports this interpretation. Needs-information furthermore compresses the perceived injustice of arbitrary inequality. As in prospect theory, such reference dependency suggests biases in judgment and decision making. A consequence may be that the lot of the poorest in society does not receive the attention it would otherwise get. (shrink)

The allocation of any scarce health care resource, especially a lifesaving resource, can create profound ethical and legal challenges. Liver transplant allocation currently is based upon urgency, a sickest-first approach, and does not utilize capacity to benefit. While urgency can be described reasonably well with the MELD system, benefit encompasses multiple dimensions of patients’ well-being. Currently, the balance between both principles is ill-defined. This survey with 502 participants examines how urgency and benefit are weighted by different stakeholders. Liver transplant patients (...) favored the sickest-first allocation, although all other groups tended to favor benefit. Criteria of a successful transplantation were a minimum survival of at least 1 year and recovery of functional status to being ambulatory and capable of all self-care. An individual delisting decision was accepted when the 1-year survival probability would fall below 50%. Benefit was found to be a critical variable that may also trigger the willingness to donate organs. The strong interest of stakeholder for successful liver transplants is inadequately translated into current allocation rules. (shrink)

§ 1. Introduction. In this communication we present some recent results on the classification of Polish metric spaces up to isometry and on the isometry groups of Polish metric spaces. A Polish metric space is a complete separable metric space.Our first goal is to determine the exact complexity of the classification problem of general Polish metric spaces up to isometry. This work was motivated by a paper of Vershik [1998], where he remarks : “The classification of Polish spaces up to (...) isometry is an enormous task. More precisely, this classification is not ‘smooth’ in the modern terminology.” Our Theorem 2.1 below quantifies precisely the enormity of this task.After doing this, we turn to special classes of Polish metric spaces and investigate the classification problems associated with them. Note that these classification problems are in principle no more complicated than the general one above. However, the determination of their exact complexity is not necessarily easier.The investigation of the classification problems naturally leads to some interesting results on the groups of isometries of Polish metric spaces. We shall also present these results below.The rest of this section is devoted to an introduction of some basic ideas of a theory of complexity for classification problems, which will help to put our results in perspective. Detailed expositions of this general theory can be found, e.g., in Hjorth [2000], Kechris [1999], [2001]. (shrink)

Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS, previously known as vegetative state) occurs after patients survive a severe brain injury. Patients suffering from UWS have lost awareness of themselves and of the external environment and do not retain any trace of their subjective experience. Current data demonstrate that neuronal functions subtending consciousness are not completely reset in UWS; however, they are reduced below the threshold required to experience consciousness. The critical factor that determines whether patients will recover consciousness is the distance of (...) their neuronal functions from this threshold level. Recovery of consciousness occurs through functional and/or structural changes in the brain, i.e., through neuronal plasticity. Although some of these changes may occur spontaneously, a growing body of evidence indicates that rehabilitative interventions can improve functional outcome by promoting adaptive functional and structural plasticity in the brain, especially if a comprehensive neurophysiological theory of consciousness is followed. In this review we will focus on the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in UWS and on the plastic changes operating on the recovery of consciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Athens from Alexander to AntonyArthur M. EcksteinChristian Habicht. Athens from Alexander to Antony. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. ix 1 369 pp. Cloth, $39.95.Among his several areas of expertise in ancient studies, Christian Habicht is one of our profession’s authorities on the history and monuments of Hellenistic Athens; and he is a writer of crystal-clear style in both German and [End (...) Page 646] English. He is thus the ideal candidate to have produced a successor to W. S. Ferguson’s magisterial narrative of post-Classical Athenian history. Ferguson’s Hellenistic Athens (London 1911) is itself a work of great learning and insight, but of course it is terribly out of date because of the vast number of archaeological discoveries at Athens (both of buildings and especially of stone inscriptions) since its publication. Those discoveries, continuing to this day, have been primarily the work of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—which did not even begin its massive archaeological project in the Agora until some twenty years after the publication of Ferguson’s book. Habicht’s Athens from Alexander to Antony (published in German in 1995) will rank with Ferguson as a milestone in post-Classical Athenian studies. It is a synthesis of all the technical work done by archaeologists and historians (not least Habicht himself) since Ferguson’s day, and it will no doubt be the standard text on Hellenistic Athens for decades to come. Moreover, Habicht’s Athens is not only a work of careful technical expertise, useful for professional scholars; because it is written (and translated) clearly and elegantly, it will also make the newest discoveries and arguments concerning Hellenistic Athens easily accessible to the general public. All in all, it is a splendid achievement, and one could hardly ask for more. (Though in fact I will: see below.)Habicht’s theme is that the struggle of the Greek city-states for political freedom did not end with the victory of Philip II of Macedon at Chaeronea in 338 b.c. It is true that in the world of Macedonian super-states that developed in the wake of the conquests of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, the individual poleis that had played dominant roles among the Greeks in the Classical age (including Athens) had much less political-military weight, because the scale of politics and of political units was now so much larger. But most city-states (including Athens) “remained viable and vital organisms” (366; cf. 4), capable of inspiring intense traditional patriotism in the elites necessary to run them—even when these poleis were forced to live under the hegemony of a Macedonian king. In the case of Athens specifically, Habicht continually stresses the continuity of institutions, and that this continuity existed because the institutions (Council, Assembly, courts) succeeded in regulating Athenian internal affairs “in an exemplary fashion” (2). It was a situation which the Athenians recognized, and in which they took great pride.But Athens, unlike most other poleis, also had its own imperial past, and so it naturally strove for a long time under often very difficult circumstances to assert not merely local autonomy but its true independence—including freedom of action in foreign relations. Here too one can see the powerful perseverance of the city’s tradition, and the long Athenian struggle for freedom is Habicht’s true theme. Thus he chronicles the energetic military improvements undertaken by the Athenians in the fifteen years after Chaeronea (16–17, 22–24); the serious preparations for war against Alexander the Great in 324 (!) over his decision to deprive Athens of Samos (31–32); the leading role played [End Page 647] by Athens in the Greek rebellion against Macedonian hegemony that followed Alexander’s death (the Lamian War), which ended in defeat and the eventual Macedonian-imposed dictatorship of Demetrius of Phalerum (36–41, 53–66); the successful Athenian self-defense after the city was liberated by Demetrius the Besieger in 307 (74–75); the successful rebellion against Demetrius himself in 287 by “the freedom-loving citizens of Athens” (93), achieved with heavy Athenian casualties in the Piraeus (124... (shrink)

By resituating Alexander von Humboldt in the “working world” of mining, this essay offers a case study of the way in which industry has shaped practice and theory in the history of science. While Humboldt’s experience as a miner in Saxony and Prussia provided him a venue in which to study fossilized vegetation, revealing a fundamental link between the migrations of plants and of peoples, industrial concerns about miners’ safety inspired a study of the interplay between plants and people (...) that shaped his later articulation of the verticality of plant distribution. Moreover, the cartographic methods Humboldt employed during his American journey depended as much on drawing practices indebted to mining as they did on patterns of vertical mobility above and below the surface of the earth. These arguments ultimately encourage a departure from “Humboldtian Science,” a term that has veiled an originally Prusso-Saxon science beneath a set of Anglo-American connotations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Hume to Alexander Dick: A New Letter Heiner Klemme Hume's letter to the well-known physician and sometime President of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, Sir Alexander Dick (formerlyCunningham)(1703-1785),1 belongs toa series ofinteresting letters written by philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment to be found in the autograph-collection of the German chemist and historian of science Ludwig Darmstaedter (1846-1927). Although a catalogue has been published (...) which lists the items ofhis collection in 1909, some of its autographs have not been noticed by scholars. The only hitherto known letter from Hume to Dick was written in August 1760. However, Hume mentions Dick once in a letter of 1762. Although the letter of 1771 listed below does not contribute in any specific way to our knowledge of their relationship, it might be of general interest to students ofHume.?. Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (West) Signature: Sammlung Darmstaedter, 2a 1748 (1) [Address:] To Sir Alexander Dick Bar1 Dear Sir This will be deliverdtoyoubyMrPanton,5 whogoes offthe Endof this Week, to New York. I have us'd the Freedom ofintroducing him to you, both as he is a young Man of Merit, and as I thought it probable you might take the Oppertunity of writing to your Friend, Mr Smith, by so good ahand. Ifyou do, I shoudbegofyou to recommend the young Gentlemen to his Acquaintance; and you may safely mention him as a Man of Letters and a Man of Character. He is to settle in New York, and it is impossible but he must get acquainted with Mr Smith; but a Recommendation from so good an Authority as Yours, wou'd serve to Volume XVI Number 2 87 HEINER KLEMME [crossedout: probably]forwardtheirgood Correspondence, andconnect them much sooner with each other. I am Dear Sir Your most obedient and most humble EdinburghServant 18 of March 1771David Hume Philipps-Universität Marburg, F.R.G. 1.For details ofhis life and work see Leslie Stephen, ed., Dictionary ofNational Biography, Vol. 15 (London, 1888), 14a-14b. 2.Ludwig Darmstaedter, Verzeichnis der Autographensammlung (Berlin, 1909), esp. 167. The collection includes the very firstletter Hume wrote in March 1755 to Andrew Strahan, his printer. See my "'And Time does Justice to All the World': Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von David Hume an William Strahan," Journal of the History of Philosophy, forthcoming. Two further letters of Adam Smith to Thomas Cadell are to be published in Archiv für Geschichte derPhilosophie. 3.See R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner, eds., New letters ofDavid Hume (Oxford, 1954; reprint, New York, 1983), 58-64. 4.See New Letters (above,?. 3), 68. 5.I have not been able to verify the identity ofthis person nor ofthe Mr. Smith mentioned below. 88Hume Studies... (shrink)

Peter Lipton argues that inference to the best explanation involves the selection of a hypothesis on the basis of its loveliness. I argue that in optimal cases of IBE we may be able to eliminate all but one of the hypotheses. In such cases we have a form of eliminative induction takes place, which I call ‘Holmesian inference’. I argue that Lipton’s example in which Ignaz Semmelweis identified a cause of puerperal fever better illustrates Holmesian inference than Liptonian IBE. I (...) consider in detail the conditions under which Holmesian inference is possible and conclude by considering the epistemological relations between Holmesian inference and Liptonian IBE.Keywords: Inference to the best explanation; Peter Lipton; Abduction; Holmesian inference; Eliminative induction. (shrink)

Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the (...) concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are. (shrink)

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

To figure out whether the main empirical question “Is our brain hardwired to believe in and produce God, or is our brain hardwired to perceive and experience God?” is answered, this paper presents systematic critical review of the positions, arguments and controversies of each side of the neuroscientific-theological debate and puts forward an integral view where the human is seen as a psycho-somatic entity consisting of the multiple levels and dimensions of human existence (physical, biological, psychological, and spiritual reality), allowing (...) consciousness/mind/spirit and brain/body/matter to be seen as different sides of the same phenomenon, neither reducible to each other. The emergence of a form of causation distinctive from physics where mental/conscious agency (a) is neither identical with nor reducible to brain processes and (b) does exert “downward” causal influence on brain plasticity and the various levels of brain functioning is discussed. This manuscript also discusses the role of cognitive processes in religious experience and outlines what can neuroscience offer for study of religious experience and what is the significance of this study for neuroscience, clinicians, theology and philosophy. A methodological shift from “explanation” to “description” of religious experience is suggested. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion between theologians, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. (shrink)

The value of resting electroencephalogram (EEG) in revealing neural constitutes of consciousness (NCC) was examined. We quantified the dynamic repertoire, duration and oscillatory type of EEG microstates in eyes-closed rest in relation to the degree of expression of clinical self-consciousness. For NCC a model was suggested that contrasted normal, severely disturbed state of consciousness and state without consciousness. Patients with disorders of consciousness were used. Results suggested that the repertoire, duration and oscillatory type of EEG microstates in resting condition quantitatively (...) related to the level of consciousness expression in brain-damaged patients and healthy-conscious subjects. Specifically, results demonstrated that (a) decreased number of EEG microstate types was associated with altered states of consciousness, (b) unawareness was associated with the lack of diversity in EEG alpha-rhythmic microstates, and (c) the probability for the occurrence and duration of delta-, theta- and slow-alpha-rhythmic microstates were associated with unawareness, whereas the probability for the occurrence and duration of fast-alpha-rhythmic microstates were associated with consciousness. In conclusion, resting EEG has a potential value in revealing NCC. This work may have implications for clinical care and medical–legal decisions in patients with disorders of consciousness. (shrink)

In simplified form, the argument that I am defending holds that the incompatibility of our freedom with determinism follows from the conjunction of (1) a plausible supervenience claim which says that whether a human agent is free depends only on what happens during the agent’s life and (2) a freedom-cancellation principle of Richard Gale which says that an agent is not free if all of her actions are intentionally brought about by another agent. Improved versions of (1) and (2) are (...) also considered. (shrink)

Dispositions are related to conditionals. Typically a fragile glass will break if struck with force. But possession of the disposition does not entail the corresponding simple (subjunctive or counterfactual) conditional. The phenomena of finks and antidotes show that an object may possess the disposition without the conditional being true. Finks and antidotes may be thought of as exceptions to the straightforward relation between disposition and conditional. The existence of these phenomena are easy to demonstrate at the macro-level. But do they (...) exist at the fundamental level also? While fundamental finkish dispositions may be excluded fairly straightforwardly, the existence of fundamental antidotes is more open. Nonetheless I conclude that the phenomenon is likely to be less widespread than at the macro level and that fundamental antidotes may be eliminable. According to the dispositional essentialist, the laws of nature can be explained by taking natural properties to be essentially dispositional. This account can be extended to show that the existence of finks and antidotes explains ceteris paribus laws. Consequently the existence or otherwise of fundamental finks and antidotes sheds some light on the question of whether fundamental laws may also be ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

We provide a general theorem implying that for a (strongly) dependent theory T the theory of sufficiently well-behaved pairs of models of T is again (strongly) dependent. We apply the theorem to the case of lovely pairs of thorn-rank one theories as well as to a setting of dense pairs of first-order topological theories.

In this volume his object is to fully examine his friend's writings and characters and draws upon his own personal recollections to do so.

In light of the failure of attempts to analyse knowledge as a species of justified belief, a number of epistemologists have suggested that we should instead understand justification in terms of knowledge. This paper focuses on accounts of justification as a kind of ‘would-be’ knowledge. According to such accounts a belief is justified just in case any failure to know is due to uncooperative external circumstances. I argue against two recent accounts of this sort due to Alexander Bird and (...) Martin Smith. A further aim is to defend a more traditional conception, according to which justification is a matter of sufficiently high evidential likelihood. In particular, I suggest that this conception of justification offers a plausible account of lottery cases: cases in which one believes a true proposition – for example that one's lottery ticket will lose – on the basis of probabilistic evidence.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)