In this paper, I develop a view about machine autonomy grounded in the theoretical frameworks of 4E cognition and PF Strawson’s reactive attitudes. I begin with critical discussion of White, and conclude that his view is strongly committed to functionalism as it has developed in mainstream analytic philosophy since the 1950s. After suggesting that there is good reason to resist this view by appeal to developments in 4E cognition, I propose an alternative view of machine autonomy. Namely, machines count as (...) autonomous when we members of the moral community adopt reactive attitudes in response to their actions. I distinguish this view from White’s and suggest assets and liabilities of this approach. (shrink)

In late 1912, Fritz Goos at the Hamburg Physikalisches Staatslaboratorium discovered a systematic dependency of arc-spectra wavelengths on the length of the electric arc used and on its electric parameters, such as, for instance, the current employed. In early 1913, at Heinrich Kayser's better-equipped physical laboratory in Bonn, Goos was able to confirm these effects using a large concave Rowland grating. He was able to establish that variations of between 3 mm and 10 mm in the length of the (...) arc produced wavelength differences of up to 0.02 Å violet shift and -0.007 Å redshift respectively. Further inquiry also revealed a dependency of the wavelength on the region of the arc selected for spectrometric observation. All these surprising effects were soon collectively named ‘pole effect’.As is shown in this paper, the pole effect threatened the validity of the results of the entire research tradition of high-precision spectroscopy which, around 1910, had excelled in establishing several internally coherent systems of wavelength assignments. These wavelength catalogues had been established by spectroscopists such as Heinrich Kayser, Paul Eversheim and their co-workers in Bonn, by August Herman Pfund in Baltimore, and by Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson in Marseille under the aegis of the ‘International Union for Co-Operation in Solar Research’. They had all produced locally consistent, “homogeneous” systems of wavelengths with estimated errors sometimes smaller than 0.001 Å. However, long before 1913, strange non-local inconsistencies had emerged between these systems that were of much greater magnitude than the estimated error. The discovery of the pole effect opened up the possibility that variations in the arc parameters used in the measurements, which the different teams had hitherto not specified, were responsible for the systematic differences, in their respective sets of measurements, coming to up to 0.025 Å.This paper explores the interrelations between local knowledge production, the strategies for the establishment of local coherence, and the ways in which the community of physicists and spectroscopists handled a possible threat to this coherence after 1913. Around 1930, a general agreement was reached about the physical cause of the pole effect, namely Stark effects, caused in turn by intermolecular electric fields of ions in the arc. Much before 1930, however, the community had already succeeded in standardizing the instrumentation used in high-precision spectrometry and had conformed its research practice to such an extent that from 1917 on the pole effect could be routinely circumvented in high-precision spectrometry and interferometry. Thus, experimentation along with its instrumentation, indeed had ‘a life of its own’, independent of the many unsuccessful efforts to explain the pole effect theoretically. (shrink)

We investigate whether air pollution harms business ethics from the perspective of earnings manipulation, which exerts a real effect on the economy and social welfare. Using a large sample and a comprehensive air quality index in China, we find that firms located in cities with more severe air pollution exhibit higher levels of discretionary accruals and are more likely to restate their financial statements, consistent with exposure to air pollution leading to more earnings manipulation. We further provide causal evidence using (...) propensity score matching and a discontinuity regression design exploiting the Qinling Mountain–Huai River Heating Policy Line, which exogenously leads to more air pollution to cities located immediately north of the Line but not those in the south. Our findings are robust to controlling for weather conditions and alternative samples and measures of air pollution and earnings manipulation. Overall, this study unveils how the ecological environment shapes business ethics. (shrink)

Though some doubts about the principle that every proposition is either true or false were entertained even by Aristotle, both the number and the vigor of criticisms of this principle have been increasing in recent years. This paper attempts a restatement and a re-examination of the issues involved in this dispute, and in particular an evaluation of the effects on the argument of such recent discoveries as that of the “many-valued logics.”.

In English law there is a strong (though rebuttable) presumption that life should be maintained. This article contends that this presumption means that it is always unlawful to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from patients in permanent vegetative state (PVS) and minimally conscious state (MCS), and that the reasons for this being the correct legal analysis mean also that such withdrawal will always be ethically unacceptable. There are two reasons for this conclusion. First, the medical uncertainties inherent in the definition and diagnosis (...) of PVS/MCS are such that, as a matter of medical fact, it can never be established, with the degree of certainty necessary to rebut the presumption, that it is not in the patient’s best interest to remain alive. And second (and more controversially and repercussively), that even if permanent unconsciousness can be unequivocally demonstrated, the presumption is not rebutted. This is because there is plainly more to human existence than consciousness (or consciousness the markers of which can ever be demonstrated by medical investigations). It can never be said that the identity of the patient whose best interests are at stake evaporates (so eliminating the legal or ethical subject) when that person ceases to be conscious. Nor can it be said that the best interests of an unconscious person do not mandate continued biological existence. We simply cannot know. That uncertainty is legally conclusive, and (subject to resource allocation questions and views about the relevance of family wishes and the previously expressed wishes of the patient) should be ethically conclusive. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 33-35.

There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...) would expect were Darwin attempting to model his work on the precepts found in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Science. While Hodge has worked out a careful interpretation of both Darwin and Herschel, drawing similar conclusions, his interpretation misreads Herschel’s use of the vera causa principle and the verification of hypotheses. The new reading that I present here resolves this trouble, combining Hodge’s careful treatment of the structure of the Origin with a more cautious understanding of Herschel’s philosophy of science. This interpretation lets us understand why Darwin laid out the Origin in the way that he did and also why Herschel so strongly disagreed, including in Herschel’s heretofore unanalyzed marginalia in his copy of Darwin’s book. (shrink)

David Elder-Vass's “For Emergence: refining Archer's account of social structure,” is the latest of a number of papers which together constitute a family quarrel in the cognitive space After Postmodernism among realist social scientists. In the case under examination here in “Elder-Vass's Move and Giddens's Call”, the concern is the structure and agency problem in the social sciences. The debate continuing in Elder-Vass's paper represents the proponents of the resurrection of Durkheim's social realism under the auspices of Bhaskar's Transcendental Realism; (...) the debate that continues here as a response to the Elder-Vass paper, opposes the latter's attempt to advance the argument for social realism under the canopy of Harre's Immanental realism. The theme of this response is this: Elder-Vass fails to realize the promise of reconciling social structural realism and social relational realism. (shrink)

Western music is characterized primarily by simple meters, but a number of other musical cultures, including Turkish, have both simple and complex meters. In Experiment 1, Turkish and American adults with and without musical training were asked to detect metrical changes in Turkish music with simple and complex meter. Musicians performed significantly better than nonmusicians, and performance was significantly better on simple meter than on complex meter, but Turkish listeners performed no differently than American listeners. In Experiment 2, members of (...) Turkish classical and folk music clubs who were tested on the same materials exhibited comparable sensitivity to simple and complex meters, unlike the American and Turkish listeners in Experiment 1. Together, the findings reveal important effects of musical training and culture on meter perception: trained musicians are generally more sensitive than nonmusicians, regardless of metrical complexity, but sensitivity to complex meter requires sufficient exposure to musical genres featuring such meters. (shrink)

Preview: “America does not think much of its philosophers,” Douglas Anderson writes in his introduction to Philosophy Americana. “We do not teach philosophy in our high schools. A majority in America have no idea what philosophy is about or why it might be interesting, if not important.” Perhaps that lack of appreciation for philosophy is coeval with its beginnings when the ancient Athenians put Socrates to death. Anderson’s lament is clearly present from the supposed birth of Western philosophy, and vividly (...) so in 1486 in Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s discourse known as The Dignity of Man, where he states, “The whole of philosophy is occasion for contempt and contumely, rather than honor and glory. The deadly and monstrous persuasion has invaded practically all minds, that philosophy ought not to be studied at all or by very few people; as though it were a thing of little worth to have before our eyes and at our fingertips....Thus,” Pico said six centuries ago, “we have reached a point, it is painful to recognize, where the only persons accounted wise are those who can reduce the pursuit of wisdom to a profitable traffic.” So it seems today in America and so it has apparently been and will ever be. Nevertheless, Anderson hopes to open a discussion about how philosophy does and does not manifest itself in American culture, how its practitioners remain “invisible,” and largely misunderstood “in rural, laboring, underclassed, and unschooled settings.” It is not his intention, at least in this book, to take up the issue of race in a discipline as overwhelmingly white as Western philosophy. Yet this has been for me, a black American philosopher, a lifelong meditation, which I will attempt to address in this essay. (shrink)

Although Gaius Julius Victor has attracted scholarly attention due to his inclusion of letter-writing in his fourth-century rhetorical manual, his peculiar notion of sermocinatio or “impersonation” has gone largely unnoticed. Set against the backdrop of earlier accounts of sermocinatio as a technique of the grand style—including accounts in Quintilian and Cicero—Julius Victor presents impersonation as a method of subtle eloquence most germane to plain-style rubrics. Given Julius Victor’s coupling of sermocinatio and letter-writing, too, his manual suggests that the ascending importance (...) of writing tracks this stylistic reorientation, anticipating our own era’s evolving media and techniques for impersonating others. (shrink)

Among the many manuscripts that emerged from the library cave at Mogaoku 莫 高窟 are copies of a medieval vernacular rhapsody entitled “Rhapsody on the Ershi General Spring”. The poem relates a legend about the Han general Li Guangli 李廣利, who is said to have created a spring to provide drinking water for his troops traversing the desert near Dunhuang 敦煌. This article introduces the manuscripts containing “Rhapsody on the Ershi General Spring,” discusses the background and content of the rhapsody, (...) and translates it. (shrink)

Healthcare ethics committees (HEC) have emerged as institutional forums for addressing bioethical dilemmas. Psychiatrists have important roles to play on these committees. Their skills in group process assessment, mental status examination, and character assessment have diverse applications. Psychiatrists can facilitate communication within the committee and as HEC-based clinical ethics consultants. HECs must be concerned with how they arrive at ethical decisions, guarding against political influence or individual monopolization. Psychiatrists can assist these efforts as organizational consultants to HECs. The perception of (...) psychiatrists as reflective, tolerant of ambiguity, humanizing, and approachable about ethical aspects of health care suggests they would make excellent committee leaders. Psychiatrists also have important committee roles to play as ethics educators and policy makers. More demographic data is needed to investigate psychiatrist participation on HECs. Studies of how they are perceived by their ethics committee colleagues may reveal new roles and potential pitfalls for HEC psychiatrists. (shrink)

Epictetus’ discussion of the death of spouse and child in Encheiridion 3 raises interesting problems on the meaning of “person” in his Stoic philosophy. The author uses Epictetus’ discussion as a window into his notion of person, and weighs the strengths and weaknesses of that notion. The Stoic view of person represents an advance over pre-Stoic views. It offers us a better way to look at significant others throughout life, and helps us better to deal with their loss. Yet it (...) falls short of being a fully satisfactory notion of person, because it does not address the fact that I am constituted as person only in relationship to others who are themselves persons. (shrink)

As a youngster of perhaps 8 years, Charles S. Peirce was given a chemistry laboratory in which he probably did experiments in qualitative analysis. These experiments were modeled on the hypothetico-deductive method of inquiry. I argue that this laboratory experience initiated Peirce’s life-long interest in logic and the logic of science, and flowered in his “pragmaticism.”.

Originally published in 1942, this book was written in attempt to resolve disagreements surrounding educational theory through clarifying the positions of key schools of thought. The text is based around the examination of three typical theories: 'Education According to Nature'; 'The Educational Theory of Johann Friedrich Herbart'; and 'The Educational Theory of John Dewey'. Discussions of the foundations of educational theories and the logical assumptions involved in educational measurement are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with (...) an interest in educational theory and the history of education. (shrink)

Inner experience is proposed as a basis for self-interpretation in both children and adults, but young children's inner experience may not be comparable to our own. I consider evidence on children's attribution of inner experience, experience sampling, and the development of inner speech, concluding that Carruthers' theory should predict a developmental lag between mindreading and metacognition.