In this paper, the relationship between the e-value of a complex hypothesis, H, and those of its constituent elementary hypotheses, Hj, j = 1… k, is analyzed, in the independent setup. The e-value of a hypothesis H, ev, is a Bayesian epistemic, credibility or truth value defined under the Full Bayesian Significance Testing mathematical apparatus. The questions addressed concern the important issue of how the truth value of H, and the truth function of the corresponding FBST structure M, relate to (...) the truth values of its elementary constituents, Hj, and to the truth functions of their corresponding FBST structures Mj, respectively. (shrink)

Research on gender inequality has posited the importance of gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work. Previous studies have suggested that gender stereotyping and organizational factors may contribute to discrimination. Yet it is not well understood how these elements connect to foster gender discrimination in everyday workplaces. This work contributes to our understanding of these relationships by analyzing 219 discrimination narratives constructed from sex discrimination cases brought before the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. By looking across a variety of actual work (...) settings, the analysis sheds light on the cultural underpinnings and structural contexts in which discriminatory actions occur. The analyses reveal how gender stereotyping combines in predictable ways with sex composition of workplaces and organizational policies, often through interactional dynamics of discretionary policy usage, to result in discrimination. The findings suggest the importance of cultural, structural, and interactional influences on gender discrimination. (shrink)

The paper is one of the first empirical attempts that builds on the moral dilemmas and group rationality literature to explore the way in which group composition with respect to group members’ individual choices in moral dilemmas and social influence processes impact on group moral choices. First individually and then, in small groups, 221 participants were asked to decide on 10 moral dilemmas. Our results show that emergent group level utilitarianism is higher than the average individual utilitarianism, yet, lower (...) than the highest individual utilitarianism within groups. We also show that average individual utilitarianism positively predicts group utilitarianism while group fragmentation in individual utilitarianism has a negative effect on group utilitarianism. Next to group composition, minority influence processes explain additional variance in group utilitarianism, cognitive dissent having a positive influence, while normative deviance a negative influence on group utilitarianism. Majority influence has no significant influence on group utilitarianism. Finally, our results show that the relationship between group fragmentation in individual utilitarianism and emergent group utilitarianism is mediated by the two forms of minority influence. (shrink)

This paper provides new arguments for the following claim: either strong composition as identity cannot retain the full strength of both the logical principles of one-one identity and its semantical principles or it only delivers cases of boring composition in that it entails mereological nihilism.

This paper is a critical examination of Vendler's well-known aspectual classes (states, activities, accomplishments, achievements). It is argued that it not classes that play a role in the explanation of aspectual phenomena but rather some specific semantic factors from which aspectual classes can be constructed, in particular factors inherent to the (lexical) verb and to the determiners of noun phrases.

The closing chapters of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics x are regularly described as “puzzling,” “extremely abrupt,” “awkward,” or “surprising” to readers. Whereas the previous nine books described—sometimes in lavish detail—the multifold ethical virtues of an embodied person situated within communities of family, friends, and fellow-citizens, NE x 6-8 extol the rarified, god-like and solitary existence of a sophos or sage (1179a32). The ethical virtues that take up approximately the first half of the Ethics describe moral exempla who experience fear fighting for (...) their communities, are sensitive to the esteem and recognition of others, and feel love for a desire to live together with a wide variety of kinds of friends. Such good people take pleasure in prudently expending sums to improve their communities—communities in which they exchange goods and participate in ruling and being ruled in a cooperative fashion. The exemplum of x 7-8, by contrast, is a person whose activity consists almost entirely in exercising his or her mind (nous)—a part of one’s soul that Aristotle explicitly notes is disconnected from human emotions and that can be exercised, insofar as one as wise, in a wholly solitary fashion (1178a15-16, a19-20; 1177a33-34). Although Aristotle’s claim that a “life in accord with the mind” is best and most pleasant (1178a6-7) may jar the intuitions of many people—he himself endorses Anaxagoras’ claim that the happy person will appear as “someone who is absurd” (atopos, 1179a15) to most people—it is false to claim that his conclusions in NE x 6-8 are unexpected or unanticipated, or that the text is in any way discontinuous with what precedes it. The Nicomachean Ethics exhibits aspects of ring-composition both within the work as a whole and within book 10. In NE i 5 Aristotle introduces his rendition of a trope that he inherits (most immediately) from Plato, viz. that the problem of the good can be considered like a contest between three different kinds of life—the life of enjoyment (apolaustikos), the life of politics (politikos), and the life of contemplation (theôrêtikos). NE x 6-8 returns to that contest, rendering a verdict about which life takes first, second, and third place. As the opening lines of NE x 6 note, that verdict presupposes central claims articulated between the first and last books of the Ethics, specifically about the nature of the virtues, the nature of friendship, and the nature of pleasure. NE i 5 and x 6-8 thus serve as “bookends” which encase arguments and proposition located between them. Book 10 exhibits a similar ring-composition. NE x opens with methodological reflection on the gap between the theoretical positions that thinkers articulate and the way they live their lives (especially in the case of scolds who simultaneously criticize pleasure on a scientific level but seek it on a practical level [1172a33-b8]). Chapter 8 concludes with an explicit reiteration of the methodological point, a reiteration that underscores how Aristotle’s treatment of the contest of lives incorporates central aspects of the discussion of pleasure in NE x 1-5. Aristotle’s reiteration of the problem of a gap between theory and practice also draws attention to the centrality of his treatment of pleasure in his adjudication of the three lives. Although the life of pleasure takes a distant third in the contest of lives, the contemplative life wins the contest in part because it itself is the most pleasant form of life. The central philosophical problem looming behind Aristotle’s treatment of the contest of lives concerns the relationship between the notion of activity (energeia) and the notion of a way of life (bios). In the last four decades, much of the scholarship on NE x 6-8 has sought to address the question of what activities a certain way of life includes or excludes. “Monistic” or “dominant” end interpretations of the best life have viewed it as including only contemplative activities whereas “inclusivist” end interpretations of the best life have viewed it as including non-contemplative activities. Although this chapter largely side-steps this debate—partially because there are ample recent first-rate introductory treatments of the debate, partially because I have addressed the question elsewhere in my own writing —I argue that focusing solely on the contest between the two best ways of life overshadows the way that Aristotle incorporates insights from the third way of life into the best way of life. Although the notion of a contest among different kinds of lives presupposes that the lives are mutually exclusive, Aristotle has no problem saying that the contemplative life trumps the life of pleasure because the contemplative life is more pleasant. I proceed in two parts. In the first part I examine what I will call the “outer” ring of the Ethics, namely the relationship between the contest of lives proposed in NE i 5 and its overall resolution in x 6-8. I show how i 5 and x 6 establish the framework for the contest, how x 7 adjudicates that contest in large part by relying upon premises articulated in the interim between books 1 and 10, and how x 6 and x 8 determine the second and third place positions in the contest. In the second part I focus on what I will call the “inner” ring of NE x. More than half of NE x struggles with the nature of pleasure, its role in a happy life, and the methodological problems of examining pleasure within a practical science. I show how x 1 and x 8 are “bookends” that underscore the methodological problem of examining pleasure and how the contest of lives draws upon the proximate conclusions concerning the nature of pleasure in NE x 1-5. (shrink)

Many metaphysicians accept the view that, necessarily, any collection of things composes some further thing. Necessarily, my arms, legs, head, and torso compose my body; necessarily, my arms, my heart, and the table compose something y; necessarily, my heart and the sun compose something z; and so on. 1 Though there have been a few recent attempts to argue against the necessity of this principle of unrestricted composition the consensus is that if it is true, it is necessarily true. (...) 2In what follows I will join the few dissenters and argue that this principle of unrestricted composition is not necessarily true. If I am right, it follows that either some principle of restricted composition is necessarily true or the existence of composite objects is a contingent matter. I will end by indicating why the latter option seems the most plausible. 3I proceed by reductio. Assume the following: Unrestricted composition is necessarily true.That is, assume that necessarily, any collection of things composes something. Then, necessarily, the collection of everything composes something. That is, necessarily, there exists a universal object U having all things as parts, not itself being a proper part of anything. Hence, by our assumption, we get: There must be a universal object U.It is important to note that this is so whether the world is finite or infinite. Holding that in worlds of finite cardinality there is a universal object U while in worlds of infinite cardinality there is no universal object U amounts to accepting a restricted form of composition. 4Now consider the following scenario. Everything in this world is spatially extended and just one half of something else that is also spatially extended. That is, for any thing in this world, there is something else of which …. (shrink)

Phenomenographic research about teachers’ conception of teaching has consistently revealed that teachers’ conception of teaching influence their classroom practices, which in turn shape students’ learning experiences. This paper reports teachers’ conceptions of teaching with regards to the use of interactive spherical video-based virtual reality in Chinese descriptive composition writing. Twenty-one secondary teachers in Hong Kong involved in an ISV-VR-supported Chinese descriptive writing program participated in this phenomenographic study. Analyses of the semi-structured interviews establish seven conception categories that are specifically (...) related to the use of ISV-VR for descriptive Chinese composition writing: offering students more observational opportunities; improving students’ writing skills; promoting students’ learning participation and motivation; shifting learning from teacher-centric to student-centric, enhancing collaborative learning among students; cultivating students’ positive values and moral character, and shaping students’ self-identity as “writers.” The concurrent and convenient access to the ISV-VR resources was for the teachers an enriched and supportive environment for them to cultivate students’ writer identity. In addition, it was discovered that the structural relationships of the conceptions may be better organized along three axes of continuum: conception’s orientation, teaching attention locus, and understanding of writing. These categories form a hierarchy from skill-oriented to community-oriented, and finally to identity-oriented conception. The findings may provide researchers and practitioners with novel insight into the teaching of composition writing in the contexts of L1 acquisition supported by virtual reality technology. (shrink)

John Duns Scotus recognizes complexity in God both at the level of God’s being and at the level of God’s attributes. Using the formal distinction and the notion of “unitive containment,” he argues for real plurality in God, but in a way that permits him to affirm the doctrine of divine simplicity. We argue that his allegiance to the doctrine of divine simplicity is purely verbal, that he flatly denies traditional aspects of the doctrine as he had received it from (...) Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and that his denial of the doctrine allows him to escape certain counterintuitive consequences of the doctrine without falling afoul of the worries that motivated the doctrine in the first place. We note also an important consequence of Scotus’s approach to simplicity for the correct interpretation of his view of the foundation of morality. (shrink)

Although panpsychism has had a very long history, one that goes back to the very origin of western philosophy, its force has only recently been appreciated by analytic philosophers of mind. And even if many still reject the theory as utterly absurd, others have argued that it is the only genuine form of physicalism. This paper examines the case for panpsychism and argues that there are at least goodprima faciereasons for taking it seriously. In a second step, the paper discusses (...) the main difficulty the theory has to face, the ‘composition problem’. This is the problem of explaining how the primitive experiences that are supposed to exist at the ultimate level of reality could give rise to the unified experience of a human being. What assumptions as to the nature of experience generate the composition problem? Is mental composition impossible in principle or do we simply lack at present any understanding of phenomenal parts and wholes? (shrink)

It is customary practice to define ‘x is composed of the ys’ as ‘x is a sum of the ys and the ys are pairwise disjoint ’. This predicate has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the customary characterization is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model where everything qualifies as composed of atoms (...) even though some elements in the domain are gunky, i.e., can be divided indefinitely into smaller and smaller proper parts. (shrink)

I show that a particular version of Hume's Dictum together with the falsity of Composition as Identity entails an incoherency, so either that version of Hume's Dictum is false or Composition as Identity is true. I conditionally defend the particular version of Hume's Dictum in play, and hence conditionally conclude that Composition as Identity is true. I end by suggesting an alternative way out for a persistent foe of Composition as Identity, namely mereological nihilism.

According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to as “functional intentionality,” a machine can have genuine intentional states so long as it has functionally characterizable mental states that are causally hooked up to the world in the right way. This paper considers a detailed description of a robot that seems to meet the conditions of functional intentionality, but which falls victim to what I call “the composition problem.” One obvious way to (...) escape the problem (arguably, the only way) is if the robot can be shown to be a moral patient – to deserve a particular moral status. If so, it isn’t clear how functional intentionality could remain plausible (something like “phenomenal intentionality” would be required). Finally, while it would have seemed that a reasonable strategy for establishing the moral status of intelligent machines would be to demonstrate that the machine possessed genuine intentionality, the composition argument suggests that the order of precedence is reversed: The machine must first be shown to possess a particular moral status before it is a candidate for having genuine intentionality. (shrink)

Abstract: The 'special composition question' is this: given objects O1, . . . , On, under what conditions is there an object O, such that O1, . . . , On compose O? This paper explores a heterodox answer to this question, one that casts composition as a secondary quality. According to the approach I want to consider, there is an O that O1, . . . , On compose (roughly) just in case a normal intuiter would, under (...) normal conditions, intuit that there is. (shrink)

Much complexity we see around us stems from a similar source, structures generated by the interactive combination of many constituents. The constituents themselves can be rather simple, so can the relation between any two. However, because there are so many constituents in a large system, their multiple relations generate a relational network that can be highly complex, variegated, and surprising.

MS. Cromwell 22 was among the Greek books thought to have been donated by Oliver Cromwell, Lord-Proctor and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, to the Bodleian Library in 1654. It received its first full description in the catalogue of Greek manuscripts compiled by Coxe. A modern approach to the description of the codex can be found in the entry that Cromwell 22 obtained in the catalogue of illuminated manuscripts by Irmgard Hutter, principally thanks to a headpiece arabesqued in penwork (...) at p. 22. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of Kant's theory of mathematical cognition in his phoronomy, his pure doctrine of motion. I argue that Kant's account of how we can construct the composition of motion rests on the construction of extended intervals of space and time, and the representation of the identity of the part–whole relations the construction of these intervals allow. Furthermore, the construction of instantaneous velocities and their composition also rests on the representation of extended intervals of space (...) and time, reflecting the general approach to instantaneous velocity in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Research investigating the brain basis of language comprehension has associated the left anterior temporal lobe with sentence-level combinatorics. Using magnetoencephalography, we test the parsing strategy implemented in this brain region. The number of incremental parse steps from a predictive left-corner parsing strategy that is supported by psycholinguistic research is compared with those from a less-predictive strategy. We test for a correlation between parse steps and source-localized MEG activity recorded while participants read a story. Left-corner parse steps correlated with activity in (...) the left ATL around 350–500 ms after word onset. No other correlations specific to sentence comprehension were observed. These data indicate that the left ATL engages in combinatoric processing that is well characterized by a predictive left-corner parsing strategy. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct and discuss Antonio Rubio (1546-1615)’s theory of the composition of the continuum, as set out in his Tractatus de compositione continui, a part of his influential commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, published in 1605 but rewritten in 1606. Here I attempt especially to show that Rubio’s is a significant case of Scholastic overlapping between Aristotle’s theory of infinitely divisible parts and indivisibilism or ‘Zenonism’, i.e. the theory that allows for indivisibles, extensionless points, lines, and surfaces, (...) which are supposed to take part in the composition of the continuum. Even if such a syncretic tendency was, in many different ways, already developing in the medieval period and then at the end of the sixteenth century, Rubio’s position is indeed peculiar. He maintains that indivisibles are real and actual, infinite in act, really distinct from each other, and that, although they indwell in substance, indivisibles do not contribute directly to the constitution of the continuum. In this reconstruction I emphasize notably Rubio’s usage of mereological notions like those of part, whole, completeness and incompleteness. (shrink)

A ubiquitous assumption about composite material objects is that—if they exist at all—they are single things. This chapter articulates and defends manyism, which rejects that assumption. According to manyism, each composite object is simply its many parts. Since manyism accepts the existence of composite objects, it is distinct from nihilism; since manyism denies that composite objects are each one in number in addition to being many in number, it is distinct from the view known as composition as identity (CAI). (...) What’s more, manyism is both coherent and attractive. Manyism is coherent because it can be underwritten by a defensible quasi-Quinean metaontology, and because it’s not analytic that objects are each one in number. Manyism is attractive because it shares all of the benefits of CAI without having to join CAI in objectionably positing many–one identities, and without incurring other serious costs. (shrink)

Society as the ethical starting point for political inquiry -- The moral relevance of dependence -- Nature and the moral frame of society -- Morality in the order of the will.

Recently developed super‐resolution microscopy techniques are changing our understanding of lipid rafts and membrane organisation in general. The lipid raft hypothesis postulates that cholesterol can drive the formation of ordered domains within the plasma membrane of cells, which may serve as platforms for cell signalling and membrane trafficking. There is now a wealth of evidence for these domains. However, their study has hitherto been hampered by the resolution limit of optical microscopy, making the definition of their properties problematic and contentious. (...) New microscopy techniques circumvent the resolution limit and, for the first time, allow the fluorescence imaging of structures on length scales below 200 nm. This review describes such techniques, particularly as applied to the study of membrane organisation, synthesising newly emerging facets of lipid raft biology into a state‐of‐the art model.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays: Super‐resolution imaging prompts re‐thinking of cell biology mechanisms Abstract and Quantitative analysis of photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) datasets using pair‐correlation analysis Abstract. (shrink)

This article introduces a framework which aims at capturing the complexity of economic organizations. The analysis of most legitimate conventions of coordination results in a new approach to the firm as a compromising device between several modes of coordination which engage different repertoires of evaluation. This contribution to the Économie des conventions offers an analytical tool to operate comparative research on firms, intermediate regulatory committees or public policies.

It is widely accepted that, in the course of interpreting a metaphorical utterance, both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the utterance are available to the interpreter, although there may be disagreement about the order in which these interpretations are accessed. I call this the dual availability assumption. I argue that it does not apply in cases of metaphorical singular reference. These are cases in which proper names, complex demonstratives or definite descriptions are used metaphorically; e.g., ‘That festering sore must go’, (...) referring to a derelict house. We are forced to give up dual availability in these cases because a process of predicate transfer happens in the restriction clauses of such metaphorically used definite phrases, so that a denotation-less definite concept is never constructed. A process of enriched composition yields only a metaphorical referent/denotation. I compare cases of metaphorical reference both to cases of metonymic reference and to uses of epithets of the ‘That N of an N’ form. Reflection on the former is helpful in getting clear about the kind of property transfer involved in referential metaphors. Such transfer happens directly at the level of properties and is not mediated via a correspondence between objects, as is the case with metonymic reference. Reflection on epithets such as ‘that festering sore of a house’ is helpful since these are a sort of intermediate case between cases of literal and metaphorical reference. They provide support for my claim that in cases of metaphorical reference there is only a single referent. Moreover, constraints on the use of these epithets suggest that referential metaphors are similarly constrained. In particular, I argue that referential metaphors can only be used when the implicit category restriction is highly salient, and that the evaluative information conveyed by the metaphor serves primarily to indicate the speaker’s attitude towards the referent rather than being intended to help the hearer identify the referent. (shrink)