The past few years have witnessed a growth in the interest on the historical and philosophical dimensions of bioinformatics as a discipline. Despite the importance of bioinformatics in addressing the issues raised by the growing amount of biological data, data management is often seen as all it has to offer to biology. However, the emphasis on data management may come at the expense of understanding how bioinformatics generates genuine biological knowledge beyond its instrumental value for bench biologists. Some authors have (...) moved the first steps beyond data management, and towards the characterization of bioinformatics as a unique epistemic endeavor, by stressing how its experimental practices can be conducive to biological knowledge. In this article, we build upon these attempts, and by using a detailed case study from the field of single cell transcriptomics (i.e., RNA velocity), we provide a fully-fledged characterization of bioinformatics as an experimental discipline. (shrink)

With the intensification of COVID-19 epidemic, it becomes prominent to discuss the issue about the influence of psychological contract breach on job performance of new generation of employees. Based on social exchange theory, fairness theory, and conservation of resource theory, this study constructed a relationship model between psychological contract breach and job performance of new generation of employees with considering the mediating effect of job burnout and the moderating effect of past breach experience. Our hypotheses were tested using data from (...) 235 respondents working in Yunnan Province, China. The results were as follows: first, psychological contract breach had a significant negative effect on job performance of new generation of employees, whether in the whole sample or in two grouped samples; second, both in the overall sample and the grouped sample of state-owned enterprises, job burnout partially mediated the negative relationship between psychological contract breach and job performance of new generation of employees, and past experience of breach positively moderated the negative relationship between psychological contract breach and job performance of new generation of employees; third, in the grouped sample of non-state-owned enterprises, job burnout did not play a significant mediating role in the relationship between psychological contract breach and job performance of new generation of employees, and past breach experience did not play a significant moderating role in this relationship. These findings uncover the psychological mechanism underlying work performance of new generation of employees, and also provide useful theoretical reference for management practices of new generation of employees among different natures of enterprises. (shrink)

One of Thomas Kuhn's profoundest arguments is introduced in the 1970 “Postscript” to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Kuhn is discussing the idea of a “disciplinary matrix” as a more adequate articulation of the “paradigm” notion he'd introduced in the first, 1962, edition of his famous work . He notes that one “element” of disciplinary matrices is likely to be common to most or even all such matrices, unlike the other elements which serve to distinguish specific disciplines and sub-disciplines (...) from one another. This is the element which he calls “values”, which, as he notes , being common to a number of otherwise distinct disciplinary matrices, “do much to provide a sense of community to natural scientists as a whole”. On the other hand, they also do much, and crucially in Kuhn's view, to promote and sustain a healthy diversity among the practitioners who share any specific disciplinary matrix. In particular, Kuhn claims that “individual variability in the application of shared values may serve functions essential to science.”. (shrink)

Recent years have been blessed with an abundance of logical systems, arising from a multitude of applications. A logic can be characterised in many different ways. Traditionally, a logic is presented via the following three components: 1. an intuitive non-formal motivation, perhaps tie it in to some application area 2. a semantical interpretation 3. a proof theoretical formulation. There are several types of proof theoretical methodologies, Hilbert style, Gentzen style, goal directed style, labelled deductive system style, and so on. The (...) tableau methodology, invented in the 1950s by Beth and Hintikka and later per fected by Smullyan and Fitting, is today one of the most popular, since it appears to bring together the proof-theoretical and the semantical approaches to the pre of a logical system and is also very intuitive. In many universities it is sentation the style first taught to students. Recently interest in tableaux has become more widespread and a community crystallised around the subject. An annual tableaux conference is being held and proceedings are published. The present volume is a Handbook a/Tableaux pre senting to the community a wide coverage of tableaux systems for a variety of logics. It is written by active members of the community and brings the reader up to frontline research. It will be of interest to any formal logician from any area. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ethical thinking about social science research is dominated by a biomedical model whose salient features are the assumption that only potential harms to subjects of research are relevant in the ethical evaluation of that research, and in the emphasis on securing informed consent in order to establish ethical probity. A number of counter‐examples are considered to the assumption, a number of defences against these counter‐examples are examined, and an alternative model is proposed for the ethical evaluation of social science (...) research: a model which can cope with the systemic harms which have been identified. This model is based on John Rawls's idea of original position reasoning and treats social science research as an institutional feature of the basic structure of society. (shrink)

Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable in polynomial time), although by means of growing (...) computational resources, and converge towards classical propositional logic. The underlying claim is that this hierarchy can be used to represent increasing levels of “depth” or “informativeness” of Boolean reasoning. Special attention is paid to the most basic logic in this hierarchy, the pure “intelim logic”, which satisfies all the requirements of a natural deduction system (allowing both introduction and elimination rules for each logical operator) while admitting of a feasible (quadratic) decision procedure. We argue that this logic is “analytic” in a particularly strict sense, in that it rules out any use of “virtual information”, which is chiefly responsible for the combinatorial explosion of standard classical systems. As a result, analyticity and tractability are reconciled and growing degrees of computational complexity are associated with the depth at which the use of virtual information is allowed. (shrink)

Discussion of the cognitive division of labor has usually made very little contact with relevant materials from other disciplines, including theoretical biology, management science, and design theory. This article draws on these materials to consider some unavoidable conundrums faced by any attempt to present a particular way of dividing tasks among a labor team as the uniquely rational way of doing this, given the interdependence of the underlying evaluative standards by which the products of a system of division of labor (...) will be judged. Divisions of labor will typically cut across these interdependencies in ways which leave the outcomes of a process of labor hostage to path dependencies and suboptimalities. Some attempts to avoid these results are shown to be unsuccessful. All these difficulties are compounded by the fact that, in many cases, the division of labor has to be constructed over a ground of values that is itself being constructed simultaneously with the products which they are invoked to assess. Key Words: risk spreading • interdependency • NK fitness landscapes • complexity • epistasis • Kuhn • modularity • path dependency. (shrink)

Ian C. Jarvie developed the idea of situational logic in a subtle and effective way. He was also interested in, as well as a contributor to, the institution of academic publication. This chapter provides a situational analysis of an important recurrent pattern in academic publishing, namely, the concentration of work around particular topics, despite the fact that most such work will be unrewarded in the economy of esteem that is meant to be in play.

This book was published in 2003.This volume presents a detailed examination of incommensurability in the value-theoretical sense. Exploring how choosers deal with problems and constraints of choice, the author draws on work in cognitive psychology, in sociology, in jurisprudence, in economics, and in the theory of value to show how choosers learn to make trade-offs when there is potential incommensurability among the options they are considering. The analysis is also informed by recent work in the tradition of Michel Foucault. With (...) so many modern devices and ideals of government dependent on the comparability of options, this book is timely and can inform public debate about de-regulation, user-pays, accountability, and the substitution of market mechanisms for government regulation and supply. (shrink)

We investigate the semantics of the logical systems obtained by introducing the modalities and into the family of substructural implication logics (including relevant, linear and intuitionistic implication). Then, in the spirit of the LDS (Labelled Deductive Systems) methodology, we "import" this semantics into the classical proof system KE. This leads to the formulation of a uniform labelled refutation system for the new logics which is a natural extension of a system for substructural implication developed by the first two authors in (...) a previous paper. (shrink)

To understand the continuing importance of John Rawls’s work, we need to understand the background, the object and the method of his fifty-year quest as a political thinker. The background to Rawls’s investigation was a (carefully circumscribed) acknowledgement of a certain kind of evaluative pluralism. The object of Rawls’s work was to develop a method of commensuration that would enable us, the free and equal citizens of a democratic society, to identify a common basis for our dealings, in search of (...) mutual benefit, with one another. Finally, the method used by Rawls in his work was broadly, though tacitly rather than explicitly, pragmatist in character, especially in the sense that Rawls was aiming, now explicitly, to develop principles of political association that generate their own support in the attitudes and actions of those whose behavior they are intended to guide. (shrink)

Free Public Reason examines the idea of public justification, stressing its importance but also questioning the coherence of the concept itself. Although public justification is employed in the work of theorists such as John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, and others, it has received little attention on its own as a philosophical concept. In this book Fred D'Agostino shows that the concept is composed of various values, interests, and notions of the good, and that no ranking of these is possible. (...) The notion of public justification itself is thus shown to be contestable. In demonstrating this, D'Agostino undermines many current political theories that rely on this concept. Having broken down the foundations of public justification, D'Agostino then offers an alternative model of how a workable consensus on its meaning might be reached through the interactions of a community of interpreters or delegates at a constitutional convention. (shrink)

Philosophy of Social Science, that social scientific investigations do not and cannot meet the liberal requirement of "neutrality" most familiar to social scientists in the form of Max Weber's requirement of value-freedom. He argues, moreover, that this is for "institutional," not idiosyncratic, reasons: methodological demands (e.g., of validity) impel social scientists to pass along into their "objective" investigations the values of the people, groups, and cultures they are studying. In this paper, I consider the implications of Root's claims for the (...) use of social scientific results in the formation of policy in a democratic society. In particular, I argue that Root's results amplify familiar "post-modernist" conclusions: there is no "neutral" and "objective" basis for policy-making. (shrink)

Is expertise in applied ethics compatible with individual autonomy and democratic self‐governance? This depends on whether a ‘tracking condition’ is satisfied for expert claims about issues in applied ethics. This condition requires that, when expert deliberations are properly conducted they ‘track’ the courses of reasoning that the experts’ clients would themselves have undertaken if they had (perhaps subject to certain conditions) considered the matters for themselves. Pluralism of the kind thematised by Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire suggests that the tracking (...) condition typically will not be satisfied and, hence, that whatever experts are praticising in applied ethics they are doing it contrary to democratic principles of autonomy and self‐government. The implications of this result are sketched and some standard objections briefly considered. (shrink)

It has frequently been suggested that Rawls’s characteristic method of justification, a method crucially involving the notion of reflective equilibrium, is in some sense relativistic in its implications. No sustained development of this suggestion has been undertaken by those who advance it; likewise, no sustained attempt to refute this suggestion has been made by those who are otherwise sympathetic to Rawls’s account of justification. I here attempt to fill these gaps in the already extensive literature associated with the method of (...) reflective equilibrium. At below, I review claims that Rawls’s method has relativistic implications. I also attempt, for purposes of argument, to buttress these claims by citing remarks of Rawls which could be interpreted as relativistic in character. At below, I consider problems of political reasoning as these arise in societies which are ill- and well-ordered in Rawls’s sense. At below, I consider problems of political reasoning as these arise between the members of two or more well-ordered societies, each of which is regulated by a different conception of justice. I also there adapt Williams’s distinction between notional and real confrontations between incompatible systems of beliefs in order to distinguish two kinds of conflict with respect to fundamental political principles. Finally, I show how a notion of broad reflective equilibrium can be deployed in order to solve those problems of political adjudication which may arise between the members of societies which have distinct conceptions of justice. At this point it should be clear that Rawls’s method of justification is not, in intention at least, relativistic in its implications. (shrink)

Normal science involves persistent collective application of an agreed research agenda. Anomaly can threaten normal science, but so too can “undue persistence” in that agenda by a normal science peer group. We consider how “undue persistence” might be a collective effect of the common incentive structure that individual members of the peer group typically face in relation to their careers. To understand how “undue persistence” might be ameliorated, we consider the affordances of a peer’s membership of a departmental collegium, organized (...) on a different basis than the specialist peer group and hence able to supply the individual scholar with kinds of information and critical comment that may occasion off-agenda contributions to the specialty. The idea of brokerage is borrowed from the sociology of innovation to see how a scholar’s departmental colleagues might be able to broker new ways of thinking that can assist in the avoidance of “undue persistence”. (shrink)

I want to consider how the general characteristics of a discipline might facilitate ?social mechanisms for distributing knowledge? that do not depend on uniformity of use, but, in fact, on different uses by different people. Indeed, I want to show that the ways in which a discipline is organized afford the growth of knowledge and do so, in particular, by facilitating an approach to what Thomas Kuhn described as ?the essential tension? between, on the one hand, the traditional or customary (...) elements of disciplined enquiry, which are prerequisites for there being a community of enquiry, and, on the other hand, the innovative elements of disciplined enquiry, which are needed on account of the always already inadequate character of our engagement with the objects of enquiry. (shrink)

What is the relation between autonomy, education, and democracy?

We have considered two strategies for using native utterances as evidence for assigning native beliefs. We have shown that each of these two strategies (literalism and symbolism) can avoid the logical difficulties mentioned in section 1 — so long, at least, as we employ an account of the logical form of belief sentences developed by Burdick. We have also considered the methodological principles which provide the basis for translational practice. Based on our consideration of these principles, we then argued that (...) we must prefer the literalist strategy for attributing beliefs. Only the literalist strategy enables us to provide a recursive account of the significance of native utterances, and only the literalist strategy enables us to maximize the truth of our claims about native beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper we explore a generalization of traditional abduction which can simultaneously perform two different tasks: given an unprovable sequent Γ ⊢ G, find a sentence H such that Γ, H ⊢ G is provable ; given a provable sequent Γ ⊢ G, find a sentence H such that Γ ⊢ H and the proof of Γ, H ⊢ G is simpler than the proof of Γ ⊢ G . We argue that the two tasks should not be distinguished, (...) and present a general procedure for finding suitable hypotheses or lemmas. When the original sequent is provable, the abduced formula can be seen as a cut formula with respect to Gentzen's sequent calculus, so the abduction method is cut-based. Our method is based on the tableau-like system KE and we argue for its advantages over existing abduction methods based on traditional Smullyan-style Tableaux. (shrink)

We discuss the interpolation property on some important families of non classical logics, such as intuitionistic, modal, fuzzy, and linear logics. A special paragraph is devoted to a generalization of the interpolation property, uniform interpolation.

This book supports the idea that the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life does not disappear in early modernity, but is transformed into a search for how to cure, guide, and free the human mind.