The effort to align MathML 3 and OpenMath has led to a realisation that (pragmatic) MathML’s condition and domainofapplication elements, when used with quantifiers, do not have a neat expression in OpenMath. This paper analyzes the situation focusing on quantifiers and proposes a solution, via six new symbols. Two of them fit completely within the existing OpenMath structure, and we place them in the associated quant3 CD. The others require a generalization of OMBIND. We also propose, logically separately but in (...) the same area, a quant2 CD with existsuniquely, commonly written ∃!, and the ‘fusion’ symbol existsuniquelyin. In a second step we generalize the solution to the phenomenon of big operators that MathML 2 implicitly provides but which do not have a direct counterpart in the OpenMath CDs. (shrink)

One of the fundamental and seemingly simple aims of mathematical knowledge management (MKM) is to develop and standardize formats that allow to “represent the meaning of the objects of mathematics”. The open formats OpenMath and MathML address this, but differ subtly in syntax, rigor, and structural viewpoints (notably over calculus). To avoid fragmentation and smooth out interoperability obstacles, effort is under way to align them into a joint format OpenMath/MathML 3. We illustrate the issues that come up in such an (...) alignment by looking at three main areas: bound variables and conditions, calculus (which relates to the previous) and “lifted” n-ary operators. (shrink)

Manuel M. Davenport PROFESSIONALS OR HIRED GUNS? LOYALTIES ARE THE DIFFERENCE . In The Contemporary literature of professional ethics, two different ways of ...

1. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? One of the fascinating aspects of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the precise nature of its subject ..

Perhaps no technological innovation has so dominated the second half of the twentieth century as has the introduction of the programmable computer. It is quite difficult if not impossible to imagine how contemporary affairs—in business and science, communications and transportation, governmental and military activities, for example—could be conducted without the use of computing machines, whose principal contribution has been to relieve us of the necessity for certain kinds of mental exertion. The computer revolution has reduced our mental labors by means (...) of these machines, just as the Industrial Revolution reduced our physical labor by means of other machines. (shrink)

The development of science has been a distinctive feature of human history in recent times, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In light of the problems that define the philosophy of science today, James Fetzer provides a foundation for inquiry into the nature of science, the history of science, and the relationship between the two. In Philosophy of Science, Fetzer investigates the aim and methods of empirical science and examines the importance of methodological commitments to the study of (...) science and the significance of interpretations of probability for understanding laws of nature and scientific explanations. This book offers a welcome framework for investigating the most recent work and the most promising solutions to the central problems that arise within this discipline. The result is a timely introduction to an increasingly important field. -- Publisher description. (shrink)

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...) love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper’s core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. (shrink)

Some reasons are thought to depend on relations between people, such as that of a promiser to a promisee. It has sometimes been assumed that all reasons that are relational in this way are moral obligations. I argue, via a counter example, that there are non-obligatory relational reasons. If true, this has ramifications for relational theories of morality.

Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in (...) order to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

Every ℵ 0 -categorical partially ordered set of finite width has a finitely axiomatizable theory. Every ℵ 0 -categorical partially ordered set of finite weak width has a decidable theory. This last statement constitutes a major portion of the complete (with three exceptions) characterization of those finite partially ordered sets for which any ℵ 0 -categorical partially ordered set not embedding one of them has a decidable theory.

The book uses Zen Buddhism as the opening wedge for an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration of consciousness.

If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation, that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, therefore, ought to find it refreshing to discover that its author has not remained content with a facile defense of his previous investigations; on the (...) contrary, Salmon offers an original account of different kinds of explications, advances additional criticisms of various alternative theories, and elaborates a novel “two-tiered“ analysis of explanation that tacitly depends upon a “two-tiered” account of homogeneity. Indeed, if the considerations that follow are correct, Salmon has not merely refined his statistical relevance account but has actually abandoned it in favor of a “causal/mechanistic“ construction. This striking development suggests that the theory of explanation is likely to remain as lively an arena of debate in the eighties as it has been in the past. (shrink)

A lineage of prominent philosophers who have discussed the second-person relation can be regarded as advancing structural accounts. They posit that the second-person relation effects one transformative change to the structure of practical reasoning. In this paper, I criticise this orthodoxy and offer an alternative, substantive account. That is, I argue that entering into second-personal relations with others does indeed affect one's practical reasoning, but it does this not by altering the structure of one's agential thought, but by changing what (...) reasons can become available. The importance of second-personal thought for action is heterogenous. Second-person relations make possible the emergence of a wide variety of different kinds of practical reasons: creating some, revealing others. Recognising this diminishes the appeal of the traditional, structural accounts of the practical significance of such second-personal relations. Moving away from structural accounts facilitates a more thorough understanding of the intersubjective form of action. (shrink)

The relationship of Grundy and chromatic numbers of graphs in the context of Reverse Mathematics is investi-gated.

The purpose of this paper is to explore three alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of language and mentality, which accent syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical aspects of the phenomena with which they are concerned, respectively. Although the computational conception currently exerts considerable appeal, its defensibility appears to hinge upon an extremely implausible theory of the relation of form to content. Similarly, while the representational approach has much to recommend it, its range is essentially restricted to those units of language that (...) can be understood in terms of undefined units. Thus, the only alternative among these three that can account for the meaning of primitive units of language is one emphasizing the basic role of skills, habits, and tendencies in relating signs and dispositions. (shrink)

Technological revolutions are dissected into three stages: the introduction stage, the permeation stage, and the power stage. The information revolution is a primary example of this tripartite model. A hypothesis about ethics is proposed, namely, ethical problems increase as technological revolutions progress toward and into the power stage. Genetic technology, nanotechnology, and neurotechnology are good candidates for impending technological revolutions. Two reasons favoring their candidacy as revolutionary are their high degree of malleability and their convergence. Assuming the emerging technologies develop (...) into mutually enabling revolutionary technologies, we will need better ethical responses to cope with them. Some suggestions are offered about how our approach to ethics might be improved. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a computational theory of thinking that does not eliminate the mind. In doing so, I will defend computationalism against the arguments of John Searle and James Fetzer, and briefly respond to other common criticisms.

The notion of program verification appears to trade upon an equivocation. Algorithms, as logical structures, are appropriate subjects for deductive verification. Programs, as causal models of those structures, are not. The success of program verification as a generally applicable and completely reliable method for guaranteeing program performance is not even a theoretical possibility.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social Epistemologists at the Crossroads:Authorizing Agents of ChangeJames H. CollierIn this issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Thomas Basbøll and Christine Isager and Sine Just provide a vital, constructive forum for discussing the first and second editions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (PREK) and Steve Fuller's broader project of social epistemology. More specifically, both Basbøll's review and Isager and Just's suggest innovative proposals for applying and assessing (...) PREK's ideas and influence. In response, I analyze and counter Basbøll's and Isager and Just's conceptions of how agency is configured, and how criticism is authorized, at the level of textuality. I end by calling for deliberations to sort out what we, as social epistemologists and critical intellectuals, know and what we want to do about it.A Job for Social EpistemologistsIf the reader of PREK wants to "be" a social epistemologist, or "do" social epistemology, what would the job and its duties entail? Thomas Basbøll offers a job description for the social epistemologist as a "postmodern grammarian"—one "who corrects academic texts to suit them for strange times." This description strikes the dissonant chord of being at once pragmatic and abstract. On the one hand, correcting academic texts is a specific task reminiscent of the duties of writing instructors or editors. On the other hand, the specificity of the labor stands in juxtaposition to the surreal working conditions—the "strange times." And in the end, "postmodern grammarian" is hardly a position for which one could apply. Yet the specificity and dissonance in Basbøll's description reveals the difficulty and ambiguity of what Fuller asks the reader to do in PREK. Basbøll gets at this problem by [End Page 269] shifting the subject position of the social epistemologist to the postmodern grammarian. This move is necessary to bring social epistemology down from "the highest level" and make it task oriented. Interestingly, the job that Basbøll describes offers a return to textuality and, I would argue, critical intellectualism. Yet these positions appear somewhat removed from the role of the rhetorician as portrayed in PREK.In proposing a specific job for the social epistemologist, Basbøll develops a microlevel application of Fuller's macrolevel vision. Basbøll's task is not easy: "One of the greatest difficulties encountered in reading PREK is its willingness to make a great many philosophical commitments for openly rhetorical purposes. Not the least of these is the concept of knowledge that a research program and policy platform that calls itself 'social epistemology' is obviously dutybound to provide." The willingness of social epistemologists to occupy many philosophical positions also obscures what labor and service commitments they might make. Moreover, since PREK's initial publication (1993) Fuller has continued to multiply social epistemologists' roles regarding scientific conduct (Science, 1997; The Governance of Science, 2000a; Knowledge Management Foundations, 2002). Further, these commitments shift as Fuller has continued to reinterpret the historical record and to recast philosophical debates (Thomas Kuhn, 2000b; Kuhn vs. Popper, 2003). The ability to both destabilize and maintain such a fluid intellectual environment is something only Fuller, or the postmodern grammarian, could—or would want to—accomplish. More on that idea in a moment.Despite the moving target, defining the subject position of the social epistemologist has been a parallel conversation accompanying much of Fuller's work. I proposed the less "stylish" idea of the social epistemologist as technical communicator in PREK's first edition and in Scientific and Technical Communication (1997). Contemplating the social epistemologist's position as rhetorician, or vice versa, has been taken on by Keith (1995; 1996), Zagacki (1995), and Campbell and Benson (1996) (as summarized by Isager and Just). In contrast to these previous configurations, Basbøll situates the labor of the social epistemologist on the level of reading and writing. As he puts it:And it is precisely because the social epistemologist assists the writer of academic texts in the difficult task of connecting utterances to particular conditions (under which they are read) that social epistemology becomes a critical force. It is not by reconfiguring the knowledge-producing practices themselves [End Page 270] that this... (shrink)

Three images of holiness have, at different times, enjoyed wide currency among American Protestants: holiness as pilgrimage, holiness as perfection, and holiness as pentecostal outpouring. Since the colonial era, confidence in the attainment of holiness has grown dramatically. Yet such assurance has not been matched by equal agreement on the content of the holy life.