Bayesian probability is normally defined over a fixed language or eventspace. But in practice language is susceptible to change, and thequestion naturally arises as to how Bayesian degrees of belief shouldchange as language changes. I argue here that this question poses aserious challenge to Bayesianism. The Bayesian may be able to meet thischallenge however, and I outline a practical method for changing degreesof belief over changes in finite propositional languages.

The epistemic theory of causality is analogous to epistemic theories of probability. Most proponents of epistemic probability would argue that one's degrees of belief should be calibrated to chances, insofar as one has evidence of chances. The question arises as to whether causal beliefs should satisfy an analogous calibration norm. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of a norm requiring calibration to chances and argue that this norm is the most fundamental evidential norm for epistemic probability. I then (...) develop an analogous calibration norm for epistemic causality, argue that it is the *only* evidential norm required for epistemic causality, and show how an epistemic account of causality that incorporates this norm can be used to analyse objective causal relationships. (shrink)

The article addresses the potential impact of functional brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron-emission tomography) on surrogate end-of-life decision-making in light of varying state-law definitions of consciousness, some of which define awareness behaviorally and others functionally. The article concludes that, in light of admonitions by neuroscientists that functional brain imaging cannot yet replace behavioral evaluation to determine the existence of consciousness, state legislatures, courts and drafters of written advance healthcare directives should consider treating behavior, not function, as the (...) touchstone for end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article aims at contributing to the unification of history and psychology by studying the expressions of anger and enthusiasm in several historical contexts. These mainly include France and America in the eighteenth century, but also more recent episodes of transitional justice. In addition it aims at drawing the attention of psychologist to the understudied emotion of enthusiasm. To this end, it also considers how Hume and Kant treated this emotion.

The relationship between machine learning and the philosophy of science can be classed as a dynamic interaction: a mutually beneficial connection between two autonomous fields that changes direction over time. I discuss the nature of this interaction and give a case study highlighting interactions between research on Bayesian networks in machine learning and research on causality and probability in the philosophy of science.

A traditional ethic of medicine asserts that physicians have special obligations to individual patients with whom they have a clinical relationship. Contemporary trends in US healthcare financing like bundled payments seem to threaten traditional conceptions of special obligations of individual physicians to individual patients because their population-based focus sets a tone that seems to emphasise responsibilities for groups of patients by groups of physicians in an organisation. Prior to undertaking a cogent debate about the fate and normative weight of special (...) obligations and a traditional ethic for contemporary healthcare, we need a deeper examination of what the traditional ethic of special obligations really means. Here we offer a conception of ‘doubly distributed’ special obligations. Physicians and similarly minded healing professionals abiding by a traditional ethic have always spread their devotion and attention across multiple patients and have shared responsibilities with physician and non-physician colleagues in much the same way devoted parents have frequently distributed their special obligations across multiple children and across multiple parents. By taking up the extended analogy of parent we argue that doubly distributing special obligations need not contradict the possibility of special obligations in restructured collective forms of healthcare delivery and financing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges on Language and TranslationJon StewartAlthough Jorge Luis Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published a philosophy treatise. The result is that his oeuvre has often been viewed as purely literary and been largely neglected by trained philosophers. However, by ignoring the philosophical aspects of Borges’s thought, criticism has neglected a vast dimension of his work (...) and has thus frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted many aspects of it. As I have tried to demonstrate in an earlier article, 1 there are important philosophical themes in the short stories of Borges, which have yet to be considered. In the present essay, I take up one of these heretofore neglected themes.We can find perhaps no better example of the literary exposition of Borges’s philosophical ideas than in his short story or cuento, “Averroes’ Search.” 2 There Borges reconstructs for us a culture and an age radically different and temporally distant from our own. He recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosopher living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. The history of philosophy knows Averroes as one of the great medieval commentators on the works of Aristotle. Borges recreates the historical moment and the passion of Averroes in his task of translating and providing a commentary for the texts of the great Greek philosopher who remains forever distant from him. The story takes as its point of departure Renan’s observation about a curious misinterpretation of Aristotle found in Averroes: “S’imaginant que la tragédie n’est autre chose que l’art de louer...”(p. 180). Borges poses [End Page 320] the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges brilliantly employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes’s particular time period and cultural context. The short story presents us with a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and crosscultural knowledge and comprehension. In the present essay, I wish to argue that the point of Borges’s story about the fate of Averroes is (1) to refute the common view which sees language as an entity neutral with respect to culture and history, and (2) to bring to light the comprehensive nature and scope of particular culturally and historically determined ways of thinking and perceiving the world. These philosophical elements have been neglected by the various literary scholars who have treated the works of Borges. 3 Moreover, Borges anticipates many of the most celebrated epistemological and hermeneutical theories of our day from philosophers such as Gadamer, Davidson and Quine, and presents them in literary form.IThere is a common view according to which the manifold languages of the various peoples and cultures of the world are more or less interchangeable. According to this linguistics of common sense, language is something secondary and accidental which is only an inessential corollary to our basic understanding and perception of the world. Human perception and cognition are thought of as constants for all humans everywhere. A dog will be perceived as a dog regardless of time period, place or culture, and the words we create to represent “dog” in the medium of language are secondary and even arbitrary. As a result, individual words in one language correspond to individual words in another. Dog in English corresponds straightforwardly to Hund in German or perro in Spanish, and nothing could be more simple. The gifted translator is merely someone with a great capacity to memorize words and to effect rapid replacement changes, and translation is regarded as a more or less mechanical process with little room for creativity. The diversity of languages is neither epistemologically necessary nor important, but rather explained as an historical accident as in the etiological tale of the Tower of Babel. Language has no necessary connection to the time period in which it is spoken or to the culture of [End Page 321] the people who speak it. That we... (shrink)

Important discussions about limiting care based on professional judgment often devolve into heated debates over the place of physicians in bedside rationing. Politics, loaded rhetoric, and ideological caricature from both sides of the rationing debate obscure precise points of disagreement and consensus, and hinder critical dialogue around the obligations and boundaries of professional practice. We propose a way forward by reframing the rationing conversation, distinguishing between the scale of the decision and its context avoiding the word “rationing.” We propose to (...) shift the terminology, using specific, descriptive words to defuse conflict and re-focus the debate towards substantive issues. These distinctions can clarify the real ethical differences at stake and facilitate a more constructive conversation about the clinical and social responsibilities of physicians to use resources ethically at the bedside and their role in allocating medical resources at a societal level. (shrink)

In this paper I want to discuss a well-known but poorly understood problem: how can socialists reconcile the observed paucity of cooperatives in capitalist societies with their alleged superiority on normative grounds? If cooperatives are so desirable, why don't workers desire them? If one's ideal of socialism is central planning, it is clear enough that it cannot emerge gradually within the womb of the capitalist economy. If instead it is something like market socialism, it is not clear that a discontinuous (...) transformation of society is required. If workers want socialism, they can start up here and now. If they don't, doesn't it prove that they do not want it? I shall proceed as follows. Section I argues that the usual explanation - that cooperatives are not economically viable or that workers prefer working in capitalist firms – is not necessarily correct. The explanation may lie elsewhere, in endogenous preference formation, adverse selection, discrimination, or externalities. Section II is concerned with the variety of cooperative arrangements. Only rarely do we find cooperatives in their pure form, with all workers and only workers having equal ownership rights. Non-working owners, non-owning workers and unequal distribution of shares are frequent. When the deviations become sufficiently large, the firms cease to become cooperatives in any meaningful sense. Section III extends the argument of Section I by surveying the causes of cooperative failure. Some fail by success: profitable cooperatives often attract or turn into private ownership. Others fail outright, partly because they tend to be established under unfavorable circumstances and partly because of intrinsic difficulties of management. (shrink)

We show that several theorems on ordinal bounds in different parts of logic are simple consequences of a basic result in the theory of global inductive definitions.

It is generally recognized that emotional states induce impatience, in the sense of a heightened preference for early rewards over later rewards. In this article I argue that they also induce urgency, in the sense of a preference for early action over later action. I adduce scattered evidence for the existence of the phenomenon and sketch a possible experiment that might demonstrate it, while also noting that it may be hard to distinguish urgency-based action from action based on the anticipation (...) of the decay of emotion. (shrink)

In Pérez Laraudogoitia (1996), I introduced a simple example of a supertask that involved the possibility of spontaneous self-excitation and, therefore, of a particularly interesting form of indeterminism in classical dynamics. Alper and Bridger (1998) criticised (among other things) this result. In the present article, I answer their criticisms. In what follows I assume familiarity both with Pérez Laraudogoitia (1996) and Alper and Bridger’s subsequent article.

Multiple explanatory frameworks may be required to provide an adequate account of human cognition. This paper embeds the classical account within a neural network framework, exploring the encoding of syntacticallystructured objects over the synchronicdiachronic characteristics of networks. Synchronic structure is defined in terms of temporal binding and the superposition of states. To accommodate asymmetric relations, synchronic structure is subject to the type uniqueness constraint. The nature of synchronic structure is shown to underlie Xbar theory that characterizes the phrasal structure of (...) human languages. The derivation differentiates core Xbar properties from languagespecific properties. (shrink)

This paper considers the correspondence theory from modal logic and obtains correspondence results for models as opposed to frames. The key ideas are to consider infinitary modal logic, to phrase correspondence results in terms of substitution instances of a given modal formula, and to identify bisimilar model-world pairs.

Since the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series (KSMS) was first published in 1997, it has served as the authoritative book series in the field. Starting from 2011 the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series will intensify the peer-review process with a new editorial and advisory board. KSMS is published on behalf of the S ren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. KSMS publishes outstanding monographs in all fields of Kierkegaard research. This includes Ph.D. dissertations, Habilitation theses, conference proceedings and single author (...) works by senior scholars. The goal of KSMS is to advance Kierkegaard studies by encouraging top-level scholarship in the field. The editorial and advisory boards are deeply committed to creating a genuinely international forum for publication which integrates the many different traditions of Kierkegaard studies and brings them into a constructive and fruitful dialogue. To this end the series publishes monographs in English and German. Potential authors should consult the Submission guidelines. All submissions will be blindly refereed by established scholars in the field. Only high-quality manuscripts will be accepted for publication. Potential authors should be prepared to make changes to their texts based on the comments received by the referees. (shrink)

In a recent discussion, Earman and Norton [(1998)] propose a classification of supertasks that generate indeterminism which is flawed. An emendation is presented here.

We argue that the stakeholder perspective on corporate social responsibility is in the process of being enlarged. Due to the process of institutional isomorphism, corporations are increasingly adopting organizational features designed to promote proactivity over mere reactivity in their stakeholder relationships. We identify two sources of pressure promoting the emergence of the proactive corporation -- stakeholder activism and the recognition of the social embeddedness of the economy. The final section describes four organizational design dimensions being installed by the more proactive (...) corporations today -- cooperation, participation, negotiation, and direct anticipation. (shrink)

High atop cascading waterfalls and deep within the lush green depths of the valleys, Swiss photographer Ruedi Homberger has for more than twenty years captured in photographs the majestic beauty of eastern Alaska's Wrangell Mountain range. In addition to summiting some of the Wrangells' loftiest peaks, Homberger has in recent years incorporated a technically challenging new approach into his work. Flying above the mountains in a small plane, Homberger literally goes to new heights to reveal a series of stunning aerial (...) views. The first book-length collection of photographs focusing exclusively on the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Preserve, My Wrangell Mountains offers readers a rare opportunity to “stand among the giants.” Included in this magnificent oversized volume are nearly three hundred full-color photographs and an accompanying selection of sketches by award-winning illustrator Jon Van Zyle. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi articulates two arguments against the view that moral judgment has no proper place in the conduct of political science: Non-judgmental political science cannot understand what it studies; and non-judgmental political science cannot understand the political scientist himself. Evaluation of these arguments not only clarifies important dimensions of Polanyi’s conceptions of understanding and tacit inference, it prompts a reconsideration of the nature of both moral deliberation and moral truth. The encounter with Polanyi demonstrates that non-judgmental political science does indeed (...) fall short of its stated objective. (shrink)

Deep learning developers typically rely on deep learning software frameworks (DLSFs)—simply described as pre-packaged libraries of programming components that provide high-level access to deep learning functionality. New DLSFs progressively encapsulate mathematical, statistical and computational complexity. Such higher levels of abstraction subsequently make it easier for deep learning methodology to spread through mimesis (i.e., imitation of models perceived as successful). In this study, we quantify this increase in abstraction and discuss its implications. Analyzing publicly available code from Github, we found that (...) the introduction of DLSFs correlates both with significant increases in the number of deep learning projects and substantial reductions in the number of lines of code used. We subsequently discuss and argue the importance of abstraction in deep learning with respect to ephemeralization, technological advancement, democratization, adopting timely levels of abstraction, the emergence of mimetic deadlocks, issues related to the use of black box methods including privacy and fairness, and the concentration of technological power. Finally, we also discuss abstraction as a symptom of an ongoing technological metatransition. (shrink)

Recent interest in communism as an idea prompts reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “communist” aesthetic politics. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical condemnation of aestheticized politics, his “artwork essay” is better read as both explicit condemnation of a particular (regressive fascist) type of aestheticized politics and implicit commendation of another (progressive communist) type. Under the modern conditions of the technological reproducibility of art, and mass politics, the character of and relationship between the cultural value spheres of politics and aesthetics (...) also changes. Benjamin analyzes dialectically the actuality of the fascist response to modern mass arts and politics in which technology and society are misaligned, and the potentiality of a communist response that would bring about a collective interplay of humanity and technology. (shrink)

t. 1. Philosophy -- t. 2. Theology -- t. 3. Literature, drama, and music.