In his "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of Goc" (1908), Charles Peirce argued for two dimensions of belief in God's reality. On the one side, he maintained that this belief would be useful for guiding the conduct of life; on the other side, he maintained that the belief could function as the first stage in a scientific inquiry. My suggestion in this paper is that we examine the last of Peirce's 1903 lectures on pragmatism at Harvard to see how (...) the possibility of this dual function arises out of his late theory of cognition in which the functional certainty of perception is brought to close quarters with the provisionality of hypotheses. The upshot is that for Peirce a healthful religious belief should internally "marry" science and religion —theory and practice — by allowing provisional and vague conceptions of God to carry on the work of guiding conduct. /// No texto "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (1908), Charles Peirce defende que há duas dimensões de crença na realidade de Deus. Afirma, por um lado, que esta crença poderia ser útil para orientar o comportamento (conduct of life); por outro, que ela poderia ser como que o primeiro escalão numa investigação científica. A minha sugestão neste artigo é que, examinámos as últimas conferências de Peirce de 1903 sobre o pragmatismo em Harvard para ver como a possibilidade desta dupla função surge da sua última teoria de conhecimento (cognition) em que a certeza funcional de percepção é usada para aproximar o aspecto provisório das hipóteses. A consequência disso é que para Peirce uma saudável crença religiosa deve "juntar" internamente ciência e religião - teoria e prática - permitindo as concepções provisórias e vagas de Deus para continuar a tarefa de orientar o comportamento. /// Dans ce texte "Un argument négligé pour la réalité de Dieu" (1908), Charles Peirce soutient qu'il y a deux dimensions de croyance en la réalité de Dieu. Il afflrme, d'un côté, que cette croyance pourrait être utile pour orienter le comportement (conduct of life) et, par ailleurs, qu'elle pourrait être pour ainsi dire le premier niveau dans une recherche scientifique. Ma suggestion dans le présent article est que nous examinions les dernières conférences de Peirce en 1903 sur le pragmatisme à Harvard pour voir comment Ia possibilite de cette double fonction surgit de sa dernière théorie de la connaissance dans laquelle la certitude fonctionnelle de perception est utilisée pour aborder l'aspect provisoire des hypothèses. La conséquence en est que pour Peirce une saine croyance religieuse doit "unir" intrinsèquement science et religion - théorie et pratique - en permettant les conceptions provisoires et vagues de Dieu. (shrink)

L R Perry; Training and Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 6, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 7–29, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1972.tb00.

The third edition gives particular attention to neuroimaging, which has emerged in the past decade as one of the most active areas of research in the field.

In the course of writing this book, answers to the following questions and many others were given in both narrative and visual form. Most of them were presented rather forcefully, and not when I was expecting them. I understood that I was to share what I learned. What is in store for the geology of North America? How do we create matter every day? What is the nature of nature? How did people live more than a half million years ago? (...) What was space travel like a half million years ago? Where is God? What are our responsibilities as humans? Is Hitler in heaven? How can we go to heaven? (shrink)

The pull to coordinate with other individuals is fundamental, serving as the basis for our social connectedness to others. Discussed is a dynamical and ecological perspective to joint action, an approach that embeds the individual’s mind in a body and the body in a niche, a physical and social environment. Research on uninstructed coordination of simple incidental rhythmic movement, along with research on goal‐directed, embodied cooperation, is reviewed. Finally, recent research is discussed that extends the coordination and cooperation studies, examining (...) how synchronizing with another, and how emergent social units of perceiving and acting are reflected in people’s feelings of connection to others. (shrink)

The old ritual word macte was only vaguely understood even in Republican times. As is well known, the ancient critics connected the word with magis, magnus, and explained it as magis auctus. A glance at Walde's Wörterbuch reveals that many attempts have been made in modern times to solve the mystery; but the formidable equipment of the modern philologist has yielded little better results than the popular etymology of the ancients, the most favoured view to-day seeing in mactus the PPP (...) of a verb mago with macto as the frequentative which replaces it. The supposed semantic development of this verb, originally meaning ‘to increase’, has been set forth by Warde Fowler in a well-known passage, to which recent authorities have accorded their assent and praise: ‘the vitality of the deity … was really increased by placing on the altar the organs of life of the victim’. But this is a solution which ignores half the problem: macte and mactare are used not only of the deities but also of the victim. One can perhaps understand lovem mactare as ‘to magnify J.’, but not even by the most superficial analogy can we find a transition from here to the meaning typified in mactare vinum. Yet this is one of the most frequent usages of the word. So deep a gulf lies between the two semantic spheres of the verb that some scholars have sought to find in it two different verbs. But this is a counsel of despair which the editor of the Thesaurus dismisses with a non recte. We must agree, then, with Hey that the modern explanation is ‘sicher eine unrichtige’ and with Meillet-Ernout that there exists ‘aucune étymologie claire’. It is, therefore, surprising that so ill-founded a preconception should lead investigators to ignore or even dismiss important evidence which the ancient authorities offer for the solution of this problem. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers of biology have endorsed views about random drift that, we will argue, rest on an implicit assumption that the meaning of concepts such as drift can be understood through an examination of the mathematical models in which drift appears. They also seem to implicitly assume that ontological questions about the causality of terms appearing in the models can be gleaned from the models alone. We will question these general assumptions by showing how the same equation (...) — the simple 2 = p2 + 2pq + q2 — can be given radically different interpretations, one of which is a physical, causal process and one of which is not. This shows that mathematical models on their own yield neither interpretations nor ontological conclusions. Instead, we argue that these issues can only be resolved by considering the phenomena that the models were originally designed to represent and the phenomena to which the models are currently applied. When one does take those factors into account, starting with the motivation for Sewall Wright’s and R.A. Fisher’s early drift models and ending with contemporary applications, a very different picture of the concept of drift emerges. On this view, drift is a term for a set of physical processes, namely, indiscriminate sampling processes. (shrink)

Precision medicine research involving human biological material is becoming an increasingly central component of healthcare, and its potential is quickly growing due to rapid technological progress...

In computer science, an algorithm is an unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems. Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing and automated reasoning tasks. As an effective method, an algorithm can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time and in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function. Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, (...) eventually producing "output" and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input. This book introduces a set of concepts in solving problems computationally such as Growth of Functions; Backtracking; Divide and Conquer; Greedy Algorithms; Dynamic Programming; Elementary Graph Algorithms; Minimal Spanning Tree; Single-Source Shortest Paths; All Pairs Shortest Paths; Flow Networks; Polynomial Multiplication, to ways of solving NP-Complete Problems, supported with comprehensive, and detailed problems and solutions, making it an ideal resource to those studying computer science, computer engineering and information technology. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: In the light of the almost brilliant equilibrium of the author, who manages to compose a resourceful explanation, switching between the notional conditionality and the expected contextual understanding, I intend to focus on the interdisciplinary potential of some suggestions that offer new perspectives on conceiving society, which are driven by a non-analytical and holistic vision.

We show that the first order theory of the lattice $\mathscr{L}^{ (S) of finite dimensional closed subsets of any nontrivial infinite dimensional Steinitz Exhange System S has logical complexity at least that of first order number theory and that the first order theory of the lattice L(S ∞ ) of computably enumerable closed subsets of any nontrivial infinite dimensional computable Steinitz Exchange System S ∞ has logical complexity exactly that of first order number theory. Thus, for example, the lattice of (...) finite dimensional subspaces of a standard copy of $\bigoplus_\omega$ Q interprets first order arithmetic and is therefore as complicated as possible. In particular, our results show that the first order theories of the lattice L(V ∞ ) of c.e. subspaces of a fully effective ℵ 0 -dimensional vector space V∞ and the lattice of c.e. algebraically closed subfields of a fully effective algebraically closed field F ∞ of countably infinite transcendence degree each have logical complexity that of first order number theory. (shrink)

Downey and Remmel have completely characterized the degrees of c.e. bases for c.e. vector spaces (and c.e. fields) in terms of weak truth table degrees. In this paper we obtain a structural result concerning the interaction between the c.e. Turing degrees and the c.e. weak truth table degrees, which by Downey and Remmel's classification, establishes the existence of c.e. vector spaces (and fields) with the strong antibasis property (a question which they raised). Namely, we construct c.e. sets $B<_{\rm T}A$ such (...) that the c.e. W-degrees below that of A are disjoint from the nonzero c.e. T-degrees below that of A and comparable to that of B. (shrink)

L. R. Reinhardt; III—Dualism and Categories, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 71–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

After summarizing my own views of 'I' and the first-person perspective, I consider a well-known autistic, Temple Grandin, who claims that she thinks only in pictures, not in language. I argue, to the contrary, that Grandin's mental life as she describes it in fact requires language, which, as a writer, she undoubtedly has. Finally, I turn to the question of whether thought as Temple Grandin describes it is independent of language.

Philosophical discussions of species have focused on multicellular, sexual animals and have often neglected to consider unicellular organisms like bacteria. This article begins to fill this gap by considering what species concepts, if any, apply neatly to the bacterial world. First, I argue that the biological species concept cannot be applied to bacteria because of the variable rates of genetic transfer between populations, depending in part on which gene type is prioritized. Second, I present a critique of phylogenetic bacterial species, (...) arguing that phylogenetic bacterial classification requires a questionable metaphysical commitment to the existence of essential genes. I conclude by considering how microbiologists have dealt with these biological complexities by using more pragmatic and not exclusively evolutionary accounts of species. I argue that this pragmatism is not borne of laziness but rather of the substantial conceptual problems in classifying bacteria based on any evolutionary standard. (shrink)

When a patient visits his doctor there is, as well as a spoken dialogue, also an unspoken, or tacit, dialogue between them. This may not be evident unless that dialogue breaks down when the psychological or moral terms of reference of each are seen to be different. The author of this paper tries to elucidate the framework in which physician and patient think, and in so doing allow an understanding of why the physician may appear to be rigid and authoritarian (...) in his dealing with his patients and the patient uncooperative. (shrink)

The paper discusses the evolving concept of causationin epidemiology and its potential interaction with logic and scientific philosophy. Causes arecontingent but the necessity which binds them totheir effects relies on contrary-to-fact conditionals,i.e. conditional statements whose antecedent is false.Chance instead of determinism plays a growing role inscience and, although rarely acknowledged yet, inepidemiology: causes are multiple and chancy; a priorevent causes a subsequent event if the probabilitydistribution of the subsequent event changesconditionally upon the probability of the prior event.There are no known (...) sufficient causes in epidemiology.We merely observe tendencies toward sufficiency ortendencies toward necessity: cohort studies evaluatethe first tendencies, and case-control studies thelatter.In applied sciences, such as medicine andepidemiology, causes are intrinsically connected withgoals and effective strategies: they are recipewhich have a potential harmful or sucessful use; theyare contrastive since they make a differencebetween circumstances in which they are present andthose in which they are absent: causes do notexplain Event E but event E rather thaneven F. Causation is intrinsically linked with thenotion of ``what is pathological''.Any definition of causation will inevitably collapseinto the use made of epidemiologic methods. Theprogressive methodological sophistication of the lastforty years is in perfect alignment with a gradualimplicit overhaul of our concept of causation. (shrink)