The world contains objective causal relations and universals, both of which are intimately connected. If these claims are true, they must have far-reaching consequences, breathing new life into the theory of empirical knowledge and reinforcing epistemological realism. Without causes and universals, Professor Fales argues, realism is defeated, and idealism or scepticism wins. Fales begins with a detailed analysis of David Hume's argument that we have no direct experience of necessary connections between events, concluding that Hume was mistaken on (...) this fundamental point. Then, adopting the view of Armstrong and others that causation is grounded in a second-order relation between universals, he explores a range of topics for which the resulting analysis of causation has systematic implications. In particular, causal identity conditions for physical universals are proposed, which generate a new argument for Platonism. The nature of space and time is discussed, with arguments against backward causation and for the view that space and time can exist independently of matter or causal process. Many of Professor Fales's conclusions seem to run counter to received opinion among contemporary empiricists. Yet his method is classically empiricist in spirit, and a chief motive for these metaphysical explorations is epistemological. The final chapters investigate the perennial question of whether an empiricist, internalist and foundational epistemology can support scientific realism. (shrink)

Biases in cognition are ubiquitous. Social psychologists suggested biases and stereotypes serve a multifarious set of cognitive goals, while at the same time stressing their potential harmfulness. Recently, biases and stereotypes became the purview of heated debates in the machine learning community too. Researchers and developers are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that some biases, like gender and race biases, are entrenched in the algorithms some AI applications rely upon. Here, taking into account several existing approaches that address the (...) problem of implicit biases and stereotypes, we propose that a strategy to cope with this phenomenon is to unmask those found in AI systems by understanding their cognitive dimension, rather than simply trying to correct algorithms. To this extent, we present a discussion bridging together findings from cognitive science and insights from machine learning that can be integrated in a state-of-the-art semantic network. Remarkably, this resource can be of assistance to scholars (e.g., cognitive and computer scientists) while at the same time contributing to refine AI regulations affecting social life. We show how only through a thorough understanding of the cognitive processes leading to biases, and through an interdisciplinary effort, we can make the best of AI technology. (shrink)

This study is a new look at the question of how God can act upon the world, and whether the world can affect God, examining contemporary work on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, and current work in the theory of knowledge and mysticism. It has been traditional to address such questions by appealing to God’s omnipotence and omniscience, but this book claims that this is useless unless it can be shown how these two powers "work." Instead of (...) treating the familiar problems associated with omnipotence and omniscience, this book asks directly whether, and how, causal interactions between God and His world could occur: both between God and the physical world and between God and other minds, as well as between the world and God. Fales examines current thinking about the very nature of causation, laws of nature, and agency. (shrink)

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the (...) acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses. (shrink)

It has been shown that Recurrent Artificial Neural Networks automatically acquire some grammatical knowledge in the course of performing linguistic prediction tasks. The extent to which such networks can actually learn grammar is still an object of investigation. However, being mostly data-driven, they provide a natural testbed for usage-based theories of language acquisition. This mini-review gives an overview of the state of the field, focusing on the influence of the theoretical framework in the interpretation of results.

Using a term coined by the contemporary Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan, we could define Zhou Dunyi's thought in terms of ‘moral metaphysics’. Zhou Dunyi, a thinker who lived in Northern Song period, developed a philosophy that shows an ontological link between the cosmic order of the universe and the human moral reality. His contribution consists of two short works, Penetrating the Book of Changes and Discussion of the Supreme Polarity Diagram. These works played a fundamental role in creating the metaphysical (...) structure of the neo-Confucian thought: Zhu Xi emphasized Zhou Dunyi's contribution to the neo-Confucian philosophy and, more precisely, he pointed out how Zhou Dunyi's ideas helped to define the conceptual framework of neo-Confucianism. Moreover, Zhu Xi legitimized Zhou Dunyi's role as the pioneer of the ‘Learning of the Way’, or the renewed neo-Confucian tradition. This paper aims to provide an overview of Zhou Dunyi's crucial role in the field of neo-Confucianism. At the same time, we stress the need for further analysis in order to fully understand the value of Zhou Dunyi's philosophy in the Song period intellectual context. (shrink)

Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, since a measure of the perceived similarity between faces may be used to investigate fundamental tasks like face categorization and recognition. Despite its fundamental role, measuring perceived similarity between faces is not trivial from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this paper we present theoretical arguments that undermine the method currently most used to measure perceived similarity between faces in visual perception, and we propose an (...) alternative method. We finally compare the two methods and find some empirical evidence that the proposed method can provide a more reliable evaluation of the perceived similarity between faces. (shrink)

Introduction : (re) making meaning -- Shaping private demons -- A play of selves : art as play -- Narrating the self -- Mapping : the need for borders -- The fluidity of time and space in art, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience -- Resisting representation -- Conclusion : order and chaos or framing ambiguity.

The foundation of ancient, invented writing systems lies in the predominant iconicity of their sign shapes. However, these shapes are often used not for their referential meaning but in a metaphorical way, whereby one entity stands for another. Metaphor, including its subcategories pars pro toto and metonymy, plays a crucial role in the formation of the earliest pristine invented scripts, yet this mechanism has been understudied from a cognitive, contextual, and comparative perspective. This article aims to address issues pertaining to (...) the definition, development, and application of these mechanisms in the formation of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese scripts. We analyze the local cases of metaphor-in-action in primary inventions, focusing first on visual metaphors and, second, on the typical or idiosyncratic uses of metonyms. (shrink)

Several writers have argued for the implausibility of there being naturalistic explanations of mystical experience. These writers recognize that the evidential significance of mystical experiences for theism depends upon whether explanations that exclude supernatural agency can be discounted; but they seem unaware of some of the best scientific work done in this area. Part I of the present paper introduces the theory of I. M. Lewis, an anthropologist, and tests it against the case of St Teresa. I use Teresa because (...) of her prominence, and because we have considerable biographical data for her. I conclude that Lewis's approach, suitably supplemented, is strikingly successful in explaining this case. (shrink)

The “doctrine of the given” that Fales defends holds that there are certain experiences such that we can have justified beliefs about their “contents” that are not based on any other beliefs, and that the rest of our justified empirical beliefs rest on those “basic beliefs.” The features of experience basic beliefs are about are said to be “given.” Fales holds that some basic beliefs are infallible, having a kind of clarity that guarantees their truth to the believer. (...) In addition, some basic beliefs are fallible, typically due to failure to devote full attention to one’s experience. (shrink)

A movement asking to take race out of medicine is growing in the US. While we agree with the necessity to get rid of flawed assumptions about biological race that pervade automatic race correction in medical algorithms, we urge caution about insisting on a blanket eliminativism about race in medicine. If we look at racism as a fundamental cause, in the sense that this notion has been introduced in epidemiological studies by Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, we must conclude that (...) race is indispensable to consider, investigate, and denounce the health effects of multilevel racism, and cannot be eliminated by addressing more specific risk factors in socially responsible epidemiology and clinical medicine. This does not mean that realism about human races is vindicated. While maintaining that there are no human races, we show how it is that a non-referring concept can nonetheless turn out indispensable for explaining real phenomena. (shrink)

It has been nearly a decade and a half since Fred Dretske, David Armstrong and Michael Tooley, having each rejected the Regularity theory, independently proposed that natural laws are grounded in a second-order relation that somehow binds together universals.' (l shall call this the ‘DTA theory’). In this way they sought to overcome the major - and notorious — shortcomings of every version of the Regularity theory: how to provide truth conditions for laws that lack instances; how to distinguish laws (...) from accidental generalizations; how to provide truth conditions for the counterfactuals and disposition statements that laws apparently ‘support’; how to justify inductive inferences from past events to laws and future events. For each of these puzzles, an apparently key element in the solution seems to be missing from Regularity theories. That missing element is a genuine connection, a relation with more than merely spatial and/or temporal content, linking the antecedent of a law to its consequent. Once such an additional objective element - however understood — is admitted to be essential to the analysis of laws, one is forced to give up the idea that the logical form of laws can be given in terms of quantifiers ranging over events or states of alfairs, and truth-functions. (shrink)

In this article, we tackle the epistemological and ethical issues related to the use of race concepts in the genomics of sport performance and sport-related concussion (SRC). In the first part of the article, we show how the concept of race is ubiquitous in scientific literature, besides the fact that ‘race’ as other analogous population descriptors like ‘ancestry’ and ‘continent’ carry ancestral genetic heterogeneity and therefore they cannot be used to infer any kind of genetic or physiological property. Then, we (...) investigate the question of whether genomics research focusing on racial categories and race-specific genes of sport performance and of risk of health outcomes due to repetitive head impacts (RHI) is justified from an epistemological point of view, arguing that it is not; we show that the evidence supporting the existence of genetic variants determining an elite athlete status or a predisposition to health outcomes after SRC is scarce, and the use of racial categories (e.g. African or Black, Caucasian or White, Asian, etc.) as proxies for genetic variants associated with an elite athlete status/a predisposition to health outcomes after SRC is ill-conceived. In the second part of the article, we analyze the main ethical issues concerning the reification of race concepts in sport genomics, also considering the more general issue of the ethical and social impact of the use of a genetic framework in the explanation of individual differences in sport performance and SRC. (shrink)

The article connects the topic of health in Nietzsche’s thought with the perspective that emerges from some novels of Theodor Fontane, by leaning on a close interaction between philosophy and literature. It is shown that two of Fontane’s characters, Victoire von Carayon from the novel Schach von Wuthenow and Waldemar von Haldern from the novel Stine, embody and depict specific Nietzschean ideas concerning the relationship between the experience of illness and the development of a higher cognitive faculty. How could be (...) thought the latter? It is a greater awareness of oneself, one’s feelings and needs, and a better intuitive capacity. Illness is seen, therefore, not as a mere negative, i.e., as something simply disabling, but rather as a challenge for deeper self-knowledge and empowerment. The concepts of health and illness thus end up flowing into each other, since health cannot be isolated from illness, which acquires a new meaning. (shrink)

The attraction between religion and politics is perennial. Sometimes, in its long and checkered history, it has led to an adulterous affair. I want to ask what lies at the heart of this attraction, and whether that can shed any light on the current religious/political scene. But the romance metaphor is at bottom not a good one. I shall argue that, in their originary condition, religion and politics are "closer," both ontologically and in their motivation, than woman and man, closer (...) than siblings. Perhaps the image of siamese identical twins would serve best as a figure for the union which binds together these domains, in spite of the peculiar political history which has, in the West and especially in this country, attempted to sunder them. Let me emphasize right here that my project is a descriptive one: I am seeking a deeper understanding of the phenomena, not attempting to develop a prescriptive or normative position concerning what is to be done. Indeed, I shall only be able to sketch the outlines of the descriptive position I shall propose. (shrink)

This book presents 12 essays that focus on the analysis of the problems prompted by cyber operations. It clarifies and discusses the ethical and regulatory problems raised by the deployment of cyber capabilities by a state’s army to inflict disruption or damage to an adversary’s targets in or through cyberspace. Written by world-leading philosophers, ethicists, policy-makers, and law and military experts, the essays cover such topics as the conceptual novelty of COs and the ethical problems that this engenders; the applicability (...) of existing conceptual and regulatory frameworks to COs deployed in case of conflicts; the definition of deterrence strategies involving COs; and the analysis of models to foster cooperation in managing cyber crises. Each essay is an invited contribution or a revised version of a paper originally presented at the workshop on Ethics and Policies for Cyber Warfare, organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The volume endorses a multi-disciplinary approach, as such it offers a comprehensive overview of the ethical, legal, and policy problems posed by COs and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to solve them. It will appeal to a wide readership, including ethicists, philosophers, military experts, strategy planners, and law- and policy-makers. (shrink)

Christiaan Huygens’s late writings, ranging from 1686 to 1695, bear witness to his philosophical and theological reflections. In his Cosmotheoros, which was intended for publication, and other late writings that can be regarded as its preparatory drafts, Huygens deals with issues central to seventeenth-century philosophical debates: God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology, and the plurality of worlds. This paper explains how Huygens’s reflections on animals and their souls, rational or not, play a key role in his (...) epistemological reflections on natural theology. The issue of animal generation, as well as of animal souls, is crucial to identifying elements of continuity between the scientific topics of Huygens’s works, and may be considered as the point of intersection between his understanding of mechanism and of the teleology of nature. This neglected perspective on Huygens’s philosophical-natural animism reveals key elements of his model of rationality and of his attitude towards religion, demonstrating his involvement in the debate over animism, in which he seems to have been strongly influenced by English Protestant empiricism. (shrink)

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

Literal-minded Christians are enjoying resurgent respectability in intellectual circles. Darwin isn’t the only target: also under attack is the application of modern historiography to Scripture According to Reformed epistemologists, ordinary Christians can directly know that, e.g., Jesus rose from the dead, and evidential concerns can be dismissed. This reversion to a sixteenth century hermeneutic deserves response.

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world's scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement 'Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus'. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

We inquire into the notions of ‘boundary’ and ‘cluster’ in the fields of medical genetics, pharmacogenetics, and population genetics. First we show that the two notions are not well discussed in literature. Then we propose a promising explication of them, in which we argue that clustering is always ‘property laden’, that is, fundamentally dependent on decisions about the properties to be taken into account. In particular we suggest three different kinds of properties that have a role in these decisions. That (...) is, we conclude that boundaries and clusters among humans depend on our way of considering nature. Concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnic group’ are discussed too, since they are the most used clusters among humans. (shrink)

This special issue gathers together a selection of papers presented by international experts during a workshop entitled ‘Ethics of Cyber-Conflicts’, which was devoted to fostering interdisciplinary debate on the ethical and legal problems and the regulatory gap concerning cyber conflicts. The workshop was held in 2013 at the Centro Alti Studi Difesa in Rome under the auspices of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence . This NATO-accredited international military organisation that has always placed a high value on an (...) interdisciplinary approach to cyber defence, uniting as it does perspectives from technical, policy, legal, and strategic domains. The Centre’s mission is to enhance capability, cooperation, and information-sharing between NATO, its member states, and partner countries in the area of cyber defence by virtue of research, education, and consultation. The workshop was one of the projects supported by the Centre to achieve this mission.Readers may .. (shrink)

I present the traditional debate about the so called explanation of Russell’s paradox and propose a new way to solve the contradiction that arises in Frege’s system. I briefly examine two alternative explanatory proposals—the Predicativist explanation and the Cantorian one—presupposed by almost all the proposed solutions of Russell’s Paradox. From the discussion about these proposals a controversial conclusion emerges. Then, I examine some particular zig zag solutions and I propose a third explanation, presupposed by them, in which I emphasise the (...) role of an implicit premise in the derivation of the paradox. In conclusion, I propose a different zig zag solution obtained by the adoption of a negative free logic. (shrink)

Philosophical logic has its problem-children; and among these the Principle of Substitutivity of codesignating expressions — the linguistic spawn of Leibniz's law—has achieved a place of prominence. It has become increasingly apparent that a certain style of linguistic analysis, which seeks to impose formal regimentation ruled by the constraints of classical quantification theory, does not yield results with the kind of uniformity and elegance one should hope for from a satisfyi.ng theory. The root of the difficulty, I believe, bears upon (...) the answers to fundamental questions concerning the nature of cognitive agents and the purposes which their use of language is designed to further. If this is the case, one might expect to find some of the trouble surfacing at precisely those points where the language is used to convey information about the cognitive activities associated with the use of language by such agents. So it is.The central problem of this essay is the interpretation of referential expressions in statements involving propositional attitudes, with the focus on belief contexts. But I shall begin by placing the discussion within a broader theoretical framework. (shrink)