The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling - the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process - is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of (...) such a task [1]. (shrink)

Artificial moral agents raise complex ethical questions both in terms of the potential decisions they may make as well as the inputs that create their cognitive architecture. There are multiple differences between human and artificial cognition which create potential barriers for artificial moral agency, at least as understood anthropocentrically and it is unclear that artificial moral agents should emulate human cognition and decision-making. It is conceptually possible for artificial moral agency to emerge that reflects alternative ethical methodologies without creating ontological (...) challenges or existential crises for human moral agents. (shrink)

Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not in a (...) hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression. (shrink)

Written exclusively in the third-person by a narrator who repeatedly refers to “Henry Adams” as “passive,” “submissive,” and “a helpless victim” in relation to the “forces” in the world that form him, The Education of Henry Adams attenuates both author and subject by valuing environment over eponym. The critical literature on the text has focused primarily on the formal or psychological bases of such practice in order to argue that Adams is behind, and thus exempt from, the book's paradoxical self-effacements. (...) But for Adams the rationale for the impersonal, evacuated form of The Education is more ontological than personal, the necessary consequence of his quietistic belief in a materialist determinism so absolute as to reduce persons and history alike to “sum[s].... of the forces” of “nature.” This belief, one shared by many of his contemporaries and most fully evolved in Adams's “dynamic theory of history,” entails, in the context of The Education, making the distinction between auto-biography and autobiography, between a text generated by an “automaton” and one written by a person. Routed through a discussion of de Man's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of irony, this essay explores the relevance of such a distinction to both the humanism of Adams's age and the posthumanism of our own. (shrink)

This paper examines the popular philosophical theory of moral relativism. Traditionally, the theory argues that communities have their own conceptual frameworks of morality that are inaccessible to those outside of the community. Thus, one community cannot give another community a moral reason to change a practice. In this paper, I will examine David Velleman’s version of the theory presented in his book Foundations for Moral Relativism. This version posits that the drive towards mutual interpretability is a universal drive among human (...) communities. From this drive stem all the practices and moral values of communities. However, Velleman does not believe that this implies that communities can understand each others’ conceptual frameworks. In this way, his account remains a normal version of moral relativism. I will argue that there are some cases in which a person can understand a different community’s conceptual framework enough to provide a reason for that community to change a practice. Importantly, my argument will not say that the reasons for change are moral reasons. They will be practical reasons based on the normative fact that human communities should strive towards mutual interpretability. Thus, my account will also maintain the crucial tenets of moral relativism. If accomplished, this argument will add a great power to the theory. (shrink)

AbstractIntegrity is considered an important corporate value. Yet recent global events have highlighted the challenges firms face at living up to their stated values, especially when extended supply chain partners are involved. The concept of Supply Chain Integrity (SCI) can help firms shift focus beyond internal corporate integrity, toward supply chain integrity. Researchers and managers will benefit from an understanding of the SCI concept toward implementing SCI to better align supply chain partners with stated corporate values. This research fully develops (...) and empirically grounds the firm-level, inter-firm-oriented SCI concept. The thematic analysis of six firms’ archival and website content elaborated empirical descriptions of SCI themes and enabled the development of a process model for SCI, presenting a novel view of the underlying process by which firms can assess, develop, and maintain SCI across their supply chains. We propose the SCI model as an evolutionary process to improve a firm’s supply chain sustainability, rather than a dichotomous end state where firms either “have” integrity or they don’t. The SCI model could be used as a tool to help leaders create necessary change to better align values and supporting statements with culture, while influencing and affecting stakeholders across the supply chain. This is particularly important in today’s world, where business leaders must consider all stakeholders and address important stakeholder-driven issues such as supply chain sustainability, resilience, and security, which are now at the forefront in the ever-changing environment. (shrink)

Recent high-profile lawsuits have supported competing narratives that alternately depict civil litigation as an essential instrument of the rule of law and a threat to the ideal. This essay argues that each narrative captures an important element of truth and that Gerald Postema’s account of the rule of law in his book Law’s Rule helps us (albeit unwittingly) to see why. While Postema presents recourse for alleged abuses of power as a universal and enduring facet of the rule of law, (...) his conception of recourse turns out to resemble core features of the kind of adversarial litigation process exemplified by the U.S. federal civil justice system. Yet such a system both promises to promote and threatens to undermine each of the three principles that Postema claims are entailed by his understanding of the rule of law—namely, sovereignty, equality, and fidelity. Realizing recourse thus requires confronting difficult tradeoffs within each of those principles, as well as within the overarching rule-of-law ideal. And if the rule of law can’t be instantiated unequivocally in any particular set of institutions, then perhaps we should be more willing to treat the ideal as a subject of politics rather than just a constraint on it. (shrink)

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view--scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary--they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities--a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today. Universes without Us explores a lesser-known countertradition in (...) American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither "other" nor "mirror." Instead, humans are enmeshed with "alien" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of "us." By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it. Universes without Us demonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman. (shrink)

Hope is an attitude with a distinctive epistemological dimension: it is incompatible with knowledge. This chapter examines hope as it relates to knowledge but also to probability and inductive considerations. Such epistemic constraints can make hope either impossible, or, when hope remains possible, they affect how one’s epistemic situation can make hope rational rather than irrational. Such issues are especially relevant to when hopefulness may permissibly figure in practical deliberation over a course of action. So I consider cases of second-order (...) inductive reflection on when one should, or should not, be hopeful for an outcome with which one has a long record of experience: in other words, what is the epistemology behind when one should, if ever, stop hoping for outcomes which have failed one many times in the past? (shrink)

The generalizability crisis is compounded, or even partially caused, by a lack of specificity in psychological theories. Expanding the use of mechanistic models among psychologists is therefore important, but faces numerous hurdles. A cultural evolutionary approach can help guide and evaluate interventions to improve modeling efforts in psychology, such as developing standards and implementing them at the institutional level.

Juslin & Vll's (J&V's) discussions of evaluative conditioning and episodic memory focus on circumstances in which music becomes associated with arbitrary life events. However, analyses of film music suggest that viewers experience consistent pairings between types of music and types of narrative content. Researchers have demonstrated that the emotional content of film music has a major impact on viewers' emotional experiences of a narrative.

This paper takes up two questions regarding Locke’s doctrine of suspension. First, what motivates suspension? Second, what are the conditions under which we are motivated to suspend? In response to the first question, I argue that suspension is motivated by the desire to avoid the possible future evils that might result from acting precipitately upon some desire without suspending. In response to the second question, I argue against the common assumption that the desire motivating suspension must be an agent’s most (...) pressing desire. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, the mass media have changed the way they cover major political stories, like foreign policy crises. As a consequence, what the public learns about these events has changed. More media outlets cover major events than in the past, including the entertainment-oriented soft news media. When they do cover a political story, soft news outlets focus more on than traditional news media and less on the political or strategic context, or substantive nuances, of policy debates. Many Americans who (...) previously ignored most political news now attend to some information about major political events, like wars, via the soft news media. These changes have important implications for democratic politics. Most importantly, a large number of particularly persuadable potential voters are now tuning in to politics via soft news outlets. This gives politicians an incentive to develop strategies for reaching out to them. Such individuals care less about the nuances of policy and more about the personality of leaders and any sensational human drama that a policy, like a war, entails. Soft news consumers care less about geopolitics than about body bags. Politicians who want their votes are therefore likely to emphasize body bags more than geopolitics. In short, the media environment changes both the style and substance of politics in democracies. (shrink)

We consider a quaternionic quantum formalism for the description of quantum states and quantum dynamics. We prove that generalized quantum measurements on physical systems in quaternionic quantum theory can be simulated by usual quantum measurements with positive operator valued measures on complex Hilbert spaces. Furthermore, we prove that quaternionic quantum channels can be simulated by completely positive trace preserving maps on complex matrices. These novel results map all quaternionic quantum processes to algorithms in usual quantum information theory.

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

Reference guide to Paul Grice and the literature arising from his work, particularly in philosophy of language and mind.

In this paper we establish the - and -transfer principles for finitely decidable locally finite varieties, where a class of structures is finitely decidable if the first order theory of its finite members is recursive. The transfer principles deal with the local structure of finite algebras and have strong global consequences.

Stawarczyk, Bezdek, and Zacks offer neuroscience evidence for a midline default network core, which appears to coordinate internal, top‐down mentation with externally‐triggered, bottom‐up attention in a push‐pull relationship. The network may enable the flexible pursuance of thoughts tuned into or detached from the current environment.

This article reflects on the relative silence of African farmers within debates around the potential for genetically modified crops to transform agriculture on the continent. It proposes two strategies for amplifying these voices—one focused on research methodologies, the other on outreach—in order to transform the conversation around GM’s potential in Africa into one that revolves around farmer preferences and priorities.

I explicate and defend Kant's analysis of “skepticism” as a single, metaphilosophically unified rational phenomenon (at A756–764/B784–797, for instance). Kant anticipates one of the defining trends of contemporary epistemology's approach to radical philosophical skepticism: the thought that skepticism cannot be directly refuted, by demonstrating its falsity, but must be diagnosed, to show that its premises are unnatural, and consequently fail to be rationally compelling from within our own nonskeptical standpoint. Kant's most ambitious claim here is that he will develop this (...) diagnosis in a unitary fashion, by demonstrating that Cartesian, Humean, Pyrrhonian, and Agrippan skepticism are essentially interrelated as so many means to “the skeptic's” defining philosophical end. This “unity thesis” comes in both weak and strong variations. First, and more weakly, Kant argues that apparently distinct skeptical problematics share certain crucial metaphilosophical assumptions about the nature of reason, and the role of philosophical self-knowledge. More strongly, he also claims that the four problematics just mentioned are related hierarchically, in that the more fundamental skeptical worries constitute the essential dialectical context for the less fundamental ones, such that the more superficial problematics only arise if a logically prior worry is first acceded to. By showing how deeply these two unity theses structure Kant's Critical methodology, I argue that the Kantian view of philosophy as a “doctrine of wisdom” incorporates, and arguably surpasses, a number of key insights found in more recent work. The final result is that the transcendental philosopher may hope to co-opt the attractions of skepticism without making any unnecessary concessions along the way. (shrink)

Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").

In a recent paper,(1) palaeontologist Mike Benton claimed that our ability to reconstruct accurately the tree of Life may not have improved significantly over the last 100 years. This implies that the cladistic and molecular revolutions may have promulgated as much bad “black box” science as rigorous investigation. Benton's assessment was based on the extent to which cladograms (typically constructed with reference only to distributions of character states) convey the same narrative as the geochronological ages of fossil taxa (an independent (...) data set). Fossil record quality varies greatly between major clades, and the palaeontological dating “yardstick” may be more appropriate for some groups than others. BioEssays 24:203–207, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.; DOI 10.1002/bies.10065. (shrink)

In the covariant Hamiltonian mechanics with action-at-a-distance, we compare the proper time and dynamical time representations of the coordinate space world line using the differential geometry of nongeodesic curves in 3+1 Minkowski spacetime. The covariant generalization of the Serret-Frenet equations for the point particle with interaction are derived using the arc length representation. A set of invariant point particle kinematical properties are derived which are equivalent to the solutions of the equations of motion in coordinate space and which are functions (...) of either the proper time or the dynamical time. Expressions for the quantities are given for the example of the covariant harmonic oscillator and comments are offered regarding the measurability of the dynamical time. (shrink)

Henry More famously argues that all substances are extended, body and spirit alike. In The True Intellectual System of the Universe, More’s friend and fellow Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth notes More’s position but refrains from criticizing it. By contrast, in a passage from one of Cudworth’s unpublished manuscripts that has escaped scholarly attention and that is included here as an appendix, Cudworth addresses More directly, raising objections against More’s view and responding to two of More’s arguments. My aim in this (...) paper is to provide a detailed analysis of Cudworth’s response to More in this passage. (shrink)

Resources the virtue of humility as an essential divine attribute through the works of Augustine, Barth, and Katherine Sonderegger.

In examining Randy Cohen, an ethical advice giver for The New York Times Magazine, this article traces out special concerns of “applied philosophers” including: dissemination of ideas through a media, disparity of public understanding of philosophical (particularly ethical) issues and the contributions to these issues by specific people, and, of course, money. It skips the question of whether or not what Cohen does is philosophy in favor of examining how whatever he does is like the philosophy that philosophers often claim (...) to be doing. Cohen, then, is a doppelganger for philosophers, particularly those working in applied philosophy, that needs to be considered. The way he wades through a big-business format to discuss individual concerns may provide a model (even if it is of what not to do) for philosophers looking to actually affect change with their ethical pronouncements. (shrink)

Training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) is required for many research trainees nationwide, but little is known about its effectiveness. For a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of a short-term course in RCR, medical students participating in an NIH-funded summer research program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were surveyed using an instrument developed through focus group discussions. In the summer of 2003, surveys were administered before and after a short-term RCR course, as well as to (...) alumni of the courses given in the summers of 2002 and 2001. Survey responses were analyzed in the areas of knowledge, ethical decision-making skills, attitudes about responsible conduct of research, and frequency of discussions about RCR outside of class. The only statistically significant improvement associated with the course was an increase in knowledge, while there was a non-significant tendency toward improvements in ethical decision-making skills and attitudes about the importance of RCR training. The nominal impact of a short-term training course should not be surprising, but it does raise the possibility that other options for delivering information only, such as an Internet-based tutorial, might be considered as comparable alternatives when longer courses are not possible. (shrink)

A great deal of ink has been spilt debating the relative merits of foundationalism and coherentism in contemporary epistemology. In this dissertation, I argue that the debate itself, lively as it's been, rides atop a fundamental mistake. Careful examination of the defenses of these views indicates that both sides rest on a set of problematic presuppositions about justification and the nature of mind. More specifically, they all assume, in one form or another, that epistemic dependence must be inferential, and, as (...) a result, that direct access to the world could only be understood as resting on a class of entities which asymmetrically convey justification to other beliefs without receiving support from them. Revealing these assumptions promises to show that there is a much larger range of options for explaining our knowledge of the world than we can see when we are in the grips of an approach to epistemology and the philosophy of mind which requires us to choose between foundationalism and coherentism. (shrink)

In the past, Wonder Woman and Superman were depicted as good friends, but as of 2016, in New 52 Wonder Woman comic books, the Amazon princess and the man of steel are in a romantic relationship. The implication seems to be that romantically compatible people cannot be just friends. Thankfully, philosophy can help to debunk this notion and shed some light on the nature of friendship and romance as well. In consuming works of popular culture, people learn what is expected (...) of them in their interpersonal lives: cross‐gender relationships must be romantic, and friendship cannot be as important as romance. The loss of Wonder Woman and Superman as an example of a stable non‐romantic cross‐gender friendship therefore represents not just a change in the treatment of the characters, but a loss of support for the idea that such friendships are possible. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry covering the growing literature on the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (and its rivals), the Knowledge Norm of Action (and pragmatic encroachment), the Knowledge Norm of Belief, and the Knowledge Norm of Disagreement.

Some philosophers oppose recent arguments for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion by claiming that assertion, being an act much like any other, will be subject to norms governing acts generally, such as those articulated by Grice for the purpose of successful, cooperative endeavours. But in fact, Grice is a traitor to their cause; or rather, they are his dissenters, not his disciples. Drawing on Grice's unpublished papers, I show that he thought of asserting as a special linguistic act in need (...) of its own norm, and he tied his maxim of Quality to knowledge. I also develop a simple Gricean-inspired argument showing that the Quality maxim is not dependent on the Cooperative Principle. If it is not thus dependent, then the Cooperative Principle cannot be the explanation of, or source of normativity for, the Quality maxim. Thus, leveraging the insights informing the maxim of Quality actually provides the resources for a distinctive positive case that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...) conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)