Dual functional brain asymmetry refers to the notion that in most individuals the left cerebral hemisphere is specialized for language functions, whereas the right cerebral hemisphere is more important than the left for the perception, construction, and recall of stimuli that are difficult to verbalize. In the last twenty years there have been scattered reports of sex differences in degree of hemispheric specialization. This review provides a critical framework within which two related topics are discussed: Do meaningful sex differences in (...) verbal or spatial cerebral lateralization exist? and, if so, Is the brain of one sex more symmetrically organized than the other? Data gathered on right-handed adults are examined from clinical studies of patients with unilateral brain lesions; from dichotic listening, tachistoscopic, and sensorimotor studies of functional asymmetries in non-brain-damaged subjects; from anatomical and electrophysiological investigations, as well as from the developmental literature. Retrospective and descriptive findings predominate over prospective and experimental methodologies. Nevertheless, there is an impressive accummulation of evidence suggesting that the male brain may be more asymmetrically organized than the female brain, both for verbal and nonverbal functions. These trends are rarely found in childhood but are often significant in the mature organism. (shrink)

_The Undiscovered Dewey_ explores the profound influence of evolution and its corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on John Dewey's philosophy of action, particularly its argument that inquiry proceeds from the uncertainty of human activity. Dewey separated the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story concerning the certainty of human progress. He then connected this thread to the way in which our reflective capacities aid us in improving our lives. Dewey therefore launched a new understanding of the modern self (...) that encouraged intervention in social and natural environments but which nonetheless demanded courage and humility because of the intimate relationship between action and uncertainty. Melvin L. Rogers explicitly connects Dewey's theory of inquiry to his religious, moral, and political philosophy. He argues that, contrary to common belief, Dewey sought a place for religious commitment within a democratic society sensitive to modern pluralism. Against those who regard Dewey as indifferent to moral conflict, Rogers points to Dewey's appreciation for the incommensurability of our ethical commitments. His deep respect for modern pluralism, argues Rogers, led Dewey to articulate a negotiation between experts and the public so that power did not lapse into domination. Exhibiting an abiding faith in the reflective and contestable character of inquiry, Dewey strongly engaged with the complexity of our religious, moral, and political lives. (shrink)

Science and technology studies concerned with the study of lay influence on the sciences usually analyze either the political or the normative epistemological consequences of lay interference. Here I frame the relation between patients, knowledge, and the sciences by opening up the question: How can we articulate the knowledge that patients develop and use in their daily lives and make it transferable and useful to others, or, `turn it into science’? Elsewhere, patient knowledge is analyzed either as essentially different from (...) or similar to medical knowledge. The category of experiential knowledge is vague and is used to encompass many types of experience, whereas the knowledge of the `expert patient’ may be assumed to have the shape of up-to-date medical information. This paper shows through a case study of people with severe lung disease that patient knowledge can be understood as a form of practical knowledge that patients use to translate medical and technical knowledge into something useful to their daily life with disease. Patients coordinate this with homegrown know-how and advice from fellow patients, weighing different values - of which `taking good care of one’s body’ is but one - that may conflict in a specific situation. These practices result in sets of techniques that may be made useful to others. The paper argues for two alternatives to state-of-the-art medical research to turn patient knowledge into science: ethnographies of knowledge practices and the collection and making accessible of techniques. (shrink)

concepts are often embodied through metaphor. For example, we talk about moving through time in metaphorical terms, as if we were moving through space, allowing us to 'look back' on past events. Much of the work on embodied metaphor to date has assumed a single set of universal, shared bodily experiences that motivate our understanding of abstract concepts. This book explores sources of variation in people's experiences of embodied metaphor, including, for example, the shape and size of one's body, one's (...) age, gender, state of mind, physical or linguistic impairments, personality, ideology, political stance, religious beliefs, and linguistic background. It focuses on the ways in which people's experiences of metaphor fluctuate over time within a single communicative event or across a lifetime. Combining theoretical argument with findings from new studies, Littlemore analyses sources of variation in embodied metaphor and provides a deeper understanding of the nature of embodied metaphor itself. (shrink)

This paper describes the approach of empirical ethics, a form of ethics that integrates non-positivist ethnographic empirical research and philosophy. Empirical ethics as it is discussed here builds on the ‘empirical turn’ in epistemology. It radicalizes the relational approach that care ethics introduced to think about care between people by drawing in relations between people and technologies as things people relate to. Empirical ethics studies care practices by analysing their intra-normativity, or the ways of living together the actors within these (...) practices strive for or bring about as good practices. Different from care ethics, what care is and if it is good is not defined beforehand. A care practice may be contested by comparing it to alternative practices with different notions of good care. By contrasting practices as different ways of living together that are normatively oriented, suggestions for the best possible care may be argued for. Whether these suggestions will actually be put to practice is, however, again a relational question; new actors need to re-localize suggestions, to make them work in new practices and fit them in with local intra-normativities with their particular routines, material infrastructures, know-how and strivings. (shrink)

This is a thorough treatment of first-order modal logic. The book covers such issues as quantification, equality (including a treatment of Frege's morning star/evening star puzzle), the notion of existence, non-rigid constants and function symbols, predicate abstraction, the distinction between nonexistence and nondesignation, and definite descriptions, borrowing from both Fregean and Russellian paradigms.

ABSTRACTComputers are now able to automatically generate metaphors, but some automatically generated metaphors are more well received than others. In this article, we showed participants a series of “A is B” type metaphors that were either generated by humans or taken from the Twitter account “MetaphorIsMyBusiness”, which is linked to a fully automated metaphor generator. We used these metaphors to assess linguistic factors that drive metaphor appreciation and understanding, including the role of novelty, word frequency, concreteness, and emotional valence of (...) the topic and vehicle terms. We additionally assessed how these metaphors were understood in three languages, including English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese, and whether participants thought they had been generated by a human or a computer. We found that meaningfulness, appreciation, speed in finding meaning, and humanness ratings were reliably correlated with each other in all three languages, which we interpret to indicate a mor... (shrink)

An elaboration on some loose ends in Grodzinsky's analysis shows that data from the field of aphasia contribute to the formulation of theoretical linguistic principles, and provides extra arguments in favor of Grodzinsky's claim that linguistic theory is the best tool for the investigation of aphasia. This illustrates and emphasizes the importance of communication between researchers in the field of (Broca's) aphasia and of theoretical linguistics.

How do technologies such as webcams influence health care and what concepts may describe this? This article explores the literature and analyses what people looking through webcams do within a particular health care practice in the Netherlands, that is, within the rehabilitation of people suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma. Several ways to describe the activities webcams support and perform are identified. The webcam is concentrating the activities of its users, by making them focus on the task (...) at hand and magnifies the characteristics of the already existing relationships between webcam users by imposing a relational distance that fits best with intimate contacts. Although webcams shift notions of space and distance, their working appears to be related, to a great extent, to their location. (shrink)

Many powerful logics exist today for reasoning about multi-agent systems, but in most of these it is hard to reason about an infinite or indeterminate number of agents. Also the naming schemes used in the logics often lack expressiveness to name agents in an intuitive way.To obtain a more expressive language for multi-agent reasoning and a better naming scheme for agents, we introduce a family of logics called term-modal logics. A main feature of our logics is the use of modal (...) operators indexed by the terms of the logics. Thus, one can quantify over variables occurring in modal operators. In term-modal logics agents can be represented by terms, and knowledge of agents is expressed with formulas within the scope of modal operators. (shrink)

How might we philosophize about the metaverse? It is traditionally held that the four main branches of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic. In this article, I shall demonstrate how virtual walt-fictionalism, a particular version of virtual irrealism, is able to offer a straightforward, internally consistent, and powerful response about the metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics) of the metaverse. I will first characterize the metaverse in terms of a reality-virtuality (RV) continuum and distinguish between virtual realism and virtual irrealism, (...) before elaborating on the explanatory power and potential of virtual walt-fictionalism relative to the metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics) of the metaverse. (shrink)

Kleene’s well-known strong three-valued logic is shown to be one of a family of logics with similar mathematical properties. These logics are produced by an intuitively natural construction. The resulting logics have direct relationships with bilattices. In addition they possess mathematical features that lend themselves well to semantical constructions based on fixpoint procedures, as in logic programming.

The purpose of this essay is to both discuss commands as a species of speech act and to discuss commands within the broader framework of how they are used and ...

This paper continues my work of [9], which showed there was a broad family of many valued logics that have a strict/tolerant counterpart. Here we consider a generalization of weak Kleene three valued logic, instead of the strong version that was background for that earlier work. We explain the intuition behind that generalization, then determine a subclass of strict/tolerant structures in which a generalization of weak Kleene logic produces the same results that the strong Kleene generalization did. This paper provides (...) much background, but is not self-contained. Some results from [9] are called on, and are not reproved here. [9] Melvin C. Fitting. “A Family of Strict/Tolerant Logics”. In: Journal of Philosophical Logic. Online. Print publication forthcoming. (shrink)

Dignity is a fundamental concept, but its meaning is not clear. This paper attempts to clarify the term by analysing and reconnecting two meanings of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to citizen values that protect individuals as equal to one another. Dignitas refers to aesthetic values embedded in genres of sociality that relate to differences between people. The paper explores these values by way of an empirical ethical analysis of practices of washing psychiatric patients in nursing care. Nurses legitimate (...) the washing of reluctant patients with reference to dignity. The analysis shows the intertwinement of humanitas and dignitas that gives dignity its fundamental meaning. (shrink)

While Kripke's original paper on the theory of truth used a three-valued logic, we believe a four-valued version is more natural. Its use allows for possible inconsistencies in information about the world, yet contains Kripke's development within it. Moreover, using a four-valued logic makes it possible to work with complete lattices rather than complete semi-lattices, and thus the mathematics is somewhat simplified. But more strikingly, the four-valued version has a wide, natural generalization to the family of interlaced bilattices. Thus, with (...) little more work, the theory is extended to a broad class of settings. Indeed, a result like Theorem 6.2 would not even be possible to state without the interlaced bilattice machinery. We hope the notion of interlaced bilattice will make apparent further such connections. (shrink)

This book contains new essays in honor of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest (...) or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined. (shrink)

Diffusion and institutionalization are of prime sociological importance, as both processes unfold at the intersections of relations and structures, as well as persistence and change. Yet they are often confounded, leading to theoretical and methodological biases that hinder the development of generalizable arguments. We look at diffusion and institutionalization distinctively, each as both a process and an outcome in terms of three dimensions: the objects that flow or stick; the subjects who adopt or influence; and the social settings through which (...) an innovation travels. We offer examples to flesh out these dimensions, and formulate testable propositions from our analytic framework that could lead to further theoretical refinement and progress. (shrink)

Bilattices, due to M. Ginsberg, are a family of truth value spaces that allow elegantly for missing or conflicting information. The simplest example is Belnap’s four-valued logic, based on classical two-valued logic. Among other examples are those based on finite many-valued logics, and on probabilistic valued logic. A fixed point semantics is developed for logic programming, allowing any bilattice as the space of truth values. The mathematics is little more complex than in the classical two-valued setting, but the result provides (...) a natural semantics for distributed logic programs, including those involving confidence factors. The classical two-valued and the Kripke/Kleene three-valued semantics become special cases, since the logics involved are natural sublogics of Belnap’s logic, the logic given by the simplest bilattice. (shrink)

“The primary purpose of this book has been to provide a single source of containing the basic information about systematic and theoretical psychology which any student of psychology should have. It is mainly directed at the senior undergraduate major and the beginning of the graduate student.”-Publisher.

One approach to the paradoxes of self-referential languages is to allow some sentences to lack a truth value (or to have more than one). Then assigning truth values where possible becomes a fixpoint construction and, following Kripke, this is usually carried out over a partially ordered family of three-valued truth-value assignments. Some years ago Matt Ginsberg introduced the notion of bilattice, with applications to artificial intelligence in mind. Bilattices generalize the structure Kripke used in a very natural way, while making (...) the mathematical machinery simpler and more perspicuous. In addition, work such as that of Yablo fits naturally into the bilattice setting. What I do here is present the general background of bilattices, discuss why they are natural, and show how fixpoint approaches to truth in languages that allow self-reference can be applied. This is not new work, but rather is a summary of research I have done over many years. (shrink)

The family of all stable models for a logic program has a surprisingly simple overall structure, once two naturally occurring orderings are made explicit. In a so-called knowledge ordering based on degree of definedness, every logic program P has a smallest stable model, sk P — it is the well-founded model. There is also a dual largest stable model, S k P, which has not been considered before. There is another ordering based on degree of truth. Taking the meet and (...) the join, in the truth ordering, of the two extreme stable models sk P and S.. (shrink)

We introduce a subclass of Kripke's fixed points in which falsehood is the preferred truth value. In all of these the truthteller evaluates to false, while the liar evaluates to undefined (or overdefined). The mathematical structure of this family of fixed points is investigated and is shown to have many nice features. It is noted that a similar class of fixed points, preferring truth, can also be studied. The notion of intrinsic is shown to relativize to these two subclasses. The (...) mathematical ideas presented here originated in investigations of so-called stable models in the semantics of logic programming. (shrink)

This paper articulates dignity as relational engagement in concrete care situations. Dignity is often understood as an abstract principle that represents inherent worth of all human beings. In actual care practices, this principle has to be substantiated in order to gain meaning and inform care activities. We describe three exemplary substantiations of the principle of dignity in care: as a state or characteristic of a situation; as a way to differentiate between socio-cultural positions; or as personal meaning. We continue our (...) analysis by presenting cases on dignity in care related to us in focus groups with medical professionals. Our empirical ethical lens is in this paper is to analyse, not the meaning of dignity, but the way in which it emerges in practices where it is pursued, within relationships between people, technologies, places, regulations, and the values cherished by or embedded in them. We show that professional caregivers recognize in the dignity of the person they care for their own dignity; giving up on the one implies no less than giving up on the other. This ‘mirrored experience’ of dignity expresses itself in professional’s engagement with the situation. The value of this engagement, we argue, lies not primarily in realizing the particular content of the values at stake. We point to the importance of engagement itself, even if the values engaged with cannot be realized to the full, and even if competing versions of dignity are at stake simultaneously. In this way the caregivers provide us with interesting examples of moral actorship in situations of conflicting values. (shrink)

Among non-monotonic systems of reasoning, non-monotonic modal logics, and autoepistemic logic in particular, have had considerable success. The presence of explicit modal operators allows flexibility in the embedding of other approaches. Also several theoretical results of interest have been established concerning these logics. In this paper we introduce non-monotonic modal logics based on many-valued logics, rather than on classical logic. This extends earlier work of ours on many-valued modal logics. Intended applications are to situations involving several reasoners, not just one (...) as in the standard development. (shrink)

We wish here to consider the theory of a population or system made up of individuals whose number and size change with time. As usual, the description of these changes will be referred to as the kinetics, whereas the description of the special circumstances under which unchanging conditions subsist will be called the statics of the population. A third category, the conditions for a steady state, i.e., when the variables inside the system do not change, but linked variables outside do, (...) will be described by what we shall call the rheostatics of the system. All three, statics, rheostatics, and kinetics are subdivisions of the general dynamics of the system. (shrink)

Mahadevan (2018, AAAI Conference. https://people.cs.umass.edu/~mahadeva/papers/aaai2018-imagination.pdf) proposes that we are at the cusp of imagination science, one of whose primary concerns will be the design of imagination machines. Programs have been written that are capable of generating jokes (Kim Binsted’s JAPE), producing line-drawings that have been exhibited at such galleries as the Tate (Harold Cohen’s AARON), composing music in several styles reminiscent of such greats as Vivaldi and Mozart (David Cope’s Emmy), proving geometry theorems (Herb Gelernter’s IBM program), and inducing quantitative (...) laws from empirical data (Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw, Jan Zytkow, and Herbert Simon’s BACON). In recent years, Dartmouth has been hosting Turing Tests in creativity in three categories: short stories, sonnets, and dance music DJ sets. In this post, I will provide a brief and non-exhaustive survey of some plausible responses to these imagination machines and the related prospects for our understanding of the imagination. (shrink)

A sequent calculus of a new sort is extracted from the Prolog program leanTAP. This calculus is sound and complete, even though it lacks almost all structural rules. Thinking of leanTAP as a sequent calculus provides a new perspective on it and, in some ways, makes it easier to understand. It is also easier to verify correctness and completeness of the Prolog implementation. In addition, it suggests extensions to other logics, some of which are considered here.