These readings in the philosophy of education are designed to allow issues to emerge and to allow students to see how they arise, how they can be dealt with, and how a philosophy of education might be built. Of course no gathering of disparate works can deliver on that kind of editorial promise. However, this company of contributors is distinguished, and most of their entries provocative and interesting. The first section is designed to show what is special about our age (...) and what must be taken into account in order to think critically about modern issues in education. In this section Talcott Parsons, Cassirer, Melvin Seeman, Wm. H. Whyte, Marcuse, Jung, Sartre, and D. Bell talk about specialization, alienation, organization man, one-dimensional man, anxiety about values, and the knowledge explosion. This is the most "with-it" section and paints a fair portrait of our times. The last three sections are more conventional and more philosophical. There is a section on methodology which finds D. J. O'Conner, Dewey, and Whitehead discussing the nature of philosophy and which closes with Buber's opening pages from I and Thou. The last two sections have contributions by Plato, St. Augustine, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Dewey, Polanyi, and Maritain among others. These sections deal with questions of learning and with some "isms". All the sections have critical bibliographies which are enlightened, useful, and up-to-date. There is a glossary of technical terms. On the whole this is a strong anthology. Each of the four sections is sufficiently unified to provide a helpful context for the readings within it.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Multiple simultaneous independent discoveries, so well enunciated by Robert K. Merton in the early 1960s but already discussed for several hundreds of years, is a classic concept in the sociology of science. In this paper, the concept of multiple simultaneous independent errors is proposed, analyzed, and discussed. The concept of Selective Pessimistic Induction is proposed and used to connect MIDs with MIEs. Five types of MIEs are discussed: multiple errors in the interpretation of experimental data or computational results; multiple misjudgments (...) of the value of another’s research results or conclusions; multiple cases of false anticipation of achieving a certain experimental result; multiples of ignoring or omitting relevant precedents; and multiple instances of failure due to a not-yet-conceived scientific concept or principle. Causal MIDs and MIEs are those that can be traced directly to antecedent knowledge. Acausal MIDs and MIEs are those involving a consequential and identifiable leap from antecedent knowledge. Examples of causal and acausal MIEs are provided, mostly but not exclusively from the discipline of chemistry. Comparisons are made between MIDs and MIEs. Topics for future research are discussed and implications of these concepts are proposed. (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)

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)

This essay supports and encourages multiple disciplinary interactions for practitioners of the disciplines of chemistry, history of chemistry, philosophy of chemistry, and sociology of chemistry.

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)

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)

Dewey's conception of inquiry is often criticized for misdescribing the complexities of life that outstrip the reach of intelligence. This article argues that we can ascertain his subtle account of inquiry if we read it as a transformation of Aristotle's categories of knowledge: episteme, phronesis, and techne. For Dewey, inquiry is the process by which practical as well as theoretical knowledge emerges. He thus extends the contingency Aristotle attributes to ethical and political life to all domains of action. Knowledge claims (...) become experimental, the result of which makes them revisable in the context of experience. As a result, when we say a person (e.g., scientist, craftsman, or citizen) displays practical wisdom we are reading their judgments within a complex horizon, whose success as judgments require alertness and discernment of salient features in response to an uncertain environment. Contrary to his critics, he seeks to make us attuned to the world's inescapable, and sometimes, tragic complexity. (shrink)

As used by professional logicians today, is the name of their chosen subject singular or plural, "logic" or "logics"? This is a special case of a more general question. For instance, an algebraist might write a book entitled "Algebra", which is about algebras. Though many mathematicians are not aware of it, logic today most decidedly has its plural aspect. Indeed, it always did. Classical logic, which mathematicians often tend to identify with the entirety of logic, was in place roughly by (...) the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then a wide range of so-called non-classical logics have been developed. But indeed, before the creation of classical logic, there were multiple versions of logic, some of them more-or-less formalized. The current growing interest in medieval and ancient European and Asian logics has brought much of this back to modern awareness. Perhaps a later volume in this series will look at the history from a contemporary viewpoint. But that is not our task here. This is the second volume in a series called Landscapes in Logic. The intention of the series is to present reports illustrating the interplay between contemporary work in logic and mainstream mathematics. Of course this is both vague and overly ambitious, and must result in heterogeneous collections. The first volume in the series, Contemporary Logic and Computing, appeared in 2020. The contents divided plausibly into topics from contemporary logic, and from contemporary computing. The present volume is more diverse, and includes articles about both classical and non-classical logics, sometimes from the semantic side and sometimes from the proof-theoretic side. Some articles are primarily technical, often algebraic, while others are more philosophical in nature. Many fit into multiple categories. This multiplicity should not be seen as a defect. The papers here do not just explore logics house by house, but say something about their general neighborhoods as well. (shrink)

In “Idolatry and the End of Apologetics,” I worried that while continental philosophy can aid Christian philosophers and theologians, it can also tempt us toward the “Idolatry of Linguistic License”—an idolatry which sets God so far beyond our words that we deny God’s normative place in the community of speakers while safeguarding our autonomy vis-à-vis God. My essay suggested that some passages in Myron Bradley Penner’s helpful book, The End of Apologetics, might pass too close to the Idolatry of Linguistic (...) License. In Penner’s irenic reply he affirmed that the Idolatry of Linguistic License is a real worry, but protested that I had misread him at several points. This response seeks to continue that irenic tone in a discussion of three points where I still have some questions. (shrink)

Clinical ethics takes on a special cast in a rehabilitation clinic for psychosis where many patients come from severely disadvantaged backgrounds and many suffer from fluctuating decisional capacity. This paper illustrates several ethical issues—truth telling and partiality, prescribing concealed medication, questionable billing practices, industry collaboration, limits of confidentiality, grounds for abandonment and the primacy of autonomy—in the hope that discussing such matters will lead to a clearer framework for work with this population.

Honoring the divine is central to Maimonides' ethical and religious phenomenology. It connotes the recognition of radical divine incommensurability and points to the hard limits of human ability to know God. Yet it also signals the importance of philosophical speculation within those limits, indicating the intellectual and ethical telos of human life. For Maimonides, to honor or show kavod to God is closely related to the meaning of the divine glory (also known as kavod ) that Moses demands to see (...) in Exodus 33. Moses' demand to see the kavod is usually interpreted as a quest for some visible sign of God's presence or, at least, for a created light whose existence could testify to the authenticity of Moses' prophecy. Maimonides is alone among early interpreters in treating Exodus 33 as a parable of the philosophical quest to apprehend divine uniqueness, which leads first to negative theology and then to imitatio Dei . This article argues that the theme of divine kavod links Maimonides' philosophical, literary, and even medical concerns with his practical religious teaching, and connects the Guide of the Perplexed with his other legal and interpretive works. Maimonides' consistent fascination with Exodus 33 helps to organize his reflections on human perfection, ethics, and the relationship between idolatry and everyday religious language, distinguishing him from dominant trends in both Judaeo-Arabic and later kabbalistic thought. (shrink)

Myron Penner’s work shows some ways continental philosophy could strengthen apologetics. In particular, continental philosophy can serve what Francis Schaeffer called “the final apologetic” by exposing idols that keep us from living lives of “costly, observable love.” Yet continental philosophy can also imperil apologetics and theology. The worst danger stems from what I call the “idolatry of linguistic license,” a type of idolatry where linguistic criticism denies God a place in the normative community of speakers. Although the idolatry of linguistic (...) license mars some recent critiques of apologetics inspired by continental philosophy, apologetics would still profit from measured use of continental philosophy. (shrink)

Richard Brandt’s “Second Puzzle” for utilitarianism asks: What is meant to count as benefit or utility? In addressing this puzzle, Brandt dismisses “objective” theories of utility as prejudging substantive moral issues and opts for “subjective” theories of utility based either on desire-satisfaction or happiness, so as to welcome people with a variety of substantive moral commitments into his utilitarian system. However, subjective theories have difficulties finding principled grounds for elevating one desire over another. Brandt attempts to circumvent the difficulties through (...) his “reformed definition” of rationality, a definition that hinges on his notion of cognitive psychotherapy. Cognitive psychotherapy asserts that a desire is rational only once it is vividly exposed to relevant, available information. I argue that Brandt’s notion of cognitive psychotherapy tacitly builds substantive metaphysical and ethical commitments into his reformed definition of rationality, thus rendering his theory of utility an objective theory. Answering Brandt’s “Second Puzzle” forces not only Brandt, but also utilitarians more generally, to take up substantive metaphysical and ethical commitments from the outset, commitments that substantially predetermine the outcomes generated by their utilitarian systems. (shrink)

Could translation be fully automated? We must first acknowledge the complexity, ambiguity, and diversity of natural languages. These aspects of natural languages, when combined with a particular dilemma known as the computational dilemma, appear to imply that the machine translator faces certain obstacles that a human translator has already managed to overcome. At the same time, science has not yet solved the problem of how human brains process natural languages and how human beings come to acquire natural language understanding. We (...) will then distinguish between the task of translation and the responsibility of the translator. Thereafter, we will conduct a survey of the methods of machine translation (viz. RBMT, SMT, NMT, foundation models or large language models). These methods will then be critically evaluated both in general and relative to Bar-Hillel’s hypothesis about the impossibility of fully automatic, high-quality machine translation (Fahqmt). Some concluding remarks will be made about the scope, prospects, and limits of machine translation. (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)

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)

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)

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 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)

“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.

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.

First - order modal logic is very much under current development, with many different semantics proposed. The use of rigid objects goes back to Saul Kripke. More recently, several semantics based on counterparts have been examined, in a development that goes back to David Lewis. There is yet another line of research, using intensional objects, that traces back to Richard Montague. I have been involved with this line of development for some time. In the present paper, I briefly sketch several (...) of the approaches to first - order modal logic. Then I present one that I call FOIL in the Montague tradition that, I believe, is both expressive and natural. I briefly discuss in what sense it can be made to encompass the other approaches. Finally, I provide tableau rules to go with the FOIL semantics. (shrink)

An interpolation theorem holds for many standard modal logics, but first order $S5$ is a prominent example of a logic for which it fails. In this paper it is shown that a first order $S5$ interpolation theorem can be proved provided the logic is extended to contain propositional quantifiers. A proper statement of the result involves some subtleties, but this is the essence of it.

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)

Differential privacy (DP) aims to confer data processing systems with inherent privacy guarantees, offering strong protections for personal data. But DP’s approach to privacy carries with it certain assumptions about how mathematical abstractions will be translated into real-world systems, which—if left unexamined and unrealized in practice—could function to shield data collectors from liability and criticism, rather than substantively protect data subjects from privacy harms. This article investigates these assumptions and discusses their implications for using DP to govern data-driven systems. In (...) Parts 1 and 2, we introduce DP as, on one hand, a mathematical framework and, on the other hand, a kind of real-world sociotechnical system, using a hypothetical case study to illustrate how the two can diverge. In Parts 3 and 4, we discuss the way DP frames privacy loss, data processing interventions, and data subject participation, arguing it could exacerbate existing problems in privacy regulation. In part 5, we conclude with a discussion of DP’s potential interactions with the endogeneity of privacy law, and we propose principles for best governing DP systems. In making such assumptions and their consequences explicit, we hope to help DP succeed at realizing its promise for better substantive privacy protections. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kantattempts to unravel the problem of Übergang that threatens his CopernicanRevolution. Having opened up a ``chasm'' betweensensible and supersensible, betweenepistemological and ontological, Kant facesboth the specter of empirical chaos in whichthe noumenal refuses to conform to theunderstanding's attempts to legislate over themanifold of intuition, and the problem offinding a place for freedom to have effectswithin the seamless phenomenal realm ofefficient causality. Central to Kant's attemptto overcome these problems is his notion of theheautonomy of reflective judging, (...) in whichjudgment subjectively legislates its ownactivity. The net effect of this strategy isto preserve the integrity of the architectonicby permitting judgment use of ontologicalprinciples in regulating its own activity, butalways placing these ontological principlesunder an epistemological ``as if'' that cannot becarried over into the noumenal realm (e.g.,judgment can subjectively operate under theprinciple that the world appears ``as if'' it haspurpose, but this cannot be thought to apply tothe noumenal). Kant shields his architectonicby allowing it to encounter onlyepistemologically neutered noumena. This paperargues that Hick faces an analogousÜbergang problem, explores his``heautonomous'' attempt to blunt the problem,and concludes that the attempt fails, leavingHick with an unresolved problem of``onto-ethical discontinuity.''. (shrink)

Despite decades of research and thought on the meaning and identification of revolutions in science, there is no generally accepted definition for this concept. This paper presents 13 different characteristics that have been used by philosophers and historians of science to characterize revolutions in science, in general, and in chemistry, in particular. These 13 characteristics were clustered into six independent factors. Suggestions are provided as to the use of these characteristics and factors to evaluate historical events as to their possible (...) categorization as revolutions in chemistry. Challenges to the goal of creating a consensus definition of “revolutions in science” are also presented in this publication. (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)

Strict/tolerant logic is a formally defined logic that has the same consequence relation as classical logic, though it differs from classical logic at the metaconsequence level. Specifically, it does not satisfy a cut rule. It has been proposed for use in work on theories of truth because it avoids some objectionable features arising from the use of classical logic. Here we are not interested in applications, but in the formal details themselves. We show that a wide range of logics have (...) strict/tolerant counterparts, with the same consequence relations but differing at the metaconsequence level. Among these logics are Kleene’s K3\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathsf {K_3}$$\end{document}, Priest’s LP\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf {LP}}$$\end{document}, and first-degree entailment, FDE. The primary tool we use is the bilattice. But it is more than a tool, it seems to be the natural home for this kind of investigation. (shrink)

The revival of interest in pragmatism and its practical relevance for democracy has prompted a reconsideration of John Dewey’s political philosophy. Dewey’s _The Public and Its Problems _ constitutes his richest and most systematic meditation on the future of democracy in an age of mass communication, governmental bureaucracy, social complexity, and pluralism. Drawing on his previous writings and prefiguring his later thinking, Dewey argues for the importance of civic participation and clarifies the meaning and role of the state, the proper (...) relationship between the public and experts, and the source of democracy’s legitimacy. These themes remain as important today as they were when Dewey first engaged them, and this is the work to which scholars consistently turn when assessing Dewey’s conception of democracy and what might be imagined for democracy in our own time. In this carefully annotated edition, Melvin L. Rogers provides an introductory essay that elucidates the philosophical and historical background of _The Public and Its Problems_ while explaining the key ideas of the book. He also provides a biographical outline of Dewey’s life and bibliographical notes to assist student and scholar alike. (shrink)

Guiding you through the topics that shape aesthetics, this introduction explores the truth, meaning, taste, aesthetic merit and the role of perception. Each chapter offers a wealth of examples from Asia, including Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Tan Tai Yong, Kueh Appreciation Day and dragon kiln pottery. They deal with controversies and address central questions, such as: When are artworks considered dangerous? Why does Socrates recommend the banishment of the poets? What are the problems and challenges (...) posed by forgery? Here is a creative and accessible introduction that inspires a love for art and aesthetics. (shrink)