The study of Mu DNA transposition in vitro has resulted in a much better understanding of the biochemical details of the transposition process. An early step in transposition is the generation of a 5th structure which is the product of the strand‐tansfer reaction. The polarity of the strand transfer has been determined and substantial progress has been made on the role of the individual proteins. Moreover, the strand‐transfer reaction is mediated by stable protein–DNA complexes, or transposomes, and the reaction can (...) be divided into two sequential steps. The role of the transposomes and the requirement for a supercoiled Mu DNA substrate are also discussed. (shrink)

The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden (...) of proof or disproof lay with his opponent, that what was needed was to show that our talk of how things look or appear to one.. (shrink)

This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kinds of a priori justification are (...) indefeasible and that misleading all-things-considered evidence about rational requirements is impossible. Finally, the Fixed Point Thesis is applied to defend the Right Reasons position on peer disagreement, according to which an agent who has drawn the correct conclusion from her evidence should retain belief in that conclusion even in the face of disagreeing peers. (shrink)

Pope John Paul II called for an intense dialogue between science and theology, “a common interactive relationship,” in which each discipline is “open to the discoveries and insights of the other” while retaining its own integrity. This essay seeks to be responsive to that call and is an initial exploration of relationships between contemporary neuroscience and Catholic theological ethics. It examines neuroscientific data on the bicameral brain and theological ethical data on marital ethics, including divorce and remarriage, and asks what (...) insight the former might provide into both the latter and the different ethical methods that respond to marital ethics. The analysis is undertaken in the hope of illuminating a pathway that opens the insights of one way of doing theological ethics to the insights of another way, thereby eliminating the unnecessary, unhelpful, and sometimes un‐Christian polarizations that presently separate them. (shrink)

Three computational models: a narrative reader (BORIS), an editorial reader (OpEd), and a stream of thought generator (DAYDREAMER), are presented and discussed, with specific focus on the emotion-related processing and representational elements of each. These models exhibit comprehension and/or generation of emotional behaviour through the interaction of cognitive processes (memory retrieval, planning, and reasoning) over intentional constructs (goals and beliefs).

Book description: The capacity to represent and think about time is one of the most fundamental and least understood aspects of human cognition and consciousness. This book throws new light on central issues in the study of the mind by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches dealing with the connection between temporal representation and memory. Fifteen specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers investigate the way in which time is represented in memory, and the role memory (...) plays in our ability to reason about time. They offer insights into current theories of memory processes and of the mechanisms and cognitive abilities underlying temporal judgements, and draw out fundamental issues concerning the phenomenology and epistemology of memory and our understanding of time. The chapters are arranged into four sections, each focused on one area of current research: Keeping Track of Time, and Temporal Representation; Memory, Awareness and the Past; Memory and Experience; Knowledge and the Past: The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Time. A general introduction gives an overview of the topics discussed and makes explicit central themes which unify the different philosophical and psychological approaches. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus disease has become a global pandemic, causing substantial anxiety. One potential factor in the spread of anxiety in response to a pandemic threat is emotion contagion, the finding that emotional experiences can be socially spread through conscious and unconscious pathways. Some individuals are more susceptible to social contagion effects and may be more likely to experience anxiety and other mental health symptoms in response to a pandemic threat. Therefore, we studied the relationship between emotion contagion and mental (...) health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. We administered the Emotion Contagion Scale along with a measure of anxiety in response to COVID-19 and secondary outcome measures of depression, anxiety, stress, and obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms. These measures were completed by a large student sample in the United States. Data were collected in the months of April and May of 2020 when the fear of COVID-19 was widespread. Results revealed that greater susceptibility to emotion contagion was associated with greater concern about the spread of COVID-19, more depression, anxiety, stress, and OCD symptoms. Consumption of media about COVID-19 also predicted anxiety about COVID-19, though results were not moderated by emotion contagion. However, emotion contagion did moderate the relationship between COVID-19-related media consumption and elevated OCD symptoms. Although limited by a cross-sectional design that precludes causal inferences, the present results highlight the need for study of how illness fears may be transmitted socially during a pandemic. (shrink)

Infectious disease outbreaks in residential care are complex to manage and difficult to control. Research in this setting that includes individuals who lack capacity must conform to national legislation. We report here on our study that is investigating outbreaks of scabies, an itchy skin infection, in the residential care setting in the southeast of England. There appears to be a gap in legislative advice regarding the inclusion of people who lack capacity in research that takes place during time-limited acute scenarios (...) such as outbreaks. We received inconsistent advice from experts regarding, in particular, the role of nominated consultees. There is a potential inequality for vulnerable populations who cannot themselves provide informed consent in terms of their access to participation in a range of health-related research. (shrink)

Paulin and Cahill‐Lane explore the origins of event processing and event prediction in animal evolution. They propose that the evolutionary benefit of being able to predict and thus to quickly react to anticipated events may have triggered the evolution of the earliest nervous systems.

Can self-locating beliefs be relevant to non-self-locating claims? Traditional Bayesian modeling techniques have trouble answering this question because their updating rule fails when applied to situations involving contextsensitivity. This essay develops a fully general framework for modeling stories involving context-sensitive claims. The key innovations are a revised conditionalization rule and a principle relating models of the same story with different modeling languages. The essay then applies the modeling framework to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, showing that when Beauty awakens her degree (...) of belief in heads should be one-third. This demonstrates that it can be rational for an agent who gains only self-locating beliefs between two times to alter her degree of belief in a non-self-locating claim. (shrink)

Begins by explaining then proving a generalized language dependence result similar to Goodman's "grue" problem. I then use this result to cast doubt on the existence of an objective evidential favoring relation (such as "the evidence confirms one hypothesis over another," "the evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis over the other," "the evidence justifies one hypothesis over the other," etc.). Once we understand what language dependence tells us about evidential favoring, our options are an implausibly strong conception of (...) the a priori, a hard externalism on which agents are unable to determine what their evidence favors, or a subjectivist view that makes evidential favoring relative to features of the agent. (shrink)

Recent discussion of Vogel-style “bootstrapping” scenarios suggests that they provide counterexamples to a wide variety of epistemological theories. Yet it remains unclear why it’s bad for a theory to permit bootstrapping, or even exactly what counts as a bootstrapping case. Going back to Vogel's original bootstrapping example, I note that an agent who could gain justification through the method Vogel describes would have available a “no-lose investigation”: an investigation that can justify a proposition but has no possibility of undermining it. (...) The main suggestion of this article is that an epistemological theory should not permit no-lose investigations. I identify necessary and sufficient conditions for such investigations, then explore epistemological theories that rule them out. If we want to avoid both skepticism and no-lose investigations, we must eschew either Closure or epistemic externalism. (shrink)

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

Metaethicists have recently devoted a great deal of attention to questions about when a fact counts as a reason for or against a particular conclusion, and how such reasons interact. Chapter 9 asks a broader question: When a set of facts counts in favor of some conclusion, is that always because at least one of those facts is a reason for that conclusion? Examples are offered in which a set supports a conclusion without any fact in that set’s being a (...) reason for. The chapter then assesses the significance of such examples for philosophical methodology, the ‘reasons-first’ program, and metanormative realism. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

Comparisons, and by that I mean the hunt for essential similarities or at least serious family resemblances, between the ethical views of Western and non-Western thinkers have been a staple of comparative philosophy for quite some time now. Some of these comparisons, such as between the views of Aristotle and Confucius, seem especially apt and revealing. However, I’ve often wondered whether Western “ethical theory”—virtue ethics, deontology, or consequentialism—is always the best lens through which to approach non-Western ethical thought. Particularly when (...) the discussion has turned to Buddhism and Buddhist ethics, theories of this sort at best seem to have an uncertain application. This is not to say that .. (shrink)

A response to G.A. Cohen's argument that a prevailing "ethos" of justice would prevent a Rawlsian just society from having any income inequalities. I suggest that Cohen's argument fails because a Rawlsian ethos would involve correlates of both of Rawls' principles of justice.

In recent years research on John Rawls has experienced a surge in interest in Rawls’s elaborations on the economic order of a just society. This research entails the treatment of the issue which societal role Rawls attaches to work. Somewhat dissatisfied with these treatments the article at hand develops an alternative account of the function Rawls has in mind for work. It will be argued that within Rawls’s idea of a just society the societal role of work consists of three (...) components: an ‘efficiency component’, a ‘self-respect, component’, and a ‘sense of community component.’ Based on that, reconstruction of the Rawlsian position I will investigate whether such a position is reconcilable with the demand for an unconditional Basic Income. The article’s contribution is mostly exegetical albeit, in dealing with Basic Income it elucidates how an oft-proposed policy consideration with a bearing upon work can and cannot, be justified. (shrink)

The notion of a weak Messianic power serves as the focal point for this study of theological, materialist, poetic, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to time and the historical unconscious in the work of Benjamin, Celan and Derrida.

_Makes Schelling’s dialogue Bruno readily accessible to the English-language reader, with valuable commentary on the work itself, which details Schelling’s account of his differences from Fichte._.

For the sake of consistency with settled principles from other theological and ethical questions, there is a need for a Christian reexamination of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Both Old and New Testaments demonstrate that human personal life begins at conception or fertilization. Additionally, the Bible teaches that human beings are persons in the image of God from the very beginning of their existence. Thus, it can be concluded that the embryos created via IVF are persons in God’s image. Applying this (...) to the destruction and freezing of embryos, several limitations or restrictions present themselves—embryos should not be purposefully destroyed or wasted, all embryos ought to be implanted, and embryos should not be frozen. Ultimately, however, due to the immense quantity of embryo wastage, it is concluded that Christians should avoid this form of assisted reproductive technology and consider it a pro-life issue. (shrink)

Abstract. Richard Feldman’s Uniqueness Thesis holds that “a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of proposi- tions”. The opposing position, permissivism, allows distinct rational agents to adopt differing attitudes towards a proposition given the same body of evidence. We assess various motivations that have been offered for Uniqueness, including: concerns about achieving consensus, a strong form of evidentialism, worries about epistemically arbitrary influences on belief, a focus on truth-conduciveness, and consequences for peer disagreement. (...) We argue that each of these motivations either misunderstands the commitments of permissivism or is question-begging. Better understanding permissivism makes it a much more plausible position. (shrink)

This volume contains the papers delivered at the International Schelling Conference in Zürich, 1979, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Schelling’s death. The theme of the conference, as enunciated by the editor, was “taking Schelling seriously.” It is Hasler’s view that our age, which has learned by experience that both idealism and materialism are dead-end world-views, has much to learn from the philosopher who early in his career insisted that the human is just as much a natural being (...) as a spiritual one, and who late in his career attempted to make human freedom the determinative power in history, both on a human and on a cosmic scale. Accordingly, the conference was organized around two themes, nature and history, and was divided into three colloquia, the first considering Schelling’s early philosophy of nature, its relation to empirical science, and its philosophical significance. The second colloquium considered the large theme of Schelling’s view of history, and discovered three crucial transitions in his career-long meditation on that theme, a turn from the interpretation of freedom as human reason to a scheme wherein freedom pertains to divine history, the territory of mythology and revelation, a turn from an idealistic approach to history towards a materialistic one, and a general transition from absolute philosophy to a philosophy of finitude. A third colloquium, devoted to Schelling’s political philosophy, confined itself to the period of his collaboration with Hegel in Jena. While Hasler acknowledges the superiority of Hegel’s political philosophy, especially in his concrete grasp of economics, jurisprudence and politics, he notes that both philosophers entered upon the path of philosophy through their respective attempts to criticize religion as an ideological power. I will mention here only those articles which state new views in Schelling scholarship or which would be particularly of interest to students of Hegel. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

This study examined the influence of 7 high school esports developmental programs on student self-regulation, growth mindset, positive youth development, perceived general health and physical activity, and sport behaviour. A total of 188 students originally participated, with 58 participants completing both pre- and post-program information. At baseline, no significant differences were found between youth e-athletes and their aged-matched controls. The analysis for the observation period showed a significant interaction effect for the PYD confidence scale, with post-hoc comparisons showing a significant (...) decrease in the control group from pre- to post assessment whereas the esports group remained the same. Time main effects showed a decrease in the self-regulation motivation factor, PYD connection factor and PA for all participants. Overall, this study showed that students enrolled in their respective school esports program did not differ from those who did not in self-regulation, growth mindset, PYD, perceived health and PA, and sport behaviour. It was likely that all participants showed a decrease in motivation, connection, and PA due to COVID19 lockdown during the study period. This study is the first to investigate the longitudinal impact of student involvement in high school esports and showed that esports participation did not have a negative impact on any health or psychological factors. (shrink)

The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with Probability, by LeitgebHannes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 365.

The paper is a response to Peacocke's chapter. It begins by exploring and recasting his distinction between objects of attention and occupying attention. It goes on to consider cases of self‐ascription based on conscious episodes that are not authoritative, thereby suggesting that Peacocke's treatment needs a way to characterize the kinds of conscious thought, which can provide a rational basis for authoritative self‐ascription. One such kind of case is where knowledge of one's belief arises from one's apparent knowledge of how (...) matters stand in the world. This raises a puzzle as to how directing our attention outward at the world should be to give rise to the knowledge of our own minds, and it is argued that Peacocke's possession‐conditions account of self‐ascription does nothing to solve it. (shrink)

An adequate cerebellar theory should explain the timing and geometry of signal propagation in the molecular layer, hence Braitenberg et al.'s explanation of how parallel fibers may act as delay lines is important. The suggestion that these delay lines may generate control signals that dampen undesirable response modes during movements is merely interesting.

The neural blackboard architecture is a localist structured connectionist model that employs a novel connection matrix to implement dynamic bindings without requiring propagation of temporal synchrony. Here I note the apparent need for many distinct matrices and the effect this might have for scale-up to semantic processing. I also comment on the authors' initial foray into the symbol grounding problem.