Studies examining the ways in which the training of engineers and scientists shapes their research strategies and scientific identities.

ObjectiveThe Spatial Learning Task of Lhermitte and Signoret is an object-location arbitrary associative learning task. The task was originally developed to evaluate adults with severe amnesia. It is currently used in populations where the memory system either is not yet fully developed or where it has been compromised (e.g. epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, electroconvulsive therapy, cerebrovascular disease and dementia). Normative data have been published for paediatric cohorts and for older adults, however no data exist for the intervening adult years.MethodHere, we (...) address this gap, collecting normative data from 101 adults aged 18–45.ResultsOur data indicate that performance on the Spatial Learning Task is not influenced by age, gender, level of education or overall IQ. Less than 10% of the variance in learning scores is associated with variability in verbal memory. Ninety percent of participants achieved perfect scores on two successive trials (T2Cr) within five or fewer trials on the Spatial Learning Task. A T2Cr score of 6 is suggestive of impairment and a T2Cr score of 7 or more is statistically abnormal.ConclusionThese data expand the clinical utility of the Spatial Learning Task in the adult population. Future work should examine performance in lower IQ cohorts, including intellectual disability, and explore sensitivity to disease factors such as laterality of mesial temporal lobe damage. (shrink)

This article investigates a high-profile and ongoing dilemma for healthcare professionals (HCPs), namely whether the existence of a (legal) duty of care to genetic relatives of a patient is a help or a hindrance in deciding what to do in cases where a patient’s genetic information may have relevance to the health of the patient’s family members. The English caseABC v St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and othersconsidered if a duty of confidentiality owed to the patient and a putative duty (...) of care to the patient’s close relatives could coexist in this context. This article examines whether embracing the concept of coexisting duties could enable HCPs to respect duties in line with their clinical judgement, thereby providing legal support and clarity to professionals to allow them to provide the best possible genetics service to both the patient and their family. We argue that these dual duties, framed as a novel, composite duty to consider the interests of genetic relatives, could allow HCPs to exercise and act on their professional judgements about the relative value of information to family members, without fears of liability for negligence or breach of confidence. (shrink)

Popular culture can play a significant role in shaping the acceptance of evolving technologies, with nanotechnology likely to be a case in point. The most popular fiction work to date in this arena has been Michael Crichton's techno-thriller Prey, which fuses together nanotechnology science with science fiction. Within the context of Prey, this article examines the role that scientists and popular culture play in educating society, and one another, about emerging technologies. In di ferentiating fact from fiction, the article (...) reflects on how such distinctions may be important in proactive public dialogue projects. The article concludes that popular culture will be a key factor in informing citizen beliefs about the coming nano-age. Accordingly, governments, in conjunction with the scientific community, will need to be proactive in distinguishing science fact from science fiction for the benefit of their citizens. (shrink)

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics (...) of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Many philosophers, following David Lewis, believe that we should look to counterpart theory, not quantified modal logic, as a means of understanding modal discourse. We argue that this is a mistake. Significant parts of modal discourse involve either implicit or explicit reference to what is actually the case, raising the question of how talk about actuality is to be represented counterpart-theoretically. By considering possible modifications of Lewis's counterpart theory, including actual modifications due to Graeme Forbes and Murali Ramachandran, we (...) argue that no coherent version of counterpart theory can provide a plausible representation of talk about actuality, and so, we conclude, counterpart theory should be rejected. (shrink)

This volume provides a balanced set of reviews which introduce the central topics in the philosophy of time. This is the first introductory anthology on the subject to appear for many years; the contributors are distinguished, and two of the essays are specially written for this collection. In their introduction, the editors summarize the background to the debate, and show the relevance of issues in the philosophy of time for other branches of philosophy and for science. Contributors include J.M.E. McTaggart, (...) Arthur N. Prior, D.H. Mellor, Sydney Shoemaker, Graeme Forbes, Lawrence Sklar, Michael Dummett, David Lewis, W.H. Newton-Smith, and Anthony Quinton. (shrink)

[Graeme Forbes] In I, I summarize the semantics for the relational/notional distinction for intensional transitives developed in Forbes (2000b). In II-V I pursue issues about logical consequence which were either unsatisfactorily dealt with in that paper or, more often, not raised at all. I argue that weakening inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a gorgon', are valid, but that disjunction inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon or (...) an immortal gorgon', are invalid. Since 'a gorgon' and 'a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon' are extensionally and intensionally the same quantifier, it is not completely trivial to arrange the semantics of intensional transitives so that this classification of the inferences is obtained. (This paper is an abridged version of Forbes (2001a); the latter will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph, Attitude Problems.) /// [Jennifer Saul] This paper discusses the question of which verbs are intensional transitives. In particular, I ask which verbs Forbes should take to be intensional transitives. I argue that it is very difficult to arrive at a clear and plausible understanding of what an intensional transitive is-making it difficult to answer these questions. I end by briefly raising some questions about the usefulness of the category of intensional transitives. (shrink)

Comment les objets matériels persistent-ils à travers le temps ? Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire qu'un objet change tout en étant un et le même ? Peut-il y avoir un monde sans temps ? Le temps s'écoule-t-il même si rien ne change ? Et, le temps lui-même, qu'est-ce que c'est ? Consiste-t-il seulement en l'instant présent, ou le passé et le futur existent-ils également ? Est-il possible de voyager dans le temps ? Quelles propriétés le temps doit-il avoir pour permettre (...) le voyage dans le temps ? Est-il possible de changer le passé ? Ce volume recueille des traductions inédites de textes issus de la philosophie du temps des XXe et XXIe siècles. Ces contributions de R. M. Adams, Jiri Benovsky, David Braddon-Mitchell, Michael Dummett, Graeme Forbes, Mark Heller, Paul Horwich, Robin Le Poidevin, David Lewis, D. H. Mellor, Sydney Shoemaker, Theodore Sider, J. J. C. Smart, W. V. O. Quine, et Peter Van Inwagen offrent des manières différentes de réagir à ces interrogations (et bien d'autres encore). Elles permettent ainsi au lecteur de découvrir la richesse des débats contemporains en philosophie du temps. On découvre ici une variété de notions, d'arguments et de théories, telles que l'endurantisme, le perdurantisme, le relationnisme et le substantialisme, mais également d'importantes considérations en ce qui concerne la causalité, l'identité, le changement, ou encore l'analyse de similarités entre le temps et l'espace. Le problème du voyage dans le temps se voit consacrer une section spéciale dans ce volume, car il a ceci de particulièrement intéressant : il sert de cas limite offrant la possibilité de tester les théories et de soulever de nombreuses questions philosophiques sur la nature du temps et du monde. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Handbook of Research and Policy in Art EducationCharles M. DornHandbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, edited by Elliot Eisner and Michael Day. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004, 879 pp., $90.00 paper.The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education is an 875-page compendium of articles addressing nearly every conceivable issue in the field and is, if nothing else, a valuable tour de force for any (...) reader who wants to come up to speed on issues in the field. It is not, however, either strictly a handbook or a complete exploration of either art education policy or research. This in no way diminishes its potential value as a source for policy issues and research that are of significant concern to the field.The publication presents 36 individual or joint authored chapters on (1) historical currents in art education, (2) policy perspectives impacting the teaching of art, (3) learning in the visual arts, (4) teaching and teacher education, (5) forms of assessment in art education, and (6) emerging visions of the field. Each of the six sections begins with a short introductory statement by the researcher responsible for reviewing the essays in that session. These section editors include F. Graeme-Chalmers, Ralph Smith, Anna Kindler, Enid Zimmerman, Elisabeth Soep, and Arthur Efland. Forty-one authors contributed to the book's contents, all of which have nationally recognized expertise in handling the topic discussed.Editors Elliot Eisner and Michael Day view the book as an effort to bring together research and theory, policy, and concepts that guide and give shape to what people in art education try to accomplish—which is, of course, a rather ambitious goal. Even the editors admit the Handbook meets some but not all of these competing orientations. They also claim that the Handbook serves as an assertion that art education is a scholarly field, perhaps even to a fault through mostly ignoring qualitative issues regarding goals, expressive art form, and aesthetics. Also, the editors admit that the Handbook will be a disappointment, which is true, especially with respect to its emphasis on rationales rather than policy problems, on assessment appreciation rather than policy and research, on assessment in art education history as a record of events rather than as policy windows, and on emerging visions as older forms of social and political discourse rather than policy issues, implementation, and evaluation.Nevertheless, the Handbook addresses a number of important policy issues, providing well-developed and valuable views of the field by a variety of important authors and, in some cases, with some rarely seen insights into the nature of the field. I will only review the most salient ideas of the chapter authors in each of the six sections and then comment on what I believe are promising, and sometimes somewhat troubling, directions pointed out in the chapters, including what promises have not been fulfilled. [End Page 111]Section I, on historical currents, includes chapters by F. Graeme Chalmers; Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Pat Amburgy, and Paul Bolin; and John Howell White. Chalmers provides a very thorough overview of the literature on the history of art education, including what he calls the broad perspectives on art education, history, and research interests of art education historians. Overall, he references nearly 300 publications. Stankiewicz, Amburgy, and Bolin then address specific movements in nineteenth-century art education and art, including a brief history of the social function of art, drawing instruction in schools, industrial drawing, manual training, the arts and crafts movement picture study, and progressive education with over 120 references. White, who follows, provides a similar review of major forces, focusing mainly on art education influences in the twentieth century, addressing the contributions of various art educators, arts organizational leaders, artists, government initiatives, and the critical and divergent influences of key post–WW II art education writers. He also documents his work with nearly 300 sources.Section II, on policy perspectives, contains seven chapters, including ones by Ralph Smith; Samuel Hope; Constance Bumgarner Gee; Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner; H. Gene Blocker; and E. Louis Langford and Kelly Scheffer. In Section II, Sam Hope outlines the power of policy and its effect... (shrink)

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, and (...) events, based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is widely acknowledged as a major figure in twentieth-century political philosophy and the history of ideas. His famous Oxford inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, especially the last, crucial, section, entitled The One and the Many, has provoked a vast secondary literature. So it is surprising that until now there has been no substantial critical reader dedicated to his work.Editors George Crowder and Henry Hardy have admirably filled this need with this stimulating new volume, which provides a systematic (...) and comprehensive treatment of the main aspects of Berlin's work. The essays (all but two of which are newly commissioned) critically examine Berlin's work across its whole range, including his treatment of Marx, Russian thinkers, Jewish themes, liberty, pluralism, the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, nationalism, history, and religion.The contributors are: Jonathan Allen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign); Shlomo Avineri (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); Terrell Carver (University of Bristol); Joshua L. Cherniss (Harvard and Oxford Universities); George Crowder (Flinders University); William A. Galston (University of Maryland); Graeme Garrard (Cardiff University); Ryan Hanley (Marquette University); Henry Hardy (Oxford University); Michael Jinkins (Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary); David Miller (Oxford University); Mario Ricciardi (University of Milan); and Andrzej Walicki (University of Notre Dame).Complete with a valuable bibliography, this outstanding collection of recent scholarship on a seminal thinker shows the continuing relevance and importance of Berlin's many contributions to the understanding of our contemporary predicament.George Crowder (Adelaide, Australia), associate professor in the School of Political and International Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, is the author of Classical Anarchism, Liberalism and Value Pluralism and Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism.Henry Hardy (Oxford, England), a Fellow of Wolfson College (Oxford, England), Isaiah Berlin's editor, and one of his literary trustees, has edited or co-edited 17 books by Isaiah Berlin, most recently Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, and The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism. He is currently working with Jennifer Holmes on an edition of Berlin's letters. (shrink)

From Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the man best known as Malcolm X restlessly redefined himself throughout a controversial life. His transformations have appeared repeatedly in books, photographs, paintings, and films, while his murder set in motion a series of tugs-of-war among journalists, biographers, artists, and his ideological champions over the interpretation of his cultural meaning. This book marks the first systematic examination of the images generated by this iconic cultural figure--images readily found on everything from T-shirts and hip-hop (...) album covers to coffee mugs. Graeme Abernethy captures both the multiplicity and global import of a person who has been framed as both villain and hero, cast by mainstream media during his lifetime as "the most feared man in American history," and elevated at his death as a heroic emblem of African American identity. As Abernethy shows, the resulting iconography of Malcolm X has shifted as profoundly as the American racial landscape itself. Abernethy explores Malcolm's visual prominence in the eras of civil rights, Black Power, and hip-hop. He analyzes this enigmatic figure's representation across a variety of media from 1960s magazines to urban murals, tracking the evolution of Malcolm's iconography from his autobiography and its radical milieu through the appearance of Spike Lee's 1992 biopic and beyond. Its remarkable gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of iconic photographs by Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and John Launois. Abernethy reveals that Malcolm X himself was keenly aware of the power of imagery to redefine identity and worked tirelessly to shape how he was represented to the public. His theoretical grasp of what he termed "the science of imagery" enabled him both to analyze the role of representation in ideological control as well as to exploit his own image in the interests of black empowerment. This provocative work marks a startling shift from the biographical focus that has dominated Malcolm X studies, providing an up-to-date--and comprehensively illustrated--account of Malcolm's cultural afterlife, and addressing his iconography in relation to images of other major African American figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. Analyzing the competing interpretations behind so many images, Abernethy reveals what our lasting obsession with Malcolm X says about American culture over the last five decades. (shrink)

For centuries, humanists have celebrated and cherished the limitless potential of humankind and its irrepressible spirit. For its efforts to develop rational solutions to human problems rather than invoking supernatural intervention, humanism has been rewarded with a rich and distinguished heritage whose contributors include many of the brightest minds of intellectual history. Advocating reason, critical intelligence, free and objective inquiry, democratic institutions, and moral values based on human experience, humanism stands in steadfast opposition to the moral, political, and social oppression (...) perpetrated by all who would have us swear unquestioned allegiance to authoritarian power, be it temporal or divine. But if humanism is to remain fresh and vibrant, alert and ever vigilant, it must continuously assess and evaluate its goals in light of new experience. In The Question of Humanism, 23 contributors investigate the meaning of humanism today, its range of perspectives, and how humanists can deal with the challenges of contemporary life and those it will face as the new century approaches. This absorbing collection of original essays examines the abundant variety of historical and contemporary humanist philosophies, with special emphasis on the work of Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Focusing on the need for an awareness of humanist tradition, these essays offer blunt, progressive self-appraisals to illustrate how humanism will continue to grow as a vital and compelling intellectual force. Featured are essays by Cecil Abrahams, Zygmunt Adamczewski, Samuel Ajzenstat, Martin Andic, Allan Booth, Richard Brown, Michael Cardy, Kenneth Dorter, Richard Francis, David Goicoechea, Danny Goldstick, Calvin Hayes, Marsha Hewitt, Monica Hornyansky, Paul Kurtz, James Lawler, John Luik, Robert McLaughlin, Graeme Nicholson, Zaid Orudjev, Robert Perkins, Charles Scott, and Edward A. Synan. The challenges of the past have served to strengthen humanists' resolve. Humanism, in all of its variations, is now ready for a new era. (shrink)

The Growing-Block view of time has some problems with the past. It is committed to the existence of the past, but needs to say something about the difference between the past and present. I argue that we should resist Correia and Rosenkranz’ response to Braddon-Mitchell’s argument that the Growing-Block leads to scepticism about whether we are present. I consider an approach, similar to Peter Forrest, and show it is not so counter-intuitive as Braddon-Mitchell suggests and further show that it requires (...) no ‘semantic and metaphysical gymnastics’, as Chris Heathwood has suggested. In doing these things I make the problem of the past on the Growing-Block view a problem in its history, not its present. (shrink)

Arguing that the question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's relationship to the Enlightenment has been eclipsed and seriously distorted by his association with the French Revolution, Graeme Garrard presents the first book-length case that shows Rousseau as the pivotal figure in the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment thought. Viewed in the context in which he actually lived and wrote -- from the middle of the eighteenth century to his death in 1778 -- it is apparent that Rousseau categorically rejected the Enlightenment "republic of (...) letters" in favor of his own "republic of virtue." The philosophes, placing faith in reason and natural human sociability and subjecting religion to systematic criticism and doubt, naively minimized the deep tensions and complexities of collective life and the power disintegrative forces posed to social order. Rousseau believed that the ever precarious social order could only be achieved artificially, by manufacturing "sentiments of sociability", reshaping individuals to identify with common interests instead of their own selfish interests. (shrink)

In this particularly well written volume Graeme Hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation (conceptual analysis) by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities.

Patrick Æ Hutchings (Oxon), was a longtime Editor-in-Chief (Australasia) of Sophia and a cherished member of both the journal’s philosophical community and the international philosophy community more broadly. -/- With a deep intellectual and academic history (with prior studies in the University of Wellington and Oxford University), Patrick was at the time of his passing an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Over the years, he also lectured in the Philosophy of Art at (...) the University of Melbourne. He also lectured at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). From 1978–1994, Patrick served as Reader in the School of Humanities at Deakin University, (working closely with his esteemed colleagues Prof Max Charlesworth and Purushottama Bilimoria; known as the ‘intellectual mischiefs’); together they moved Sophia to the Department of Philosophy in the University of Melbourne, and he also joined the University of Melbourne as a Visiting Lecturer in the Philosophy of Art from 1993–1998 (working closely with Christopher Cordner, Graeme Marshall, Brian Scarlett , Tony (AJC) Coady, and Elvira Schnabel). Prior to coming eastwards, Patrick taught at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Western Australia, for some twenty years. He gave lectures on philosophy and arts at the University of Sydney and at the University of Otago (Dunedin, NZ), and he taught English Literature and Philosophy classes at a number of universities around the world, including at Edinburgh, London, California (Irvine), New Zealand, Japan, and India. -/- During his life and over the course of his career, Patrick wrote prolifically in topics spanning philosophy, literature, and aesthetics for many journal publications, including Art International, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Landfall, Islands, The Age, The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Sophia, Philosophical Studies (Dublin) and the Art Monthly Australasia. He also published a monograph on the Melbourne sculptor, Peter Corlett, co-authored books on Guy Boyd and Kate O’Connor, and contributed chapters in monographs on figures such as Gordon Walters, Heather Busch, Klaus Zimmer, George Johnson, Tom Gibbons, and Thornton Walker. -/- Routledge (Taylor & Francis) republished Patrick’s 1972 ground-breaking book Kant on Absolute Value (Kant’s ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals’ and of his Ontology of Personal Value), which remains in print (2019). His 2021 article ‘Has God Been and Gone?’ was his last main piece published in Sophia, and he also had a 2022 review in Sophia, ‘Religious Doubt in New Zealand.’ Forever prolific in his writing and editing, Patrick continued to publish into 2023 with another two pieces appearing in Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics (SSLA) and the Art Monthly Australasia. -/- Patrick is survived by his dear wife Heng (Kitty) Hutchings and was also memorialized recently by a wide range of scholars and friends in both actual and virtual ceremonies held in September 2023. Although Patrick’s funeral service was kept as simple as possible, just as Patrick would have liked it to be, Fr. Michael Elligate led the Requiem Mass; the Ensemble from the Australian Chamber Choir and organist Douglas Lawrence provided glorious music, Peter Wong chanted from the beautiful 'Heart of Great Perfection of Wisdom' from Heart Sūtra to mark the finalé:- Gaté gaté paragaté parasamgaté Bodhi svāhā! (Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, enlightenment!). (shrink)

Under the provisional title “Towards a Leibnizian History of Philosophy,” edited by Graeme Hunter, a number of Leibniz scholars will look at different aspects of the history of philosophy Leibniz would have written, had he written one. Contributors are Antoine Côté, Graeme Hunter, Yuen-Ting Lai, Michael Latzer, Tom Lennon, Robert McRae.

This article enquires into the curriculum advocated in the only ancient Greek treatise concerning education that has survived in its entirety, entitled On the Training of Children. The treatise was highly influential in Europe from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and thus exhibits certain assumptions concerning the purpose of curriculum that lie behind the development of western education and may still be influential today. The inquiry is conducted in three stages: the intended recipients of the curriculum are identified; its (...) elements are enumerated and evaluated; and its aims are inferred from the text. I conclude that the curriculum was intended for wealthy, privileged boys, that philosophy (though not independent theorising) was the most valued subject of study and that the aim of the curriculum was to instil in the recipients aristocratic values and modes of behaviour. Finally, some topics are suggested for reflection, in response to these conclusions, upon existing curricula. (shrink)

Free-choice disjunction manifests itself in complements of comparatives, existential modals, and related contexts. For example, “Socrates is older than Plato or Aristotle” is usually understood to mean “older than each”, not “older than at least one”. Normally, to get an “at least one” reading, a wh-rider has to be appended, e.g., “whichever is younger” or “but I don’t remember which”. Similarly, “Socrates could have been a lawyer or a banker” usually means “Socrates could have been a lawyer and could have (...) been a banker”. And “Socrates needs an umbrella or a raincoat” is normally understood in a way that isn’t synonymous with “Socrates needs an umbrella or Socrates needs a raincoat”. Roughly, the reading is “getting a satisfactory umbrella would meet his needandgetting a satisfactory raincoat would meet his need”.These examples all have “conjunctive force” and the question I address is whether there’s a satisfactory pragmatic account of why the force is with them. I present a simple Gricean argument that the “co-operative speaker” assumption, added to a disjunctive literal meaning, produces conjunctive force for epistemic modals. This argument may work for some other cases, but I express some pessimism about covering the full range of modals. (shrink)

Between 1993 and 1998 I served as magazine editor and then publications officer for the Christian Socialist Movement. The article reflects on this experience and in particular the attempt to relate theological ideas to political activity. It is argued that theological ideas were less important than political allegiances. This said, theological ideas did help motivate people to become involved in politics and offer general ideological direction especially through the notion of an eschatological vision. This type of theological reflection tended to (...) support those who were critical of the New Labour project. What seemed to be lacking was a theology of governance and so in the final section some consideration is given to the issues for this type of theology. (shrink)

Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. Attitude Problems presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek', 'imagine', and 'worship'. Forbes offers a theory of how such verbs work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.

In a recent article in Analysis, Graeme Hunter and William Seager (1981) attempt to rescue counterpart theory (CT) from some objections of Hazen 1979. They see these objections as arising from ‘uncritical use of the translation scheme originally proposed by Lewis’, and intend to meet them by refraining from use of that scheme. But they do not offer a new scheme; they say ‘…it is no more necessary to have one to capture the sense of modal idiom than it (...) is to capture the sense of quantificational idiom…Appeal to truth value is the single most important criterion of correct translation’ (Hunter and Seager 1981:72). Thus, where the scheme of Lewis (1968) translates a truth by a falsehood or conversely, Hunter and Seager simply produce a sentence which they claim to be a better translation, without articulating any structural principles they employ to arrive at their candidate. A friend of CT should not be happy with this procedure. Let Lm be first-order modal language and Lc be the language of counterpart theory. Sentences of Lc are intended to interpret or elucidate the meanings of Lm-sentences in the strong sense that they should be the outputs of an adequate theory of meaning, which we can formulate as a model theory, for Lm, written in Lc plus set theory. The interest of CT resides in its potential to provide an alternative approach to the model theory of modal logic, and from the clauses of any such alternative model theory we should be able to read off a translation scheme for Lm into Lc, just as we can in the standard case. If CT’s motivation is sound, which Hunter and Seager do not dispute, yet there is no translation scheme and so no counterpart-theoretic model theory, one might suspect some defect in the original language Lm. And in fact, Hunter and Seager find certain Lm-sentences multiply ambiguous with respect to Lc; but if a counterpart-theoretic model theory is possible, to say.. (shrink)

Discussion of uses of biomedical data often proceeds on the assumption that the data are generated and shared solely or largely within the health sector. However, this assumption must be challenged because increasingly large amounts of health and well-being data are being gathered and deployed in cross-sectoral contexts such as social media and through the internet of things and wearable devices. Cross-sectoral sharing of data thus refers to the generation, use and linkage of biomedical data beyond the health sector. This (...) paper considers the challenges that arise from this phenomenon. If we are to benefit fully, it is important to consider which ethical values are at stake and to reflect on ways to resolve emerging ethical issues across ecosystems where values, laws and cultures might be quite distinct. In considering such issues, this paper applies the deliberative balancing approach of the Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research to the domain of cross-sectoral big data. Please refer to that article for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. (shrink)

How Covid-19 can solve the climate crisis.

Approximately 1 in 30 people develop cancer due to an underlying familial predisposition. Genetic counselling and testing for people with (and at risk of) familial cancer are becoming more widely available, but service providers need to address challenging issues in relation to privacy and property. As in any counselling situation, a genetic counsellor seeks to ensure that the principles of autonomy, confidentiality, beneficence, and equity operate in favour of the client. But in dealing with a familial disorder, the application of (...) these principles to the individual must be balanced with the potential for these principles to apply to other family members. This paper summarises the recent experience of a familial cancer service in seeking to avoid situations in which these principles, operating for both individual clients and their relatives, can come into conflict. (shrink)

Filling the need for an accessible, carefully structured introductory text in symbolic logic, Modern Logic has many features designed to improve students' comprehension of the subject, including a proof system that is the same as the award-winning computer program MacLogic, and a special appendix that shows how to use MacLogic as a teaching aid. There are graded exercises at the end of each chapter--more than 900 in all--with selected answers at the end of the book. Unlike competing texts, Modern Logic (...) gives equal weight to semantics and proof theory and explains their relationship, and develops in detail techniques for symbolizing natural language in first-order logic. After a general introduction featuring the notion of logical form, the book offers sections on classical sentential logic, monadic predicate logic, and full first-order logic with identity. A concluding section deals with extensions of and alternatives to classical logic, including modal logic, intuitionistic logic, and fuzzy logic. For students of philosophy, mathematics, computer science, or linguistics, Modern Logic provides a thorough understanding of basic concepts and a sound basis for more advanced work. (shrink)

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because (...) both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)

This paper is about a substitution-failure in attitude ascriptions, but not the one you think. A standard view about the semantic shape of ‘that’-clause attitude ascriptions is that they are fundamentally relational. The attitude verb expresses a binary relation whose extension, if not empty, is a collection of pairs each of which consists in an individual and a proposition, while the ‘that’-clause is a term for a proposition. One interesting problem this view faces is that, within the scope of many (...) attitude verbs, ‘that’-clauses are not interchange able with certain other terms which stand for the same propositions as the clauses are supposed to. For example, (1a) below may be true, but (1c) is probably not: (1) a. Holmes {fears/suspects} that Moriarty has returned. b. That Moriarty has returned is the proposition that Moriarty has re turned. c. Holmes {fears/suspects} the proposition that Moriarty has returned. For only the exceptionally timorous fear propositions, and, excluding contexts in which we speak of a ‘suspect premise’, only the unusually paranoid suspect them. The truth-conditional change eVected by substituting propositional descrip tion for ‘that’- clause illustrated in (1) occurs with a wide range of attitude verbs. If you understand that the window of opportunity is closing, perhaps you should act before it is too late, but if you mere-. (shrink)