Traditional analyses of the curve fitting problem maintain that the data do not indicate what form the fitted curve should take. Rather, this issue is said to be settled by prior probabilities, by simplicity, or by a background theory. In this paper, we describe a result due to Akaike [1973], which shows how the data can underwrite an inference concerning the curve's form based on an estimate of how predictively accurate it will be. We argue that this approach throws light (...) on the theoretical virtues of parsimoniousness, unification, and non ad hocness, on the dispute about Bayesianism, and on empiricism and scientific realism. * Both of us gratefully acknowledge support from the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and NSF grant DIR-8822278 (M.F.) and NSF grant SBE-9212294 (E.S.). Special thanks go to A. W. F. Edwards.William Harper. Martin Leckey. Brian Skyrms, and especially Peter Turney for helpful comments on an earlier draft. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Am I Doing? My Experience The Title Literature: What Is It? A Friendly Witness?

This is a ‘study of Liberal Humanism in the novels of George Eliot, Henry James, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf and Angus Wilson’. The ‘free spirit’ is the person who, ‘freed’ of traditional or customary morality, has to learn an empirical or consequential morality in relations with other people and reconcile this with self-fulfilment as a new and conscious ideal. Such a spirit typifies the offspring of J S Mill and the liberal middle-class culture of the late nineteenth century (...) with its reliance on historical progress, the power of reason, tolerance and individual freedom. The dilemma of the contemporary liberal is summarised in an introductory chapter which does not however attempt any analysis more radical than the usual one. When the international conflicts of the twentieth century undermined its confidence liberalism lost its creative energy in the fields of political action and social reform, yet many middle-class people of liberal bent still retain in their private lives amidst an alien society a liberal-humanist morality of personal relationships worked out according to the motives and foreseen consequences of their actions. Certain characters and themes handled by the above line of novelists show their awareness of this liberal programme and its complications. (shrink)

rené descartes famously and explicitly rejects appeals to final causes in natural philosophy, suggesting that such appeals depend on knowledge of God’s inscrutable ends.For since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the whole kind of causes, customarily sought from (...) an end, to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating God’s ends.1This rejection did not go unnoticed nor without controversy. In the Fifth.. (shrink)

Introduction Max Horkheimer was born on February in Stuttgart. By the time he died, on 7 July in Nuremberg, he had played a decisive role in launching and ...

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

In his doctoral dissertation Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles Brentano tried to show that (against criticism of this) one could indeed give a principle defense of Aristotle's table of categories as a coherent system. In later texts Brentano appears sharply critical of Aristotle, mainly in respect to Aristotle's mereology, or theory of part and whole, and to his theory of substance and accident. It is argued that Brentano hadn't observed that Aristotle's belief that there are as many (...) predicative senses of 'be' as there are categories of being is based not on his mereology but on his theory of definition. Overlooking this Brentano was led to far reaching inadequate ontological consequences. (shrink)

SummaryLeśniewski presented his logical systems in a way which conformed to his nominalism, so the question arises whether Leśniewski's logic can be given a natural formal semantics which, unlike current versions, avoids commitment to abstract entities. Building on hints in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I develop the idea of a way of meaning which is the basis for what I call combinatorial semantics. I then consider whether this commits us to abstract objects or an intensional metalogic.

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

(2) All X’s have to be Y’s is to be brought out by glossing the latter as a stronger, nomological generalization involving counterfactural claims, thus: (3) All X’s are Y’s and further if any z that is not an X were an X, then z would be a Y. Professor Rescher points out that while (1) is equivalent to its contrapositive..

How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...) explore fast and frugal heuristics – simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this précis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data – that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program. Key Words: adaptive toolbox; bounded rationality; decision making; elimination models; environment structure; heuristics; ignorance-based reasoning; limited information search; robustness; satisficing; simplicity. (shrink)

The focus of this small contribution to studies in the history of philosophy of American education falls upon the backside of the cultural upheaval between 1880 and 1920. The general purpose is to relate aspects of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of education to pedagogical principles in the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, a document of the National Education Association’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, published in 1918. An attempt is made to implement this purpose by analyzing the educational principles (...) in the NEA report, by clarifying Spencer’s educational principles in relationship to the report, and by explaining Spencer’s philosophical principles and relating them to the CRSE document. In addition to similarities between specific Spencerian principles and the 1918 report, especially noted is the ideological proximity of the “spirit” of Spencer’s evolutionary naturalism and empiricism to the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. (shrink)

The three intertwining careers of William Torrey Harris [1835-1909] in philosophy, philosophy of education, and educational administration converge in twelve of the Annual Reports of the board of directors of the St. Louis public schools, most of the essential features of which he formulated as the superintendent of schools from 1867-79. These twelve reports, comprising philosophical and educational principles, have been acclaimed nationally and internationally to be among the most valuable official publications in American educational literature. The major purpose of (...) this paper is to clarify the nature and scope of the philosophical principles of Harris expressed in his Annual Reports. The areas of philosophy represented are metaphysics, anthropology, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. While the motivation and context of these philosophical principles are pedagogical in orientation, it is evident that Harris produced here a philosophical synthesis worthy of consideration in a formal survey of the history of American philosophy. (shrink)

Every immediate memory is unique; it is therefore unlikely to consist of an attractor or even a combination of attractors. In the present state of knowledge about the chemistry of synaptic transmission, there is no reason to look beyond neurons that directly receive sensory afferents for the afterdischarges that correspond to active memories.

This article reviews existing approaches to defining and distinguishing communication styles and proposes a common frame of reference for future research. The literature review yields two schools of thought: the behavior-centered perspective and the personality-oriented perspective. Although these lines of research differ in their ways of defining communication styles, they show considerable similarities with respect to their classification. Many researchers build their taxonomies on two key dimensions: assertiveness and responsiveness. We propose embedding communication styles into the Five-Factor Theory and defining (...) them as characteristic adaptations of personality. We also suggest the Interpersonal Circumplex as a reference model for distinguishing communication styles as it is able to integrate substantial dimensions and facets of existing taxonomies in a parsimonious way. (shrink)

Two conceptions of language have dominated philosophical reflection over the last century on the nature of language and linguistic understanding. The first is the calculus conception, advanced in various forms by Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, Carnap, Dummett and Davidson. The second is the anthropological conception of language advanced in various forms by the later Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Grice. The purpose of the paper is to compare and contrast the two conceptions. The calculus conception assigns priority to the notions of (...) truth and truth-condition, and to the assertoric mode. The anthropological conception assigns priority to use, meaning and explanations of meaning, and is indifferent to mode. The disagreements between the two conceptions are explored, and the further consequences of each conception are described. (shrink)

Frege's obscure key concept of the unsaturatedness of functions is clarified with the help of the concepts of dependent and independent parts and foundation relations used by Husserl in describing the ontology of complex wholes. Sentential unity in Frege, Husserl and Wittgenstein: all have a similar explanation. As applied to linguistic expressions, the terms 'unsaturated' and 'incomplete' are ambiguous: they may mean the ontological property of Unselbständigkeit, inability to exist alone, or the property of being what categorial grammar calls a (...) functor. Separation of these two senses resolves a dispute between Dummett and Geach on the nature of predicates. (shrink)

Introduction By the late fifth century BCE Panini had composed the Astadhyayi, consisting of nearly 4000 rules giving a precise and fairly complete ...

The 1989 collapse of trade relations with the former socialist bloc plunged Cuba into an economic and food crisis. Cuban farmers, scientists, and planners have responded with alternative agricultural technology to make up for imported food and Green Revolution inputs that are no longer available. A review of Cuban experience to date with biological pest control practices shows that, on the one hand, significant progress has been made that may serve as a model for other countries, while, on the other (...) hand, there still remains a long way to go if Cuba is to create a truly sustainable agriculture. It is essential that we understand the Cuban case if we are to be concerned about ethical issues in biological control. The apparent ability of Cuba to overcome a food crisis without significant use of pesticides stretches our concept of the possible. It thus helps refute the most common argument – that we couldn't “feed the hungry” without pesticides – against taking the “ethical” position in real-world pest management policy debates. (shrink)

For most of the history of metaphysics, the subject has been dominated by the concept of substance. There is an everyday commonsense notion of substance which is perfectly harmless and which I shall defend against attempts to remove it or revise it away. But I deny that substance has to be construed as a primitive even in everyday terms. Borrowing Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, I press the legitimate claims of revisionary metaphysics and argue that there is no (...) place for a fundamental concept of substance within it, although aspects of the concept are likely to find their place therein. (shrink)

There is no general agreement as to the meaning of long-term potentiation, but this cannot be resolved by using it to explain additional phenomena. Increased attention to recently experienced stimuli is a form of learning known to neuropsychologists as repetition priming. As more is learned about the neurochemistry of synaptic change, the term LTP will wither.

This book present research in ethics with topics including a step-by-step guide to students; wellbeing and disadvantage; ethical disposition of accounting and business management students; collegiality of journals and self-citation on annual bibliometric scorings; trends of tainted publications and their authors' publication profiles; from bioethics to biopolitics and the limits of liberalism.

The suggestion of this paper is that we need again widely to practice and teach “the science of the soul” in order to produce the renaissance required to keep civilization going. A metaphor is not the saying of one thing while meaning another. In fact, metaphor is not limited to speech and writing. The understanding offered here is that, properly understood and employed, metaphor is a powerful and indispensable precision tool for radical improvement in thought. It is a prime guide (...) and cause effecting leaps of mind from one axiomatic train of thought or mind set to a better, higher, and seemingly incommensurable one. It is at once a tool for teaching those insights which founded the civilization and a training regimen for strengthening rational creativity to solve new problems. (shrink)

Although Brentano generally regarded himself as at heart a metaphysician, his work then and subsequently has always been dominated by the Psychology. He is rightly celebrated as the person who reintroduced the Aristotelian-Scholastic notion of intentio back into the study of the mind. Brentano's inspiration was Aristotle's theory of perception in De anima, though his terminology of intentional inexistence was medieval. For the history of the work and its position in his output may I refer to my Introduction to the (...) reprinted English translation. Alongside Aristotle the work shows influences of Descartes, Comte and the British empiricists. The theory of intentionality presented in the Psychology is much less modern and less plausible than almost all recent commentary would have it, and was in any case not where Brentano's main interest lay. Intentionality simply served to demarcate mental phenomena from physical, in Book One, but the main aim was a classification of the mental, outlined in Book Two. Books Three to Five were to have dealt in detail with the three main classes of presentations, judgements and feelings, with the final book considering the metaphysics: mind-body and the immortality of the soul. Brentano's shifting views, recently documented in English with Benito Muller's translation of Descriptive Psychology, a work from the transitional 1890s, made the original plan obsolete. The role of an a priori, philosophical or descriptive psychology, methodologically prior to empirical-experimental genetic psychology, foreshadowed and influenced Husserl's notion of phenomenology, and Brentano's Comtean methodological epoche of desisting from controversial metaphysical statements in favour of an examination of the phenomena likewise presaged Husserl's more ponderous phenomenological reductions. Brentano's other work covers most areas of philosophy, notably ethics, where he upheld a form of a priori intuitionism much admired by G. E. Moore, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, philosophy of language, deductive and inductive logic, and the history of philosophy. I shall mention just two areas. In his logic lectures from 1866 onwards (a compilation published 1956) Brentano rejected the subject-predicate analysis of simple judgements and proposed instead (for which he apparently secured written assent from Mill) that all judgements are logical compounds of positive and negative existential judgements. For example the universal judgement All men are mortal becomes the negative existential There are no immortal men. On this basis Brentano radically simplified the inference rules of deductive logic. While unlike de Morgan, Frege and others he does not go beyond logic's traditional scope by recognising relations, within its bounds his reformed-term logic is simple, elegant and easily teachable. Some of his ideas in logic influenced the young Husserl. Unfortunately Brentano took against mathematical logic, which he wrongly associated exclusively with Hamilton's confused doctrine of the quantification of the predicate. His inductive logic, which takes up by far the greater part of his logic lectures, remains unresearched to this day. (shrink)

Since early in this century, a number of cultural anthropologists and archaeologists have been theorizing that some of the very culture traits Boehm regards as ‘primitive’ are, in fact, partial products of the difficult circumstances of the last few thousand years. For instance, the mobility and egalitarianism of some foragers may have been amplified by their culture contact experiences. Boehm must consider these theories if he hopes to identify foragers whose cultures may be representative of the past.

Wie kaum eine andere Materie in Deutschland ist der Verwaltungsrechtsschutz verfassungsrechtlich geprägt. In einer Rechtsordnung, in der das Diktum Fritz Werners vom Verwaltungsrecht als konkretisiertem Verfassungsrecht im Grundsatz nach wie vor gilt und als rechtsstaatlich-zivilisatorische Errungenschaft empfunden wird, muss dies für den Verwaltungsrechtsschutz – den gerichtlichen Rechtsschutz in Ansehung der öffentlichen Verwaltung – erst recht gelten. Das ist nicht nur das Produkt einer mehr oder weniger weit ausgreifenden Verfassungsexegese, sondern ein vielfältig abgesichertes Verfassungsgebot.

This book bridges the gaps between logic, mathematics and computer science by delving into the theory of well-quasi orders, also known as wqos. This highly active branch of combinatorics is deeply rooted in and between many fields of mathematics and logic, including proof theory, commutative algebra, braid groups, graph theory, analytic combinatorics, theory of relations, reverse mathematics and subrecursive hierarchies. As a unifying concept for slick finiteness or termination proofs, wqos have been rediscovered in diverse contexts, and proven to be (...) extremely useful in computer science. The book introduces readers to the many facets of, and recent developments in, wqos through chapters contributed by scholars from various fields. As such, it offers a valuable asset for logicians, mathematicians and computer scientists, as well as scholars and students. (shrink)

Moving beyond the traditional, and unproductive, rivalry between the fields of motivation and cognition, this book integrates the two domains to shed new light ...