The statistical properties of a single quantum object and an ensemble of independent such objects are considered in detail for two-level systems. Computer simulations of dynamic zero-point quantum fluctuations for a single quantum object are reported and compared with analytic solutions for the ensemble case.

In this article i defend the claim that an individual is no more and no less than a bundle of instances of properties against the following objections: (1) the concept of an instance of a property presupposes the concept of an individual. i argue that it presupposes only that no instance of a property exists independently of other instances. (2) if a thing were only a bundle of instances of properties, then properties would qualify properties. this objection commits the fallacy (...) of composition. (3) a bundle constituting an individual needs a component which is not a property to individuate it. i argue that such a bundle individuates itself. (4) the bundle theory makes change impossible. i argue against this claim by distinguishing a thing's numerical identity from its "complete" identity. (5) the bundle theory makes all true statements about individuals analytically true. i show that, at least for one interpretation of 'analytically true', this is not so. (shrink)

I defend what I believe to be a new variation on Kripkean themes, for the purpose of providing an improved way to understand the referring functions of proper names. I begin by discussing roles played by perceptual perspectives in the use of proper names, and then broaden the discussion to include what I call cognitive perspectives. Although both types of perspectives underwrite the existence of intentional intermediaries between proper names and their referents, the existence of these intentional intermediaries does not (...) entail that a Kripke-inspired view of direct reference must be abandoned. At the same time, the existence of these intermediaries can be seen to play illuminating roles as regards the referring functions of proper names in the following types of cases, among others: (a) where different names pick out the same subject; (b) where names are empty. Along the way, I argue that perspectival views are not something inside the head of language users as intended by Putnam in his well-known discussion of meaning. (shrink)

Hume's sceptical arguments regarding induction have not yet been successfully answered. However, I shall not in this paper discuss the important attempts to answer Hume since that would be too lengthy a task. On the supposition that Hume's sceptical arguments have not been met, the empirical world is a place where, as the popular metaphor goes, all the glue has been removed. For the Humean sceptic, the only empirical knowledge that we can have is given to us in immediate perception. (...) We have no reason to believe that the patterns of future events will in any way resemble patterns of events in the present or past. We have no reason to believe even that present events not observed resemble present events that are observed, or that knowledge of past and present can be any guide in making new discoveries about what took place in the past. What we have is an ideal setting for the calculation of a priori probabilities. We have a field of distinct events having no logical or evidential ties to one another. The attempt to justify induction that I wish to present is an appeal to a priori probability. (shrink)

The ‘theory of universals’ of St. Thomas Aquinas has been interpreted in one of two ways by most commentators. Traditionally, commentators have attributed to Thomas the theory which is usually also attributed to Aristotle: “moderate realism,” the view that universals exist in things, subject in some way to individuating principles in the things. For example, according to Copleston.

In this paper, we discuss the macroscopic quantum behavior of simple superconducting circuits. Starting from a Lagrangian for electromagnetic field with broken gauge symmetry, we construct a quantum circuit model for a superconducting weak link (SQUID) ring, together with the appropriate canonical commutation relations. We demonstrate that this model can be used to describe macroscopic excitations of the superconducting condensate and the localized charge states found in some ultrasmall-capacitance weak-link devices.

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Integrating the Physiological and Phenomenological Dimensions of Affect and Motivation Ralph D. Ellis Clark Atlanta University A neglected but ...

THE VISIBLE HAND: THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN BUSINESS by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. 608 pp., $9.95 paper STRATEGY AND STRUCTURE: CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962. 463 pp., $9.95 paper.

We are free to get our theories where we will. As Einstein said, the emergence of a theory is like an egg laid by a chicken, "auf einmal ist es da.1" In practice theories are usually derived as improvements on earlier theories, as better tools are refinements of earlier, cruder ones; and they are directed explanatorily not at the facts of their own construction but at independently specifiable facts which, left unexplained by earlier theories, have therefore refuted them. A new (...) theory should cogently and directly explain all that its predecessors explain and in addition those particular facts which they conspicuously do not explain. The ideal is to have the simplest possible premises explaining most precisely the widest possible range of problematical facts. · 1. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times , p.173 n. Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms", and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks". (shrink)

In his Sermons, Joseph Butler argued for a series of extraordinarily subtle and perceptive claims about the relations between virtue and self-interest. Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of controversy among Butler's interpreters about what exactly these claims amount to, and about what role these claims play in the overall project of his Sermons. Commentators generally agree that the first method is the rationalist method, which Butler almost certainly associated with the work of Samuel Clarke and William Wollaston. The (...) characteristic feature of this rationalist method is that it seeks to discover necessary truths by means of a priori reflection. By contrast, the second method starts out from contingent facts that are known on the basis of empirical observation. So Butler is claiming that the arguments of his Sermons are largely based on the contingent facts of empirical observation. One good way to understand what Butler means is to look at the earlier works of moral philosophy that are clearly influencing him. (shrink)

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War many Americans professed to reject altogether the notion of adhering to tradition, perceiving it as a malign European influence. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Americans had possibly become more tradition-minded than their European contemporaries. So argues Michael D. Clark in this incisive work of social and intellectual history. Challenging reigning assumptions, Clark maintains that in the period 1865 to 1942 Americans became more conscious of tradition as a (...) social force, viewed it more positively, and used it more eclectically and selectively for personal and social enrichment. Clark expands upon the existing body of scholarly work by clearly distinguishing tradition from other ways of relating to the past and by studying particular traditions that shaped American thought and culture. He gives primary attention to five individuals who represent the growing influence of tradition in this period: the popular philosopher and historian John Fiske, representing Anglo-American tradition; the Virginia historians Philip Bruce and Lyon G. Tyler, representing a southern variation on a national tradition; the country's leading neo-Gothic architect, Ralph Adams Cram, representing a surprisingly pervasive medieval tradition; and the sociologist Charles H. Cooley, representing views on immigrant traditions. Clark examines how the idea of tradition, initially associated with family home and local town, was carried outward to the larger sphere and applied to promote American expansionism -- territorially, economically, and demographically. Tradition was also used as a weapon by well-entrenched social groups in struggles over power and values. It offered a sense of stability in a time of unsettling technological and sociological change. Ironically, Clark shows, `traditionalists of this era helped to create a modern sensibility by opposing the Victorian linear sense of history and employing instead historical cycles and typology as ways to bridge past and present. The American Discovery of Tradition, 1865--1942 describes a period of time when the social and intellectual forces of tradition and modernity converged in the United States. America was both a nation looking back, now having a memory of its own past, and a nation looking forward to future progress. Clark's book reveals the shaping of the modern American self and its distinctive attitude -- both positive and negative -- toward tradition. (shrink)

Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama (...) when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke’s blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke’s works articulate a... (shrink)

In his two most famous works, the Principles and Dialogues, George Berkeley announces that he will refute atheism. These works are, however, devoted mainly to arguing against the existence of matter rather than for the existence of God. This oddity can be explained by appeal to the dominant philosophical understanding of atheism in Berkeley’s context, which was developed by Ralph Cudworth and influentially endorsed by Samuel Clarke. In his True Intellectual System of the Universe, Cudworth presented a detailed taxonomy (...) and analysis of atheistic philosophical systems, arguing that such systems must put matter in the place of God, and must therefore be committed to the eternal existence of matter. Cudworth, and Clarke after him, therefore thought that the key to refuting atheism was to show that matter could not exist eternally. Berkeley’s immaterialism is a kind of shortcut to this goal: if the very notion of matter is incoherent, so that it cannot exist at all, then certainly it cannot exist eternally, leading to the collapse of atheistic philosophy. (shrink)

Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly limits the extent to which (...) moral phenomenology can constitute a reason to favor one moral theory over another. Phenomenology may not be able to serve as a pre-theoretic starting point or anchor in the consideration of rival moral theories because moral phenomenology may itself be theory-laden. These doubts are illustrated through an examination of how moral phenomenology is used in the thought of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, and Søren Kierkegaard. (shrink)

A survey of theories on the passions and action in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and western Europe reveals that few, if any, of the major writers held the view that reason in any of its functions executes action without a passion. Even rationalists, like Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and English clergyman Samuel Clarke, recognized the necessity of passion to action. On the other hand, many of these intellectuals also agreed with French philosophers Jean-François Senault, René Descartes, and Nicolas Malebranche (...) that, for passions to be useful or to become virtues, they must be governed by reason. Without the moderation of reason, passions will be unruly, distort our notions of good, and disrupt our rational volitions. In response to these popular early modern perspectives, Enlightenment thinker David Hume offered a now-famous argument that reason without passion cannot motivate, drawing the further conclusion that reason cannot govern the passions, either. Given that no one in Hume’s era seemed to defend the claim that reason alone can motivate action, what was Hume’s intention? (shrink)

This paper offers an argument in favour of the conclusion that it is seriously unjust to exclude same-sex couples from the institution of civil marriage. The argument is based on an interpretation of what the institution of marriage essentially is, and of its essential rationale; the crucial claim is that although marriage is a legal institution, it is also a social institution, involving a "social meaning" -- a body of common knowledge and expectations about marriage that is generally shared throughout (...) society. (shrink)

This is a reply to Mark Johnston's paper "The Authority of Affect", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2001).

Words, Thoughts and Theories argues that infants and children discover the physical and psychological features of the world by a process akin to scientific inquiry, more or less as conceived by philosophers of science in the 1960s (the theory theory). This essay discusses some of the philosophical background to an alternative, more popular, “modular” or “maturational” account of development, dismisses an array of philosophical objections to the theory theory, suggests that the theory theory offers an undeveloped project for artificial intelligence, (...) and, relying on recent psychological work on causation, offers suggestions about how principles of causal inference may provide a developmental solution to the “frame problem”. (shrink)

Social robots serve people as tutors, caretakers, receptionists, companions, and other social agents. People know that the robots are mechanical artifacts, yet they interact with them as if they were actual agents. How is this possible? The proposal here is that people construe social robots not as social agentsper se, but asdepictionsof social agents. They interpret them much as they interpret ventriloquist dummies, hand puppets, virtual assistants, and other interactive depictions of people and animals. Depictions as a class consist of (...) three physical scenes with part-by-part mappings between them: (a) a base scene (the raw physical artifact), (b) the depiction proper (the artifact construed as a depiction), and (c) the scene depicted (the scene people are to imagine). With social robots, evidence shows people form the same three scenes plus mappings: They perceive the raw machinery of a robot, construe it as a depiction of a character, and, using the depiction as a guide, engage in the pretense that they are interacting with the character depicted. With social robots, people also recognize three classes of agents – the characters depicted, the intended recipients of the depictions (those who view or interact with the robots), and the authorities responsible for the robots (the designers, makers, and owners). Construing social robots as depictions, we argue, accounts for many phenomena not covered by alternative models. (shrink)

This response reinforces the major themes of our target article. The impact of key methodological variables should not be taken for granted. Rather, we suggest grounding experimental practices in empirical evidence. If no evidence is available, decisions about design and implementation ought to be subjected to systematic experimentation. In other words, we argue against empirically blind conventions and against methodological choices based on beliefs, habits, or rituals. Our approach will neither inhibit methodological diversity nor constrain experimental creativity. More likely, it (...) will promote both goals. (shrink)

A Photcopy of Thinking Things Through, Princeton Univeresity Press, 1980.

In a short article in the May 2004 edition of Wired magazine (revealingly subtitled “Fear and Loathing on the Human‐Machine Frontier”) the futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling sounds an increasingly familiar alarm. After warning us of the imminent dangers of “brain augmentation” he adds: Another troubling frontier is physical, as opposed to mental, augmentation. Japan has a rapidly growing elderly population and a serious shortage of caretakers. So Japanese roboticists … envision walking wheelchairs and mobile arms that manipulate (...) and fetch. But there's ethical hell at the interfaces, The peripherals may be dizzyingly clever gizmos but the CPU is a human being: old, weak, vulnerable, pitifully limited, possibly senile. (Sterling 2004: 116). (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on how the pandemic has intensified long-standing discussions regarding race, Blackness, white privilege and supremacy, settler colonialism, social justice, and more. I draw from forty years of ethnographic fieldwork or being part of the departmental leadership of Latin American and Latino Studies at my university. This essay uses propositional logic to establish a poetics of radical compassion as prior to radical politics, followed by the “scenic” as evidence to “prove” that paradox is our living condition. In (...) contrast, today’s totalization and capitalization of fear and the hypostatization of truth claims—insofar as they obscure the emptiness of truth—are the methods of war. (shrink)