The question addressed here is whether evidence concerning defendants' past criminal records should be introduced at their trials because such evidence reveals their character and thus reveals whether they are the kinds of persons likely to have committed the crimes with which they are currently charged. I strongly caution against the introduction of such evidence for a number of reasons. First, the link between defendants' past criminal records and claims about their standing dispositions to think and act is tenuous, at (...) best. Second, noncharacter, or trace, evidence should have primacy in determining the guilt or innocence of defendants. Third, character evidence will vary in its freshness and specificity. Other things being equal, only relatively fresh and specific character evidence has probative value. Moreover, such evidence will have greater probative value in criminal cases where the issue before the court is whether a crime has been committed than in cases where the issue is whether it was the defendant who committed the crime. Finally, we might be more sanguine about the introduction of fresh and specific character evidence under conditions likely to work against its misuse or misinterpretation. However, the relevant conditions may not often be satisfied in the real world of criminal trials and defendants. (shrink)

Richard Tieszen presents an analysis, development, and defense of a number of central ideas in Kurt Gödel's writings on the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and logic. Tieszen structures the argument around Gödel's three philosophical heroes - Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl - and his engagement with Kant, and supplements close readings of Gödel's texts on foundations with materials from Gödel's Nachlass and from Hao Wang's discussions with Gödel. He provides discussions of Gödel's views, and develops a new type of (...) platonic rationalism that requires rational intuition, called 'constituted platonism'. (shrink)

We present a detailed process theory of the moment‐by‐moment working‐memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes sentence processing as a series of skilled associative memory retrievals modulated by similarity‐based interference and fluctuating activation. The cognitive principles are formalized in computational form in the Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) architecture, and our (...) process model is realized in ACT–R. We present the results of 6 sets of simulations: 5 simulation sets provide quantitative accounts of the effects of length and structural interference on both unambiguous and garden‐path structures. A final simulation set provides a graded taxonomy of double center embeddings ranging from relatively easy to extremely difficult. The explanation of center‐embedding difficulty is a novel one that derives from the model' complete reliance on discriminating retrieval cues in the absence of an explicit representation of serial order information. All fits were obtained with only 1 free scaling parameter fixed across the simulations; all other parameters were ACT–R defaults. The modeling results support the hypothesis that fluctuating activation and similarity‐based interference are the key factors shaping working memory in sentence processing. We contrast the theory and empirical predictions with several related accounts of sentence‐processing complexity. (shrink)

This book presents modern logic as the formalization of reasoning that needs and deserves a semantic foundation. Chapters on propositional logic; parsing propositions; and meaning, truth and reference give the reader a basis for establishing criteria that can be used to judge formalizations of ordinary language arguments. Over 120 worked examples illustrate the scope and limitations of modern logic, as analyzed in chapters on identity, quantifiers, descriptive names, and functions. The chapter on second-order logic shows how different conceptions of predicates (...) and propositions do not lead to a common basis for quantification over predicates, as they do for quantification over things. Notable for its clarity of presentation and supplemented by many exercises, this volume will be invaluable for philosophers, linguists, mathematicians, and computer scientists who wish to better understand the tools they use in formal reasoning. (shrink)

The physical and relational structure of the biologic continuum (both internal and external to the organism) creates the information signature that is the basis for the origination of meaning in the living system. A meaning metric can be grounded in the significance of that information to the stability of the system during the process of adaptive reconciliation of divergences from the steady state condition. From this perspective, an information-theoretic formulation of the process for translating incident information into adaptive action is (...) proposed that can be practically used in defining and quantifying the meaning of that information for the living system. (shrink)

This book is dedicated to a classic presentation of the theory of computable functions in the context of the foundations of mathematics. Part I motivates the study of computability with discussions and readings about the crisis in the foundations of mathematics in the early 20th century, while presenting the basic ideas of whole number, function, proof, and real number. Part II starts with readings from Turing and Post leading to the formal theory of recursive functions. Part III presents sufficient formal (...) logic to give a full development of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Part IV considers the significance of the technical work with a discussion of Church's Thesis and readings on the foundations of mathematics. This new edition contains the timeline "Computability and Undecidability" as well as the essay "On mathematics". (shrink)

This book draws upon philosophical arguments, criminological evidence, and legal literature on prisoners' rights and sentencing to explore the restrictions and deprivations that can be legitimately imposed on serious offenders in the name of punishment.

We propose a framework for including information‐processing bounds in rational analyses. It is an application of bounded optimality (Russell & Subramanian, 1995) to the challenges of developing theories of mechanism and behavior. The framework is based on the idea that behaviors are generated by cognitive mechanisms that are adapted to the structure of not only the environment but also the mind and brain itself. We call the framework computational rationality to emphasize the incorporation of computational mechanism into the definition of (...) rational action. Theories are specified as optimal program problems, defined by an adaptation environment, a bounded machine, and a utility function. Such theories yield different classes of explanation, depending on the extent to which they emphasize adaptation to bounds, and adaptation to some ecology that differs from the immediate local environment. We illustrate this variation with examples from three domains: visual attention in a linguistic task, manual response ordering, and reasoning. We explore the relation of this framework to existing “levels” approaches to explanation, and to other optimality‐based modeling approaches. (shrink)

Theories of Truth provides a clear, critical introduction to one of the most difficult areas of philosophy. It surveys all of the major philosophical theories of truth, presenting the crux of the issues involved at a level accessible to nonexperts yet in a manner sufficiently detailed and original to be of value to professional scholars. Kirkham's systematic treatment and meticulous explanations of terminology ensure that readers will come away from this book with a comprehensive general understanding of one of philosophy's (...) thorniest set of topics. -/- Included are discussions of the correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, semantic, performative, redundancy, appraisal, and truth-as-justification theories. There are also chapters or sections of chapters on the liar paradox, three-valued logic, Field's critique of Tarski, Davidson's program, Dummett's theory of linguistic competence, satisfaction, recursion, the extension/intension distinction, and an explanation of how theories of justification, properly understood, differ from theories of truth. -/- A persistent theme is that philosophers have too often failed to recognize that not all theories of truth are intended to answer the same question. When the various questions are made distinct, it is apparent that many of the "debates" in this field are really cases of philosophers talking past one another. There is much less disagreement within the field than has commonly been thought. (shrink)

In _Freedom and the End of Reason_, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant’s philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy’s larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole of Kantianism—not merely the Second Critique—focuses on a “critique of practical reason” and is a response to a problem that Kant saw as intrinsic to reason itself: the teleological problem of its goodness. Reconstructing the influence of Rousseau on Kant’s thought, Velkley (...) demonstrates that the relationship between speculative philosophy and practical philosophy in Kant is far more intimate than generally has been perceived. By stressing a Rousseau-inspired notion of reason as a provider of practical ends, he is able to offer an unusually complete account of Kant’s idea of moral culture. (shrink)

Offering a collection of fifteen essays that deal with issues at the intersection of phenomenology, logic, and the philosophy of mathematics, this 2005 book is divided into three parts. Part I contains a general essay on Husserl's conception of science and logic, an essay of mathematics and transcendental phenomenology, and an essay on phenomenology and modern pure geometry. Part II is focused on Kurt Godel's interest in phenomenology. It explores Godel's ideas and also some work of Quine, Penelope Maddy and (...) Roger Penrose. Part III deals with elementary, constructive areas of mathematics. These are areas of mathematics that are closer to their origins in simple cognitive activities and in everyday experience. This part of the book contains essays on intuitionism, Hermann Weyl, the notion of constructive proof, Poincaré and Frege. (shrink)

Aristotle's essentialism is generally recognized as involving a distinction between what belongs to something _in itself (kath' hauto) and what belongs to it _accidentally (kata sumbebekos). But he distinguishes two relevant senses of "_in itself"; the first referring to what belongs to something in _what it is, the second referring to such attributes as: odd to number, male to animal, curved to line, and white to surface. I set out these distinctions, and argue that Aristotle counts the second class of (...) _in itself attributes as being just as essential to the individual substances to which they belong as the first. (shrink)

After explaining the philosophical significance of the paradox and explaining what an adequate dissolution must do, i show that the story of the unexpected exam hides within it two distinctly different paradoxes. the first turns on a problem of self-reference, but all previous attempts to dissolve the paradox fail to dissolve the second. i then dissolve it.

2. But even to the common understanding it soon becomes evident that such knowledge, pursued even to its ultimate perfection, is nevertheless inadequate to many of the modest demands which confront that understanding. For immediately upon the achievement of even slight knowledge of the essence, existence or causes of any finite thing there comes an awareness that this thing could have been other than as it is, could have been produced by other or different causes, could have failed to come (...) into existence at all--is, in other words, radically contingent. Nor does this awareness seem merely a function of the partiality, the incompleteness and finitude of human experience; if it were, we could expect it to diminish directly in proportion to the increasing scope and depth of our experience; this it does not do, but rather grows and increases as experience grows, reaching at last such a state that many, under the spell of its conviction, are led to assert either that such an awareness is a necessary part or aspect of all experience or that its object must be a necessary, analytically discoverable part or aspect of all the objects of experience. No such assertions are necessary here; it suffices to re-affirm our faith in, and faithfulness to, the data of experience; one of the most pervasive and fundamental of all such data, then, we may honestly declare to be the radical contingency of the finite objects of our awareness. The most pervasive is existence. (shrink)

The equivalence of Fermat's Last Theorem and the non-existence of solutions of a generalized n th order homogeneous hyperbolic partial differential equation in three dimensions and periodic boundary conditions defined in a cubic lattice is demonstrated for all positive integer, n > 2. For the case n = 2, choosing one variable as time, solutions are identified as either propagating or standing waves. Solutions are found to exist in the corresponding problem in two dimensions.

In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question.

The claim that visually masked, unidentifiable words are analyzed at the level of whole word meaning has been challenged by recent findings indicating that instead, analysis occurs mainly at the subword level. The present experiments examined possible limits on subword analysis. Experiment 1 obtained semantic priming from pleasant- and unpleasant-meaning subliminal words in which no individual letter contained diagnostic information about a word’s evaluative valence; thus analysis must operate on information more complex than that contained in individual letters. Experiments 2 (...) and 3 showed that analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented by individual bigrams or trigrams . These findings suggest that while subliminal priming is driven by subword analysis, the effective units of analysis are distributed widely across at least short words. (shrink)

Using data collected from people with at least one brother and one sister, and consistent with an evolutionary perspective, we find that older men and women (a) are more upset by a brother’s partner’s sexual infidelity than by her emotional infidelity and (b) are more upset by a sister’s partner’s emotional infidelity than by his sexual infidelity. There were no effects of participant sex or sex of in-law on upset over a sibling’s partner’s infidelities, but there was an effect of (...) participant sex on reports of upset over one’s own partner’s infidelities. The results suggest that the key variable among older participants is the sex of the sibling or, correspondingly, the sex of the sibling’s partner, as predicted from an evolutionary analysis of reproductive costs, and not the sex of the participant, as predicted from a socialization perspective. Discussion offers directions for future work on jealousy. (shrink)

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON HEGEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY has stressed its place in the modern tradition of reflection on autonomy and rights, thus rejecting negative assessments of Hegel as an authoritarian, post-Napoleonic “Prussian” opponent of liberalism as well as revising sympathetic readings of him as a “communitarian” critic of “atomistic” individualism. A group of eminent writers argues that Hegel, deeply indebted to Rousseau and Kant as turning away from early modern “negative freedom,” rethinks their accounts of “positive freedom” of self-determination based on (...) the principles of the general will or moral law, and embeds those accounts in the customary and institutional framework of the modern constitutional-monarchical state. Hegel understands citizenship in this state as realizing the highest aspirations of modernity for universal recognition of the autonomous personality as secured by the rule of law, systems of impartial justice, suffrage rights, and freedoms of religion, publication, teaching, and so on—under the sovereignty of the patriotic state. Furthermore, this scholarly approach to Hegel regards his conception of politically realized freedom as the heart of his whole philosophical endeavor, and it construes the dialectical arguments as providing chiefly the terms for explicating the rational will’s or practical reason’s inherent striving to actualize itself in ethically, politically, and publicly “mediated” forms of recognition. (shrink)

The Gauss-Hertz principle is extended by the use of existence conditions (or constraints) to obtain a hierarchy of differential equations which include all classical equations of continuum mechanics (including electrodynamics) and the harmonic oscillator potential as well.

The most popular method of incorporating time into a formal logic is based on the work of Arthur Prior. It treats tenses as operators on sentences. In this essay I show a serious problem with that approach, a confusion of scheme versus proposition, which makes any system built in that way incoherent. I will compare how other formal logics deal with the scheme versus proposition distinction and find that only for formal modal logics does the same problem arise. I then (...) compare Prior’s approach to other ways of taking time into account in formal logics. (shrink)

Negative retributivism is the view that though the primary justifying aim of legal punishment is the reduction of crime, the state's efforts to do so are subject to side-constraints that forbid punishment of the innocent and disproportionate punishment of the guilty. I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to what the side-constraints commit us to in constructing a theory of legal punishment, even one primarily oriented toward reducing crime. Specifically, I argue that the side-constraints limit the kinds of actions (...) that are appropriately criminalised, the kinds of beings who are appropriately liable to legal punishment, and the absolute and comparative severity of sanctions. I also argue that a third retributive constraint is needed, one which I term a ‘non-degradation constraint’. According to this third constraint, in our efforts to reduce crime, we must avoid treating offenders as non-moral beings and ensure that punishment does not atrophy or erode the complex capacity for moral responsibility. When this third constraint is combined with the persuasive instrumental case for promoting the moral responsiveness of offenders, the result is an approach to crime reduction that is quite different from ones which emphasise general deterrence and incapacitation. In the closing section, I broach the question whether negative retributivism has been appropriately characterised in the literature on legal punishment. (shrink)

Several theoretical perspectives have generated research on grandparental investment, notably socialization and evolutionary psychological perspectives. Using data collected from more than 200 older adults (mean age 67 years), we test three hypotheses derived from socialization and evolutionary perspectives about grandparents’ relationships with and investment in grandchildren. Results indicate that (1) emotional closeness with both children and children-in-law is positively related to reports of emotional closeness with grandchildren; (2) maternal grandmothers invest more in grandchildren than do other grandparents; and (3) grandparents (...) invest more in daughters’ children than in sons’ children. Discussion addresses limitations of self-report methodology in this context and situates the current findings within the body of research indicating the existence of psychological mechanisms designed to guide differential nepotism. (shrink)

This volume is about searching for fundamental theory in physics which has become somewhat elusive in recent decades. Like a group of blind men investigating an elephant, one physicist postulates the trunk as a hose, another a leg as a tree, the body a wall or barrier, the tail a rope and the ears as a fan. The organizers of the Vigier series symposia strongly believe cross polination by exploring many avenues of seemingly disparate research is key to breakthrough discovery (...) and solicited papers on all areas of physics deemed pertinent in Astrophysics, Cosmology, nuclear physics, quantum theory, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, vacuum field theory and topology. (shrink)