C.S. Peirce offered an evaluation of Bentham's philosophy to the effect that on some points Bentham's performance was of great value, but essentially, he was ‘a shallow logician’ confined to analysis of ‘lower motive’. This paper argues that Bentham's logic is deeply metaphysically based, multi‐levelled, and comprehensive. There are at least three constituent parts in his utilitarian logic: the first is his ontology, with its distinction between real and fictitious entities, and with pain and pleasure constituting the core real entities; (...) the second is his reductionism in, and analytical view of, simple and complex pleasures and pains; the third is the distinction between private ethics and public ethics. Bentham's logic is staunchly based on empiricism and truth and he developed a pragmatic utilitarian solution to overcome the potential impasse of Hume's scepticism through a mechanism of reflection. Even the doctrines of belief and abduction embraced and developed by Peirce are contained in Bentham's utilitarian logic. Bentham would certainly take Peirce's philosophy as ipse dixitism. Peirce was not in fact a serious reader of Bentham and failed to employ the distinction between argument and argumentation in his study of Bentham's logic. (shrink)

This target article draws together two groups of experimental studies on the control of human movement through peripheral feedback and centrally generated signals of motor commands. First, during natural movement, feedback from muscle, joint, and cutaneous afferents changes; in human subjects these changes have reflex and kinesthetic consequences. Recent psychophysical and microneurographic evidence suggests that joint and even cutaneous afferents may have a proprioceptive role. Second, the role of centrally generated motor commands in the control of normal movements and movements (...) following acute and chronic deafferentation is reviewed. There is increasing evidence that subjects can perceive their motor commands under various conditions, but that this is inadequate for normal movement; deficits in motor performance arise when the reliance on proprioceptive feedback is abolished either experimentally or because of pathology. During natural movement, the CNS appears to have access to functionally useful input from a range of peripheral receptors as well as from internally generated command signals. The unanswered questions that remain suggest a number of avenues for further research. (shrink)

When faced with transgressions in their peer groups, children must navigate a series of situational cues (e.g., type of transgression, transgressor gender, transgressor intentionality) to evaluate the moral status of transgressions and to inform their subsequent behavior toward the transgressors. There is little research on which cues children prioritize when presented together, how reliance on these cues may be affected by certain biases (e.g., gender norms), or how the prioritization of these cues may change with age. To explore these questions, (...) 138 5- to 7-year-olds (younger children) and 8- to 10-year-olds (older children) evaluated a series of boy and girl characters who partook in physical or relational aggression with ambiguous or purposeful intent. Children were asked to provide sociomoral evaluations (i.e., acceptability, punishment, and intention attribution judgments) and social preferences. Transgressor gender only impacted children’s social preferences. Conversely, aggression form and transgressor intent shifted children’s sociomoral judgments: they were harsher toward physical transgressors with purposeful intent over those with ambiguous intent but made similar evaluations for relational transgressors regardless of intentionality. The present results suggest that gender is perhaps not uniformly relevant to children across all contexts, as other cues were prioritized for children’s sociomoral judgments. Since children likely have less familiarity with relational aggression compared to physical aggression, it follows that intent would only shift judgments about physical transgressors. This research provides insight about how children simultaneously navigate multiple cues in aggression contexts, which is likely reflective of their real-world experiences. (shrink)

Using recent results in topos theory, two systems of higher-order logic are shown to be complete with respect to sheaf models over topological spaces- so -called "topological semantics." The first is classical higher-order logic, with relational quantification of finitely high type; the second system is a predicative fragment thereof with quantification over functions between types, but not over arbitrary relations. The second theorem applies to intuitionistic as well as classical logic.

§1. The origins of recursion theory. In dedicating a book to Steve Kleene, I referred to him as the person who made recursion theory into a theory. Recursion theory was begun by Kleene's teacher at Princeton, Alonzo Church, who first defined the class of recursive functions; first maintained that this class was the class of computable functions ; and first used this fact to solve negatively some classical problems on the existence of algorithms. However, it was Kleene who, in his (...) thesis and in his subsequent attempts to convince himself of Church's Thesis, developed a general theory of the behavior of the recursive functions. He continued to develop this theory and extend it to new situations throughout his mathematical career. Indeed, all of the research which he did had a close relationship to recursive functions.Church's Thesis arose in an accidental way. In his investigations of a system of logic which he had invented, Church became interested in a class of functions which he called the λ-definable functions. Initially, Church knew that the successor function and the addition function were λ-definable, but not much else. During 1932, Kleene gradually showed1 that this class of functions was quite extensive; and these results became an important part of his thesis 1935a. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that RadicalInterpretation (RI), taken to be a methodological doctrine regarding the conditions under which an interpretation of an utterance is both warranted and correct, has unacceptable implications for the conditions on (ascriptions of) understanding. The notion of understanding at play is that which underwrites the testimonial transmission of knowledge. After developing this notion I argue that, on the assumption of RI, hearers will fail to have such understanding in situations in which we should want to (...) maintain otherwise. The overall effect of the argument is to provide a heretofore unexamined source of motivation for anti-individualistic approaches to the semantics of utterances. (shrink)

The development of gene-editing technologies, such as the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and associated Cas9 endonuclease system, coincides with a rapidly expanding knowledge of the role of genes in the human ageing process. This raises the prospect that, in addition to the treatment of genetic diseases and disorders, it may become possible to use gene-editing technologies to alter the ageing process and significantly extend the maximum human lifespan. Germline editing poses distinctive problems due to its implications for individual (...) members of future, unborn generations. In this essay, I wish to home in, narrowly, on a single ethical objection to extending the lifespan of future generations by editing the human germline. The objection suggests that to extend lifespans is to unethically inflict the harm of loneliness on future people. I claim that the argument rests on assumptions that ought to be rejected. (shrink)

I am concerned that the military’s Rules of Engagement (ROE) exclusively focus on prescribing permissible actions but fail to consider the servicemembers’ blameworthiness. In explaining this concern, I will illuminate how permissible actions do not necessarily yield blamelessness. While permissibility is generally a function of rules or good outcomes, blameworthiness is at least a function of an agent’s intentions. Why should we care about permissible actions done with blameworthy intentions? I offer two distinct motivations. Using a self-defense situation as an (...) example, I explain that neglecting to consider blame can increase the magnitude of harm done to an apparent but merely possible attacker. Secondly, we should certainly be concerned about the harms done to servicemembers, and I show that ROE that fail to prescribe a blameless intention may result in increased harm to servicemembers in the form of a “moral injury”. In even more general terms, I am advocating for a more robust in bello consideration of intentions. (shrink)

Originally published in 1904, Whittaker’s A Treatise on the Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies soon became a classic of the subject and has remained in print for most of these 108 years. In this paper, we follow the book as it develops from a report that Whittaker wrote for the British Society for the Advancement of Science to its influence on Dirac’s version of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and beyond.

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