The study of law and information technology comes with an inherent contradiction in that while technology develops rapidly and embraces notions such as internationalization and globalization, traditional law, for the most part, can be slow to react to technological developments and is also predominantly confined to national borders. However, the notion of the rule of law defies the phenomenon of law being bound to national borders and enjoys global recognition. However, a serious threat to the rule of law is looming (...) in the form of an assault by technological developments within artificial intelligence (AI). As large strides are made in the academic discipline of AI, this technology is starting to make its way into digital decision-making systems and is in effect replacing human decision-makers. A prime example of this development is the use of AI to assist judges in making judicial decisions. However, in many circumstances this technology is a ‘black box’ due mainly to its complexity but also because it is protected by law. This lack of transparency and the diminished ability to understand the operation of these systems increasingly being used by the structures of governance is challenging traditional notions underpinning the rule of law. This is especially so in relation to concepts especially associated with the rule of law, such as transparency, fairness and explainability. This article examines the technology of AI in relation to the rule of law, highlighting the rule of law as a mechanism for human flourishing. It investigates the extent to which the rule of law is being diminished as AI is becoming entrenched within society and questions the extent to which it can survive in the technocratic society. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking involves imagining hypothetical alternatives to reality. Philosopher David Lewis argued that people estimate the subjective plausibility that a counterfactual event might have occurred by comparing an imagined possible world in which the counterfactual statement is true against the current, actual world in which the counterfactual statement is false. Accordingly, counterfactuals considered to be true in possible worlds comparatively more similar to ours are judged as more plausible than counterfactuals deemed true in possible worlds comparatively less similar. Although Lewis (...) did not originally develop his notion of comparative similarity to be investigated as a psychological construct, this study builds upon his idea to empirically investigate comparative similarity as a possible psychological strategy for evaluating the perceived plausibility of counterfactual events. More specifically, we evaluate judgments of comparative similarity between episodic memories and episodic counterfactual events as a factor influencing people's judgments of plausibility in counterfactual simulations, and we also compare it against other factors thought to influence judgments of counterfactual plausibility, such as ease of simulation and prior simulation. Our results suggest that the greater the perceived similarity between the original memory and the episodic counterfactual event, the greater the perceived plausibility that the counterfactual event might have occurred. While similarity between actual and counterfactual events, ease of imagining, and prior simulation of the counterfactual event were all significantly related to counterfactual plausibility, comparative similarity best captured the variance in ratings of counterfactual plausibility. Implications for existing theories on the determinants of counterfactual plausibility are discussed. (shrink)

We distinguish three aspects of medical diagnosis: generating new diagnostic hypotheses, selecting hypotheses for further pursuit, and evaluating their probability in light of the available evidence. Drawing on Peirce’s account of abduction, we argue that hypothesis generation is amenable to normative analysis: physicians need to make good decisions about when and how to generate new diagnostic hypothesis as well as when to stop. The intertwining relationship between the generation and selection of diagnostic hypotheses is illustrated through the analysis of a (...) detailed clinical case study. This interaction is not adequately captured by the existing probabilistic, decision-theoretic models of the threshold approach to clinical decision-making. Instead, we propose to conceptualize medical diagnosis in terms of strategic reasoning. (shrink)

I distinguish Nature from the World. I also distinguish development from evolution. Development is progressive change and can be modeled as part of Nature, using a specification hierarchy. I have proposed a ‘canonical developmental trajectory’ of dissipative structures with the stages defined thermodynamically and informationally. I consider some thermodynamic aspects of the Big Bang, leading to a proposal for reviving final cause. This model imposes a ‘hylozooic’ kind of interpretation upon Nature, as all emergent features at higher levels would have (...) been vaguely and episodically present primitively in the lower integrative levels, and were stabilized materially with the developmental emergence of new levels. The specification hierarchy’s form is that of a tree, with its trunk in its lowest level, and so this hierarchy is appropriate for modeling an expanding system like the Universe. It is consistent with this model of differentiation during Big Bang development to view emerging branch tips as having been entrained by multiple finalities because of the top-down integration of the various levels of organization by the higher levels. (shrink)

Abstract. A historical perspective allows for a different view on the compatibility of theistic views with a crucial foundation of modern scientific practice: the uniformity of nature, which states that the laws of nature are unbroken through time and space. Uniformity is generally understood to be part of a worldview called “scientific naturalism,” in which there is no room for divine forces or a spiritual realm. This association comes from the Victorian era, but a historical examination of scientists from that (...) period shows that uniformity was an important part of both theistic and naturalistic worldviews. Victorian efforts to maintain the viability of miracles and divine action within a universe ruled by natural laws receives special attention. The methodological practices of theistic and naturalistic scientists in the nineteenth century were effectively indistinguishable despite each group's argument that uniformity was closely dependent on their worldview. This similarity is used to reexamine both the reasons for the decline of the role of religion within the scientific community and claims made by the intelligent design movement about the relationship of science and religion. (shrink)

Science and religion have long been thought incompatible. But nowhere has this apparent contradiction been more fully resolved than in the figure of A. S. Eddington (1882–1944), a pioneer in astrophysics, relativity, and the popularization of science, and a devout Quaker. Practical Mystic uses the figure of Eddington to shows how religious and scientific values can interact and overlap without compromising the integrity of either. Eddington was a world-class scientist who not only maintained his religious belief throughout his scientific career (...) but also defended the interrelation of science and religion while drawing inspiration from both for his practices. For instance, at a time when a strict adherence to deductive principles of physics had proved fruitless for understanding the nature of stars, insights from Quaker mysticism led Eddington to argue that an outlook less concerned with certainty and more concerned with further exploration was necessary to overcome the obstacles of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. By examining this intersection between liberal religion and astrophysics, Practical Mystic questions many common assumptions about the relationship between science and spirituality. Matthew Stanley’s analysis of Eddington’s personal convictions also reveals much about the practice, production, and dissemination of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory famously unified many of the Victorian laws of physics. This essay argues that Maxwell saw a deep theological significance in the unification of physical laws. He postulated a variation on the design argument that focused on the unity of phenomena rather than Paley's emphasis on complexity. This argument of Maxwell's is shown to be connected to his particular evangelical religious views. His evangelical perspective provided encouragement for him to pursue a unified physics that supplemented his (...) other philosophical, technical and social influences. Maxwell's version of the argument from design is also contrasted with modern ‘intelligent-design’ theory. (shrink)

Despite increased focus on emotional language, research lacks for the most emotional language: Swearing. We used event-related potentials to investigate whether swear words have content dist...

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many attempts to justify political and social systems on the basis of physics and astronomy. By the early twentieth century such moves increasingly also integrated the life and social sciences. The physical sciences gradually became less appealing as a sole source for sociopolitical thought. The details of this transition help explain the contemporary reluctance to capitalize on an ostensibly rich opportunity for naturalistic social reasoning: the anthropic principle in cosmology, which deals with (...) the apparent “fine-tuning” of the universe for life. (shrink)

A division has arisen within the naturalist school of moral philosophy, with the contenders being "the emotive theorists vs. the cognitive theorists." the author suggests that the fundamental agreements between the groups far outweigh the peripheral and sometimes illusory disagreements. the article establishes the areas of agreement, deals with illusory disagreements, and indicates the peripheral disagreements can be considered disagreements in emphasis. (staff).

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Terraformer les planètes lointaines pour les rendre aptes à porter des vies humaines nourrit sans doute des imaginations littéraires, mais ce que nous appelons « vie » reste pour le moment étroitement attaché à notre planète Terre.

In this short piece belonging to a book symposium on my book How Propaganda Works (Oxford University Press, 2015), I reply to the objections, comments and suggestions provided by the contributors: Bianca Cepollaro and Giuliano Torrengo, Olúfémi O. Táíwò, and Maria Cristina Amoretti. I show how some of the objections can be accommodated by the framework adopted in the book, but also how various comments and suggestions have contributed to the development, in future work, of several threads pertaining to the (...) general view put forward in How Propaganda Works. (shrink)

A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is taken—as an order, (...) a warning, a promise, a proposal, a request, etc.—and the theory's strongest assertion is that no utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act. Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force , and if illocutionary force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a sentence will always have an illocutionary force , the illocutionary force it has will not always be the same. Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

The power of literature to resist "totalization," to divide and oppose whole meaning, to separate Being from the word, or to name Being as itself divided—this is de Man's oldest and best-defended idea. Behind its deconstructionist and semiological variations in the recent work is a long genealogy of such insistence.6 This "genealogy" contains instructive continuities and aberrations. The continuities tend to show de Man to an extraordinary degree the captive of his beginnings. The aberrations pose a threat to the very (...) criterion of rigor which he makes the touchstone of his position. I will restrict myself here to an account of what is coherent and what is incoherent in de Man's treatment of the category of error.[…]Error is not mistake. The concept of the mistake is usable, perhaps, within the restricted teleology of pragmatic acts or within the quasi-rigorous language of scientific description. Mistakes are without true value: trivial, in principle corrigible according to a norm already known. But the skew of error implies a truth. Furthermore, the concept of error supplies to the categories of blindness and insight as much coherence as they are able to achieve. As we shall see, it brings together the constituents of the essential ambivalence of all literary and at least some philosophical language .6. In 1956, for instance, in a review of Nathalie Sarraute's L'Ère du Soupçon, de Man offered his reading of "the central moment of Ulysses, the carefully prepared encounter between Bloom and Stephan Dedalus": it "indicates, surely, the total impossiblity of any contact, of any human communication, even in the most disinterested love" .Stanley Corngold, professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University, is the author of books and articles on Kafka, including The Commentator's Despair and an annotated translation of The Metamorphosis. A volume of his essays on the question of the self in Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Mann, and Heidegger is forthcoming. (shrink)

0$^{\sharp}$ can be invisibly class generic.

It may seem that I am simply confirming Davis’ assertion that in my view of the critical process “different interpretive strategies create completely different texts with no point of comparison” ; but the differences are not all that complete. While many readers now see a God who is more dramatically effective than Pope’s “school divine,” they still see a God who exists in a defining relationship with the figure of Satan, a Satan who is himself significantly changed from the energy-bearing (...) Byronic antihero who was for so long a “given” in the interpretive landscape. The point is, again, that changes do not occur in isolation, because the facts that have undergone change did not exist in isolation either. In the history of Milton criticism, any judgment against God is always and simultaneously a judgment for Satan ; and it follows that a reversal in one pole of the judgment cannot occur without a corresponding—that is, related—reversal in the other. Any increase in the literary “cash value” of Milton’s God will be registered at the expense of his Satan.In short, since literary judgments or observations are not made piecemeal, the process of challenging and changing them is not piecemeal either. That is why it is not “contradictory,” as Davis asserts, “to talk about recalcitrant features of a text” in the context of a thesis that makes the text’s features a function of interpretation . The source of recalcitrance or resistance is not the text as it exists independently of interpretation, but the text as an authoritative and elaborated interpretation has given it to us. I stress “elaborated” because the interpretation is not a single assertion but a complex of assertions; and when a challenge is made to the interpreted text at one point, its other points constitute a reservoir from which objections and “counterchallenges” can emerge. Thus, when someone offers a revisionist account of Milton’s God, a skeptical or unpersuaded reader will respond by observing that this account is incompatible with what we know to be true about other parts of the poem: the characterization of Satan, or of the War in Heaven, or of books 11 and 12. It is then the obligation of the revisionist critic either to demonstrate there is no incompatibility or to extend his new reading in such a way as to recharacterize those parts of the poem that seem to stand as refutations of the revisionist’s reading. He will then be working against resistance, but it will not be the resistance of something that stands outside interpretation; rather it will be the resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of another. Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism” and “Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies”. (shrink)

The timeless brilliance of this exhaustive survey of the best classical writers of antiquity on Pythagoras was first published in 1687 in Thomas Stanley's massive tome, The History of Philosophy. It remains as contemporary today as it was over three hundred years ago. The text of the 1687 book has been reset and modernized to make it more accessible to the modern reader. Spelling has been regularized, obsolete words not found in a modern dictionary have been replaced, and contemporary (...) conventions of punctuation have been used. Biographical sketches of Thomas Stanley and Pythagoras by Manly Palmer Hall, founder of the Philosophical Research Society, have been included, along with a profound overview of Pythagorean philosophy by Platonic scholar Dr. Henry L. Drake. The extensive Greek language references throughout the text have been corrected and contextualized, and reset in a modern Greek font. Each quotation has been verified with the source document in Greek. An extensive annotated appendix of these classical sources is included. A complete bibliography details all the reference works utilized, and a small Glossary defines a number of terms, especially those from musical theory, which may be unfamiliar to the non-technical reader. (shrink)

It is shown that there is no satisfactory first-order characterization of those subsets of ω 2 that have closed unbounded subsets in ω 1 , ω 2 and GCH preserving outer models. These “anticharacterization” results generalize to subsets of successors of uncountable regular cardinals. Similar results are proved for trees of height and cardinality κ + and for partitions of [ κ + ] 2 , when κ is an infinite cardinal.

This paper presents a viewpoint on natural philosophy focusing on the organization of substance, as well as its changes as invited by the Second Law of thermodynamics. Modes of change are pointed to as definitive of levels of organization; these include physical, chemical, and biological modes of change. Conceptual uses of the subsumptive hierarchy format are employed throughout this paper. Developmental change in dissipative structures is examined in some detail, generating an argument for the use of final causality in studies (...) of natural systems. Considerations of ‘internalism’ in science are presented along the way. (shrink)

Frontiers of Consciousness is a study of the problem of consciousness in a historic period of revolutionary change, and an authentic example of “interdisciplinary studies.” The book contains a wealth of insight into the conceptual interrelationships between the work of the American philosophers who have been called the Builders (William James, Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the work of three great modernist poets (T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams).

Volume 25, Issue 5, August 2020, Page 609-612.