We examine the concept of almost everywhere domination from the viewpoint of mass problems. Let AED and MLR be the sets of reals which are almost everywhere dominating and Martin-Löf random, respectively. Let b1, b2, and b3 be the degrees of unsolvability of the mass problems associated with AED, MLR × AED, and MLR ∩ AED, respectively. Let [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P]w be the lattice of degrees of unsolvability of mass problems associated with nonempty Π01 subsets of 2ω. Let 1 (...) and 0 be the top and bottom elements of [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P]w. We show that inf, inf, and inf belong to [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P]w and 0 < inf < inf < inf < 1. Under the natural embedding of the recursively enumerable Turing degrees into [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P]w, we show that inf and inf but not inf are comparable with some recursively enumerable Turing degrees other than 0 and 0′. In order to make this paper more self-contained, we exposit the proofs of some recent theorems due to Hirschfeldt, Miller, Nies, and Stephan. (shrink)

Aristotle's Politics is widely recognized as one of the classics of the history of political philosophy, and like every other such masterpiece, it is a work about which there is deep division.

Let ω be the set of natural numbers. For functions f, g: ω → ω, we say f is dominated by g if f < g for all but finitely many n ∈ ω. We consider the standard “fair coin” probability measure on the space 2ω of in-finite sequences of 0's and 1's. A Turing oracle B is said to be almost everywhere dominating if, for measure 1 many X ∈ 2ω, each function which is Turing computable from X is (...) dominated by some function which is Turing computable from B. Dobrinen and Simpson have shown that the almost everywhere domination property and some of its variant properties are closely related to the reverse mathematics of measure theory. In this paper we exposit some recent results of Kjos-Hanssen, Kjos-Hanssen/Miller/Solomon, and others concerning LR-reducibility and almost everywhere domination. We also prove the following new result: If B is almost everywhere dominating, then B is superhigh, i. e., 0″ is truth-table computable from B ′, the Turing jump of B. (shrink)

What is the temporal course of gratitude and indebtedness and how do these feelings influence helping in the context of reciprocity? In an online-game tapping real-life behaviour, Study 1 (N = 106) finds that while gratitude towards a benefactor remains elevated after an opportunity to reciprocate, indebtedness declines along with helping. Yet, indebtedness rather than gratitude better predicts real-life helping of a benefactor. Using a vignette-based experiment, Study 2 (N = 217) finds that after reciprocation indebtedness and likelihood of helping (...) a benefactor reset to a baseline level while gratitude endures. Furthermore, the decrease in helping after reciprocation is better explained by indebtedness than by gratitude. Study 3 (N = 217) assessed the unique influences of gratitude and indebtedness on helping by comparing contexts in which gratitude is at a baseline level but indebtedness is elevated (e.g. before a monetary payment for a service received) to contexts in which indebtedness is at a baseline level but gratitude is elevated (e.g. after reciprocation of benefits freely given by a friend). People are more likely to help in the former compared to latter context, and this difference is better explained by indebtedness rather than by gratitude. We discuss the interrelated and understudied relationships between gratitude, indebtedness, and reciprocity. (shrink)

Hegel, Derrida, and Restricted Economy: The Case of Mechanical Memory STEPHEN HOULGA'FE A GLANCE AT THE TEXTS OF Jacques Derrida and at the texts and lectures of G. W. F. Hegel indicates that Hegel and Derrida are extraordi- narily different thinkers. Hegel is clearly what Derrida would regard as a philosopher of presence, working toward the point "where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself," where con- sciousness is present to itself as it is (...) in itself. 1 Derrida, on the other hand, suggests that everything that is present, here, now, at this moment, bears within it, as constitutive features of itself, the marks or traces of what is irredeemably past, and that, consequently, we can never talk of entities such as ourselves being simply or wholly present to themselves. ~ Derrida claims in Positions that he tries hard to distinguish "diff6rance" from tlegelian "differ- ence," indeed that "diff~rance" might well be defined precisely as "the inter- ruption, the destruction of Hegelian sublation [relive] wherever it operates"; and, to judge at least from the look of his texts, he would seem to have G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwamag B~inden, edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, 20 vols. and Index , Ill [Phi~nomenologie des Geistes], 74. For the English translation, see Hegel, Phenomenolog) of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, with analysis of the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 387 and contributed an important and helpful study. This dissertation is a model of its kind. One hopes the author will continue his scholarly efforts. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM E. MAY John Henry Newman: A Biography. By IAN KER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 764. $24.95 (paper). The Achievement of John Henry Newman. By IAN KER. Notre Dame: University (...) of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Pp. x + 209. $24.95 (cloth). Ian Ker has inherited the mantle of the late Charles Stephen Dessain as the finest textual expositor of the Newman corpus, and Ker's biography should become a standard reference tool in the field. Ker ap· prenticed under Dessain in the production of the monumental (31volume ) Letters and Diaries, and his biography shows his command of the materials of that as yet unfinished project. Ker's hook joins the biographies of W. Ward (1912) and M. Trevor (1962) as significant "lives of Newman" to consider, and it addresses their earlier shortcomings : Ward's inadequate appraisal of the Anglican Newman and Trevor's unconcern for Newman's theological writings. Of Newman's intellectual contribution, Ker's treatment is similar to Dessain's John Henry Newman, an exposition of the major themes and intellectual moves, and theologically-minded inquirers need read both. Ker offers the hook as a personal life, a literary appraisal, and an intellectual study. The personal life and literary analysis are ably carried off; Ker's background in English literature and his editorial work on the letters have served him well. The intellectual study takes the form of synopses of Newman's hooks and articles, which are woven into the chronological narrative of the life. This aspect of Ker's hook is by no means "the theological achievement of JHN" (cf. Tracy's work on Lonergan); such a project still awaits Newman studies and someone of the conceptual breadth of the late Jan Walgrave to achieve it. Ker provides accurate and readable summaries of Newman's writings, and if a biography is meant to introduce the sundry aspects of a person, especially a complex thinker like Newman, then Ker's treatment of the intellectual aspect offers a fine introduction. I shall consider these three dimensions of the biography, and first the personal life. Newman considered that a person's life is best told 888 BOOK REVIEWS through that person's correspondence. Ker's biography is approached chronologically, and Newman's published letters guide the tale. Newman 's advice is particularly apropos for his own biographer, since Newman 's hooks and articles often displayed a "reserve" in which his true feelings were couched and nuanced. His letters, especially to confidants, were candid and often hard-hitting, as when he described the Curia in these words: " And who is Propaganda? one sharp man of business, who works day and night, and dispatches his work quick off, to the East and West, a high dignitary, [perhaps an Archbishop], hut after all little more than a clerk... with two or.three clerks under him " (p. 519). (Ker displays some reserve himself, omitting Newman's episcopal aside.) Ker's use of the letters is most revealing during Newman's Roman Catholic period when he encountered opposition from Archbishop Manning and W. G. Ward in England, from Archbishop Cullen in Dublin, and from Cardinal Barnaho in Rome. One senses how the laity rallied round him. Some of Newman's most pungent thoughts on ·theological freedom, on the suspicious nature of the clergy toward educated laity, on the wherewithal to make an institution a genuine university, on the role of patience and.trust in God when authorities are hearing down, are to he found in Ker's choice of letters. With so much material to mine-Newman wrote 20,000 letters-it is understandable that Ker does not include, save rarely, what Newman's opponents were thinking. Ker's account of Newman's Anglican period is equally illuminating, and indeed it is a highlight of the biography. While the Apologia has provided the main lines of the story, Ker puts flesh and hones to Newman 's struggle with his conscience. In coming to Oxford, Newman... (shrink)

This essay responds to the characterization Ted Miller offers (in his December 2008 essay in Political Theory) of the kind of nonfoundationalism I have referred to as "weak ontology," and that Gianni Vattimo frequently calls "weak thought." Miller argues that such a position embodies, first, a philosophy of history in which strong ontologies (e.g., religion) are assessed categorically as passé, and, second, are associated essentially with violence. I show that while these characterizations may be appropriate for Vattimo's thought, (...) they are not for weak ontology as I understand it. Finally, I suggest that the former might more usefully be categorized as "antifoundationalism" and the latter as "nonfoundationalism.". (shrink)

An examination of verbal hallucinations and thought insertion as examples of "alienated self-consciousness.".

A mass problem is a set of Turing oracles. If P and Q are mass problems, we say that P is weakly reducible to Q if every member of Q Turing computes a member of P. We say that P is strongly reducible to Q if every member of Q Turing computes a member of P via a fixed Turing functional. The weak degrees and strong degrees are the equivalence classes of mass problems under weak and strong reducibility, respectively. We (...) focus on the countable distributive lattices P w and P s of weak and strong degrees of mass problems given by nonempty Π 1 0 subsets of 2 ω . Using an abstract Gödel/Rosser incompleteness property, we characterize the Π 1 0 subsets of 2 ω whose associated mass problems are of top degree in P w and P s , respectively. Let R be the set of Turing oracles which are random in the sense of Martin-Löf, and let r be the weak degree of R. We show that r is a natural intermediate degree within P w . Namely, we characterize r as the unique largest weak degree of a Π 1 0 subset of 2 ω of positive measure. Within P w we show that r is meet irreducible, does not join to 1, and is incomparable with all weak degrees of nonempty thin perfect Π 1 0 subsets of 2 ω . In addition, we present other natural examples of intermediate degrees in P w . We relate these examples to reverse mathematics, computational complexity, and Gentzen-style proof theory. (shrink)

Let CKDT be the assertion that for every countably infinite bipartite graph G, there exist a vertex covering C of G and a matching M in G such that C consists of exactly one vertex from each edge in M. (This is a theorem of Podewski and Steffens [12].) Let ATR0 be the subsystem of second-order arithmetic with arithmetical transfinite recursion and restricted induction. Let RCA0 be the subsystem of second-order arithmetic with recursive comprehension and restricted induction. We show that (...) CKDT is provable in ART0. Combining this with a result of Aharoni, Magidor, and Shore [2], we see that CKDT is logically equivalent to the axioms of ATR0, the equivalence being provable in RCA0. (shrink)

Most clinicians take for granted a simple, reductionist understanding of medical knowledge that is at odds with how they actually practice medicine; routine medical decisions incorporate more complicated kinds of information than most standard accounts of medical reasoning suggest. A better understanding of the structure and function of knowledge in medicine can lead to practical improvements in clinical medicine. This understanding requires some familiarity with epistemology, the study of knowledge and its structure, in medicine. Michael Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing (...) is advanced as the basis for developing a more accurate understanding of medical knowledge. Tacit knowing, which explores the taken-for-granted background knowledge that underlies all human knowing, is explained in detail with a focus on its relevance for clinical medicine. The implications of recognizing tacit knowing in medicine and medical decisions are discussed. These include the ability to explain the importance of the clinical encounter in medical practice, mechanisms for analysing patient and doctor as persons, and the need for humility given the uncertainty that the tacit dimension injects into all medical decisions. This more robust medical epistemology allows clinicians to better articulate the nature and importance of patient-centred care, to avoid pitfalls inherent in reductionist approaches to medical knowledge, and to think more clearly about the relationships between medicine and health care at the individual and population levels. (shrink)

Stephen Salkever shows that reading Aristotle is a starting point for discussing contemporary political problems in new ways that avoid the opposition between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism, between the politics of rights and the politics of virtues. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in (...) durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

A well known fact is that every Lebesgue measurable set is regular, i.e., it includes an F$_{\sigma}$ set of the same measure. We analyze this fact from a metamathematical or foundational standpoint. We study a family of Muchnik degrees corresponding to measure-theoretic regularity at all levels of the effective Borel hierarchy. We prove some new results concerning Nies's notion of LR-reducibility. We build some $\omega$-models of RCA$_0$which are relevant for the reverse mathematics of measure-theoretic regularity.

1. It is noteworthy that scholarly interest in the history of the period leading up to the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (henceforward the 1870 Act) and its aftermath, particularly its religious...

By , we denote the system of second-order arithmetic based on recursive comprehension axioms and Σ10 induction. is defined to be plus weak König's lemma: every infinite tree of sequences of 0's and 1's has an infinite path. In this paper, we first show that for any countable model M of , there exists a countable model M′ of whose first-order part is the same as that of M, and whose second-order part consists of the M-recursive sets and sets not (...) in the second-order part of M. By combining this fact with a certain forcing argument over universal trees, we obtain the following result : if proves X!Y with arithmetical, so does . We also discuss several improvements of this results. (shrink)

The authors explore how urban versus rural community location shapes the extent to which various individual, relational, and structural factors affect the gender gap in small business success. Building on previous research on gender and small business success, gender queuing theories, and gendered organization/institution theories, they develop a place-specific theory of the gender gap in small business success. The findings, based on small business data collected in urban and rural Iowa, support queuing arguments and raise questions about the effectiveness of (...) crowded-sector explanations. They indicate that the gender gap in small business success operates such that men-owned businesses are more successful in both urban and rural settings but that men-owned businesses are even more successful than women-owned businesses in urban than rural communities. The authors discuss the causes and consequences of the gender gap in small business success in rural and urban places and identify key issues for further research. (shrink)

The increased recognition and reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorders combined with the associated societal and clinical impact call for a broad grassroots community-based dialogue on treatment related ethical and social issues. In these Stony Brook Guidelines, which were developed during a full year of community dialogue with affected individuals, families, and professionals in the field, we identify and discuss topics of paramount concern to the ASD constituency: treatment goals and happiness, distributive justice, managing the desperate hopes for a cure, (...) sibling responsibilities, intimacy and sex, diagnostic ethics, and research ethics. The members of the dialogue core committee included doctors, ethicists, administrators, social workers, ministers, disability experts, and many family members of individuals with autism who were especially engaged in community activities on behalf of their constituency, including siblings, parents, and grandparents. Our guidelines are not based on “top-down” imposition of professional expertise, but rather on a “bottom-up” grass roots attention to the voices of affected individuals and families speaking from experience. These guidelines can inform clinical practice, but they also are meaningful for the wider social conversation emerging over the treatment of individuals with ASD. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry”G. Lynn Stephens (bio)A necessary condition of our having free will is that we initiate some of our actions by our own will or decision. Spence argues that, in light of certain empirical findings, we can accept that willing causes action, only if we acknowledge that willing is a non-conscious phenomenon. “If the notion of free will is retained... it will (...) be a free will which is essentially non-conscious.... [A] conscious free will (in the sense of consciousness initiating action) is incompatible with the evidence....” I shall argue that Spence’s conclusion depends upon a highly questionable understanding of what it is for a decision to be conscious.The evidence to which Spence refers above comes from experimental studies by Libet. This work suggests that, at least for simple motor performances, we become aware of willing the action only after the act has been initiated. This raises the possibility that our subjective experience of willing an action generally follows rather than precedes initiation of the relevant act and, hence, does not cause that action.What does all this entail concerning the causal efficacy of willing or deciding? Spence carefully refrains from drawing the conclusion that decisions never cause actions. Rather he concludes that “conscious decisions do not cause acts.... “Our decision or freedom is illusory (if by these terms we mean conscious phenomena).” We can continue to maintain that our decisions sometimes initiate actions, but only provided that we regard our decisions as non-conscious.In order to evaluate the claim that conscious decisions do not cause actions, we need to distinguish two questions: (1) Does my decision, of which I am conscious, cause me to do A? and (2) Does my being conscious of my decision cause me to do A?We might answer (1) in the affirmative, but (2) in the negative. That is, it might be true that my decision to do A caused me to do A and that I was conscious of that decision, but false that my being conscious of my decision caused me to do A. Indeed, we might suppose that, although my decision caused me to do A, I did not become conscious of that decision until after I had done A. How could this be? Suppose that my subjective experience of deciding to do A results from an (internal) perceptual process and that this process takes time. In that case it is possible that, having decided to do A, it requires more time for me to become conscious of that decision than is required for the decision to initiate my doing A. By the time I become aware of my decision, I have already done what I decided to do.The evidence Spence offers is incompatible with the hypothesis that the subjective experience of [End Page 97] my decision to do A causes me to do A, but quite compatible with the hypothesis that my decision to do A, of which I was conscious, caused me to do A. When he expresses his point by saying, “decisions to act arise prior to our consciousness of them,” or “The role of consciousness in volition is not that of initiator,” he is drawing the conclusion warranted by his evidence.However, he goes beyond his evidence when he says, “Thus our decision or freedom is illusory (if by these terms we mean conscious phenomena),” or “Conscious decision do not cause acts.” To justify these conclusions he needs to argue that something counts as a conscious decision only if we become conscious of it at precisely the instant at which it occurs. (Compare: Something counts as an event that we see, only if we begin to see it precisely at the instant at which it occurs.) Absent some defense of this view, a defense provided nowhere in Spence’s paper, we may continue to maintain that conscious decisions do cause actions.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Free Will in the Light of NeuropsychiatryCommentary: Commentary by FrithCommentary: Commentary by LibetCommentary: Commentary by StephensResponse: Response to the CommentariesG. Lynn Stephens G. Lynn Stephens, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama... (shrink)

The thesis that scientists give greater weight to novel predictions than to explanations of known facts is tested against historical cases in physical science. Several theories were accepted after successful novel predictions but there is little evidence that extra credit was given for novelty. Other theories were rejected despite, or accepted without, making successful novel predictions. No examples were found of theories that were accepted primarily because of successful novel predictions and would not have been accepted if those facts had (...) been previously known. (shrink)