This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer and cognitive science. Topics included are: the foundational relevance of logic to computer science, with particular reference to tense logic, constructive logic, and Horn clause logic; logic as the theoretical underpinnings of the engineering discipline of expert systems; a discussion of the evolution of computational linguistics into functionally distinct task levels; and current issues in the implementation of speech act theory.

One significant way in which place is represented is through books based on old photographs and postcards. Recontextualised in such books, historical photos can be used to create mesmeric myths about a locality. This paper explores the genre through four works about areas in Sheffield, a city in the north of England. The book for the well to do suburb, Crosspool, constructs a quaint rural past. Two representations of a working class district are perhaps a little more successful in recovering (...) a personally significant past. The history of a local steel firm avoids issues of social conflict and exploitation by adopting a documentary tone. Thegenre trades on the active interest of seeing familiar scenes as they were in the past, but fails to develop interpretative strategies, such as asking about the context of photos’ original creation or reflecting on how they have been reused. (shrink)

Long-running horror series are reputed to yield diminishing returns (both in terms of profit and quality). At first glance, the A Nightmare on Elm Street series appears to fit that established pattern. For instance, lead antagonist Freddy supposedly ‘deteriorates’ from sinister, backlit child molester to comic-book ‘Las Vegas lounge’ stand-up act by the end of the 1980s (Schoell and Spencer 1992, 116). However, interviews from the period indicate that comedy was a central component from the outset of the series; (...) it is not, as has been often suggested, that the series’ horror was diluted by the introduction of humour in later sequels. Such misremembrances are entrenched by the writers’, directors’ and actors’ retrospective reflections on Elm Street, which colour how the series is understood more broadly. This chapter will focus on one of the most common misremembrances embedded into Elm Street’s lore; that the series began with hard rules about the relationship between dream and reality, which became looser (to the point of incoherence) as the series progressed. As close textual analysis and examination of archival interviews will demonstrate, the series’ “rules” were never as clearly established as creator Wes Craven intended. Moreover, rather than complaining that the continuing story did not hold together—indeed, Craven dismissed parts 2-6 of the series on these grounds—I argue that the series ought to be taken on its own terms. The individual films may vary in aesthetic and quality for various industrial reasons, but they are nevertheless chapters in a continuing narrative, and ought to be understood as such. Given that the diegesis is based on shared experiences—secrets held by Springwood’s parents, nightmares and abilities shared by the teens—it is reductive to understand the Elm Street films as anything other than an imbricated whole. As such, this chapter will demonstrate that the series’ narrative is best understood as a recurring nightmare. Its logic is dreamlike, being constituted by events, characters and motifs that are echoed across the series. Thus, this chapter contends that to dismiss the Elm Street sequels as a product of diminishing returns is to overlook the series’ narrative richness. More broadly, this chapter makes a case for understanding sequels as valuable parts of a whole, rather than dismissing them as inferior copies of the original. (shrink)

'Post-truth', Oxford Dictionary's 2016 word of the year, appears to cover only the turn away from reason in contemporary politics. In fact the truth behind 'post-truth' is historically and philosophically more complex. As Fuller shows in this book, it reaches into the nature of knowledge itself.

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)

This book criticizes the common belief that we are entitled to exploit animals for our benefit because they are not as rational as people. After discussing the moral (in)significance of reason in general, the author proceeds to develop a clear, commonsensical conception of what "animal rights" is about and why everyday morality points toward the liberation of animals as the next logical step in Western moral progress. The book evaluates criticisms of animal rights that have appeared in recent philosophical literature (...) and explains the consequences of animal liberation for our diet, science, and treatment of the environment. The issue of animal rights has become of increasing philosophical and popular importance over the past decade. Morals. Reason, and Animals is the first extensive, second-generation contribution to this debate. Focusing exclusively on the fundamental philosophical issues, Sapontzis both undermines the arguments that have been raised against animal rights and constructs a rebuttal that avoids the pitfalls encountered by earlier defenses. (shrink)

According to a widely held principle—the poss-ability principle—an agent, S, is able to only if it is metaphysically possible for S to. I argue against the poss-ability principle by developing a novel class of counterexamples. I then argue that the consequences of rejecting the poss-ability principle are interesting and far-reaching.

This paper is the first in a two-part series in which we discuss several notions of completeness for systems of mathematical axioms, with special focus on their interrelations and historical origins in the development of the axiomatic method. We argue that, both from historical and logical points of view, higher-order logic is an appropriate framework for considering such notions, and we consider some open questions in higher-order axiomatics. In addition, we indicate how one can fruitfully extend the usual set-theoretic semantics (...) so as to shed new light on the relevant strengths and limits of higher-order logic. (shrink)

This paper is the second in a two-part series in which we discuss several notions of completeness for systems of mathematical axioms, with special focus on their interrelations and historical origins in the development of the axiomatic method. We argue that, both from historical and logical points of view, higher-order logic is an appropriate framework for considering such notions, and we consider some open questions in higher-order axiomatics. In addition, we indicate how one can fruitfully extend the usual set-theoretic semantics (...) so as to shed new light on the relevant strengths and limits of higher-order logic. (shrink)

Despite Kant's belief in a universal causal determinism among phenomena and his rejection of any noumenal agency in brutes, he nevertheless rejected Descartes's hypothesis that brutes are machines. Explaining Kant's response to Descartes forms the basis for this discussion of the nature of consciousness and matter in Kant's system. Kant's numerous remarks on animal psychology-as found in his lecture notes and reflections on metaphysics and anthropology-suggest a theory of consciousness and self-consciousness at odds with that traditionally ascribed to him.

An affirmative answer is given to the question quoted in the title.

This paper lays the groundwork for normative-yet-naturalistic social epistemology. I start by presenting two scenarios for the history of epistemology since Kant, one in which social epistemology is the natural outcome and the other in which it represents a not entirely satisfactory break with classical theories of knowledge. Next I argue that the current trend toward naturalizing epistemology threatens to destroy the distinctiveness of the sociological approach by presuming that it complements standard psychological and historical approaches. I then try to (...) reassert, in Comtean fashion, the epistemologist's credentials in regulating knowledge production. Finally, I consider how social epistemology may have something exciting and relevant to say about contemporary debates in the theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Moral judgments about an agent's behavior are enmeshed with inferences about the agent's mind. Folk psychology—the system that enables such inferences—therefore lies at the heart of moral judgment. We examine three related folk-psychological concepts that together shape people's judgments of blame: intentionality, choice, and free will. We discuss people's understanding and use of these concepts, address recent findings that challenge the autonomous role of these concepts in moral judgment, and conclude that choice is the fundamental concept of the three, defining (...) the core of folk psychology in moral judgment. (shrink)

In the face of argument to the contrary, it is shown that there is defensible middle ground available for entity realism, between the extremes of scientific realism and empiricist antirealism. Cartwright's ([1983]) earlier argument for defensible middle ground between these extremes, which depended crucially on the viability of an underdeveloped distinction between inference to the best explanation (IBE) and inference to the most probable cause (IPC), is examined and its defects are identified. The relationship between IBE and IPC is clarified (...) and a revised version of Cartwright's argument for defensible middle ground, which is free of the identified defects, is presented. (shrink)

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deeper philosophical roots of such far-right ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon, to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life.

Research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) tends to presume that intellectual and political radicalism go hand in hand. One would therefore expect that the most intellectually radical movement in the field relates critically to its social conditions. However, this is not the case, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Parisian School of STS spearheaded by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. Their position, "actor-network theory," turns out to be little more than a strategic adaptation to the democratization of expertise (...) and the decline of the strong nation-state in France over the past 25 years. This article provides a prehistory of this client-driven, contract-based research culture in U.S. sociology of the 1960s, followed by specific features of French philosophical and political culture that have bred the distinctive tenets of actor-network theory. Insofar as actor-network theory has become the main paradigm for contemporary STS research, it reflects a field that dodges normative commitments in order to maintain a user-friendly presence. (shrink)

This paper is the first in a two-part series in which we discuss several notions of completeness for systems of mathematical axioms, with special focus on their interrelations and historical origins in the development of the axiomatic method. We argue that, both from historical and logical points of view, higher-order logic is an appropriate framework for considering such notions, and we consider some open questions in higher-order axiomatics. In addition, we indicate how one can fruitfully extend the usual set-theoretic semantics (...) so as to shed new light on the relevant strengths and limits of higher-order logic. (shrink)

Trevena and Miller provide further evidence that readiness potentials occur in the brain prior to the time that participants claim to have initiated a voluntary movement, a contention originally forwarded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl . In their examination of this issue, though, aspects of their data lead them to question whether their measurement of the initiation of a voluntary movement was accurate. The current article addresses this concern by providing a direct analysis of biases in this task. This (...) was done by asking participants to make subjective timing decisions regarding a stimulus that could be measured objectively. Our findings suggest that their timing task was indeed biased such that participants' tend to report events as happening approximately 70 ms later than they actually happened. Implications for the original Libet et al. claims are discussed. (shrink)

In the United States, convicted offenders frequently lose the right to vote, at least temporarily. Drawing on the common observation that citizens of color lose democratic rights at disproportionately high rates, this chapter argues that this punishment is problematic in non-ideal societies because of the way in which it diminishes the political power of marginalized groups and threatens to reproduce patterns of domination and subordination, when they occur. This chapter then uses the case of penal disenfranchisement to illustrate how idealized (...) discussions of deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution often ignore the relationship between punishment and social/political power, and thus systematically obscure morally significant aspects of our broader penal practices. (shrink)

Biodiversity scientists often describe their field as aiming to save life and humanity, but the field has yet to reckon with the history and contemporary practices of colonialism and systematic racism inherited from natural history. The online data portals scientists use to store and share biodiversity data are a growing class of organizations whose governance can address or perpetuate and further institutionalize the implicit assumptions and inequitable social impacts from this extensive history. In this context, researchers and Indigenous Peoples are (...) developing and implementing new strategies to examine and change assumptions about which agents should count as salient participants to scientific projects, especially projects that build and manage large digital data portals. Two notable efforts are the FAIR and CARE Principles for scientific data management and governance. To characterize how these influence the governance of biodiversity data portals, we develop an account of fitness-for-use that makes explicit its social as well as technical conditions in relation to agents and purposes. The FAIR Principles, already widely adopted by biodiversity data projects, prioritize machine agents and efficient computation, while the CARE Principles prioritize Indigenous Peoples and their data sovereignty. Both illustrate the potency of an emerging general strategy by which groups of actors craft and implement governance principles for data fitness-of-use to change assumptions about salient participants to data science. (shrink)

The practice of conservation assumes that current persons have some obligations to future generations, but these obligations are complicated by a number of philosophical problems, chief among which is what Derek Parfit calls the Non-Identity Problem. Because our actions now will affect the identities of persons to be born in the distant future, we cannot say that those actions either benefit or harm those persons. Thus, a causal link between our acts and their consequences for particular persons is severed, and (...) the justification for conservation duties toward future generations undermined. I argue for an alternative justification for conservation in the capacity of foresight, which requires us to act not only upon duties that we have now, but also upon those that we will predictably have in the future. In this way, the future generations problem, at least as applied to conservation issues, is overcome. (shrink)

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)

Defining privacy is problematic because the condition of privacy appears simultaneously to require separation from others, and the possibility of choosing not to be separate. This latter feature expresses the inherent normative dimension of privacy: the capacity to control the perceptual and informational spaces surrounding one’s person. Clearly the features of separation and control as just described are in tension because one may easily enough choose to give up all barriers between oneself and the public space. How could the capacity (...) for privacy give rise to its absence? Yet both the separation and control features of privacy do seem indispensable to any sensible understanding of it. In this paper I set out an approach to defining privacy that keeps these features and avoids the tension between them. (shrink)

: A survey of arguments made by fiscal conservatives who wish to eliminate federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is given and a critique of them stemming from Danto's argument for art for our sake. Following Hegel's lead, Danto shows us that there is an intimate relationship that exists between nations and their art—that is, that art is central to the political health of a nation. The arguments by conservatives are found wanting and pose no threat (...) to the welfare of the NEA. (shrink)

The high price of drugs is receiving due consideration from ethicists, policymakers, and legislators. However, much of this attention has focused on the difference between the cost of drug development and company profits and the possible laws and regulations that could limit a drug’s price once it reaches market. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the ethical implications of high drug prices for the research subjects whose bodies were essential to the drug’s development. Indeed, the future price of (...) a drug is routinely ignored and treated as unknowable during the ethical evaluation of the clinical trials that support its development. In this paper, I will argue that ignoring the future price of a drug during the research process is in tension with all three of the major principles of research ethics: it fails to show respect for the research participants, undermines the quality of risk/benefit judgements made by ethical review committees, and makes it impossible to judge future patient access and assess justice. (shrink)

This article illustrates the process of applied critical realist research using a case study of political decision-making in transport. Critical realism is often used to analyse socio-political cha...

Nobody knows what's going on -- Belief -- Knowledge -- Contradiction -- Certitude -- At ease with inconceivability -- Chaos -- Consciousness -- Immediacy -- What matters -- Inertia -- Becoming -- Totality.

Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis have done political economy a great service by drawing attention to the insights lost in the twists, turns and reductions in the transition from political economy to economics. These two volumes constitute a solid foundation upon which a new generation can build a political economy for the future. This review presses some of their meta-theoretical arguments a little further than they actually do in an attempt to ‘toughen-up’ the new political economy and make it more (...) able to carry the fight to economics. (shrink)

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)

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the "torture porn" film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the "pure moment of murder": that is, the moment in which two characters’ bodies adjoin onscreen in an instance of graphic violence. By exploring a number of these incidents (and their various modes of representation) in American horror films ranging from Psycho (...) (1960) to Saw VI (2009), the article aims to expound how these images of slaughter demonstrate (albeit in an augmented, hyperbolic manner) a number of long-standing problems surrounding selfhood that continue to fuel philosophical discussion. The article argues that the visual adjoining of victim and killer onscreen echoes the conundrum that in order to attain identity, the individual requires and yet simultaneously repudiates the Other that constitutes unique subjectivity. (shrink)

Critics of the Implicit Association Test —a measure of the strength of a person’s automatic, memory-based association between two concepts, such as “black” and “threatening” or “white” and “caring”—have at least three main objections. Their symmetry argument is that the IAT should but does not give equally valid results for black-on-white and white-on-black racism. Their cultural-awareness argument is that the IAT illegitimately presupposes that use of racial stereotypes presupposes no stereotype acceptance, only stereotype awareness. Their completeness argument is that at (...) best the IAT measures only questionable or implicit, not explicit, bias because IAT ignores the fact that subjects’ conscious desires to avoid bias often enable them to check their biased behavior. Examining each of these anti-IAT stances, the paper summarizes the IAT and then argues for 6 main claims. Clarifying concepts like racism is important for progress in social science. IAT critics’ SA presupposes an ahistorical/acultural concept of racism. IAT critics’ AA presupposes a linguistically-insensitive concept of racism, one presupposing that the language we use provides no behavioral evidence for racism. IAT critics’ CA presupposes a concept of racism subject to conscious, deliberate control. IAT proponents endorse a more plausible concept of racism, one that is contextual, linguistically sensitive, and often not susceptible to conscious control. Although the IAT debate is unsettled, IAT critics’ use of a questionable concept of racism gives grounds for doubting their claims. (shrink)

Bryan Van Norden’s _Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto_ draws on his expertise in Chinese philosophy to launch a comprehensive and often scathing critique of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I focus on the sense in which “China” figures as a “non-Western culture” in Van Norden’s argument. Here I identify an equivocation between what I call a “functional” and a “substantive” account of culture. I argue that Van Norden, like perhaps most others who have discussed Chinese philosophy, presupposes a “functional” conception, whereby (...) the relevant sense in which “China” matters is exactly as “non-Western,” which ends up incorporating some exogenous influences such as Indian Buddhism but not any of the Western philosophies that made major inroads in the twentieth century. I explore the implications of the functional/substantive distinction for the understanding of cross-cultural philosophy generally. (shrink)

This chapter takes off from Max Weber’s famous lectures on poli­tics and science as ‘vocations’ to explore the concept of ‘modal power’, that is, the power to determine what is possible. Politics and science are complementarily concerned with modal power, in ways that go to the heart of Michael Dummett’s influential metaphysical characterisation of the antirealism/realism distinc­tion, which the chapter pursues across several philosophical fields, including logic, epistemology, jurisprudence and finally historiog­raphy. The chapter adopts a ‘post-truth’ perspective in the sense (...) that modal power is treated from an ‘antirealist’ standpoint, in which ‘the name of the game’ is to expand one’s own sphere of possible action while constraining that of the opponent. That world of constrained possibilities is the ‘actual’ world, whose rela­tionship to other possible worlds fluctuates over time in ways that resemble quantum effects but are most clearly captured by ‘revi­sionist’ historiography. The chapter ends with a discussion of the contrasting attitudes to such historiography in politics and science. (shrink)