This paper concerns “human symbolic output,” or strings of characters produced by humans in our various symbolic systems; e.g., sentences in a natural language, mathematical propositions, and so on. One can form a set that consists of all of the strings of characters that have been produced by at least one human up to any given moment in human history. We argue that at any particular moment in human history, even at moments in the distant future, this set is finite. (...) But then, given fundamental results in recursion theory, the set will also be recursive, recursively enumerable, axiomatizable, and could be the output of a Turing machine. We then argue that it is impossible to produce a string of symbols that humans could possibly produce but no Turing machine could. Moreover, we show that any given string of symbols that we could produce could also be the output of a Turing machine. Our arguments have implications for Hilbert’s sixth problem and the possibility of axiomatizing particular sciences, they undermine at least two distinct arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, and they entail that expert systems that are the equals of human experts are possible, and so at least one of the goals of Artificial Intelligence can be realized, at least in principle. (shrink)

We argue that the set of humanly known mathematical truths (at any given moment in human history) is finite and so recursive. But if so, then given various fundamental results in mathematical logic and the theory of computation (such as Craig’s in J Symb Log 18(1): 30–32(1953) theorem), the set of humanly known mathematical truths is axiomatizable. Furthermore, given Godel’s (Monash Math Phys 38: 173–198, 1931) First Incompleteness Theorem, then (at any given moment in human history) humanly known mathematics must (...) be either inconsistent or incomplete. Moreover, since humanly known mathematics is axiomatizable, it can be the output of a Turing machine. We then argue that any given mathematical claim that we could possibly know could be the output of a Turing machine, at least in principle. So the Lucas-Penrose (Lucas in Philosophy 36:112–127, 1961; Penrose, in The Emperor’s new mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1994)) argument cannot be sound. (shrink)

In his 1996 paper Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem, Francisco Varela called for a union of Husserlian phenomenology and cognitive science. Varela''s call hasn''t gone unanswered, and recent years have seen the development of a small but growing literature intent on exploring the interface between phenomenology and cognitive science. But despite these developments, there is still some obscurity about what exactly neurophenomenology is. What are neurophenomenologists trying to do, and how are they trying to do it? To (...) what extent is neurophenomenology a distinctive and unified research programme? In this paper I attempt to shed some light on these questions. (shrink)

Intercultural Digital Ethics faces the central challenge of how to develop a global IDE that can endorse and defend some set of universal ethical norms, principles, frameworks, etc. alongside sustaining local, culturally variable identities, traditions, practices, norms, and so on. I explicate interpretive pros hen ethical pluralism ) emerging in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century in response to this general problem and its correlates, including conflicts generated by “computer-mediated colonization” that imposed homogenous values, communication styles, and so (...) on upon “target” peoples and cultures via ICTs as embedding these values in their very design. I contrast different kinds of ethical pluralisms as structural apparatus for understanding what differences may mean and allow for, as these emerged in the 1990s forwards with EP. As interwoven with phronēsis, a form of reflective judgment and virtue, EP more radically preserves irreducible differences and so fosters positive engagements across deep cultural differences. I show how EP emerged in the context of empirical research on “Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication” beginning in 1998, and then in specific applications within Internet Research Ethics beginning in 2000. I summarize its main characteristics and trace how it has further been taken up in ICE, IRE, Intercultural Information Ethics, and virtue ethics more broadly. I respond to important criticisms and objections, arguing that EP thus stands as an important component for a contemporary IDE that seeks an ethical cosmopolitanism in place of computer-mediated colonization. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that the demands of justice are institutional rather than individual? Justice is often thought to be directly concerned only with governmental institutions rather than individuals’ everyday, legally permissible actions. This approach has been criticized for ignoring the relevance to justice of informal social norms. This paper defends the idea that justice is distinctively institutional but rejects the primacy of governmental institutions. I argue that the ‘pervasive structure of society’ is the site of justice and (...) injustice. It includes all widely enforced social rules and norms, governmental and otherwise, such as informal norms of gender, language and class, and provides a revisionary foundation for the theoretical elucidation and practical pursuit of justice. It provides a framework for evaluating the ways in which people can and should promote justice in their everyday lives. (shrink)

Whistleblowing by employees to regulatory agencies and other parties external to the organization can have serious consequences both for the whistleblower and the company involved. Research has largely focused on individual and group variables that affect individuals'' decision to blow the whistle on perceived wrongdoing.This study examined the relationship between selected organizational characteristics and the perceived level of external whistleblowing by employees in 240 organizations. Data collected in a nationwide survey of human resource executives were analyzed using analysis of variance.

Employees perception of the existence of a covenantal relationship between themselves and their employer indicates that they believe there is a mutual commitment to shared values and the welfare of the other party in the relationship. Research suggests that these types of employment relationships have positive benefits for both employees and employers. There has been little research, however, on the factors that determine whether such relationships will develop and thrive.In this paper, we suggest that the organizations ethical work climate may (...) be an important factor affecting employees perceptions about the nature of the relational contract between themselves and their employer. Specifically, we argue that work climates emphasizing benevolence and principle will be associated with covenantal relationships. Conversely, we believe that work climates emphasizing egoism will make it less likely that covenantal relationships will develop between an employer and employee. (shrink)

Nested sequent systems for modal logics are a relatively recent development, within the general area known as deep reasoning. The idea of deep reasoning is to create systems within which one operates at lower levels in formulas than just those involving the main connective or operator. Prefixed tableaus go back to 1972, and are modal tableau systems with extra machinery to represent accessibility in a purely syntactic way. We show that modal nested sequents and prefixed modal tableaus are notational variants (...) of each other, roughly in the same way that tableaus and Gentzen sequent calculi are notational variants. This immediately gives rise to new modal nested sequent systems which may be of independent interest. We discuss some of these, including those for some justification logics that include standard modal operators. (shrink)

Strict/tolerant logic, ST, evaluates the premises and the consequences of its consequence relation differently, with the premises held to stricter standards while consequences are treated more tolerantly. More specifically, ST is a three-valued logic with left sides of sequents understood as if in Kleene’s Strong Three Valued Logic, and right sides as if in Priest’s Logic of Paradox. Surprisingly, this hybrid validates the same sequents that classical logic does. A version of this result has been extended to meta, metameta, … (...) consequence levels in Barrio et al.. In my earlier paper Fitting I showed that the original ideas behind ST are, in fact, much more general than first appeared, and an infinite family of many valued logics have Strict/Tolerant counterparts. This family includes both Kleene’s and Priest’s logic individually, as well as first degree entailment. For instance, for both the Kleene and the Priest logic, the corresponding strict/tolerant logic is six-valued, but with differing sets of strictly and tolerantly designated truth values. The present paper extends that generalization in two directions. We examine a reverse notion, of Tolerant/Strict logics, which exist for the same structures that were investigated in Fitting. And we show that the generalization extends through the meta, metameta, … consequence levels for the same infinite family of many valued logics. Finally we close with remarks on the status of cut and related rules, which can actually be rather nuanced. Throughout, the aim is not the philosophical applications of the Strict/Tolerant idea, but the determination of how general a phenomenon it is. (shrink)

Historically, interjections have been treated in two different ways: as part of language, or as non-words signifying feelings or states of mind. In this paper, I assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of two contemporary approaches that reflect the historical dichotomy, and suggest a new analysis which preserves the insights of both. Interjections have a natural and a coded element, and are better analysed as falling at various points along a continuum between ‘showing’ and ‘saying’. These two notions are characterised (...) in theoretical terms, and some implications of the proposed approach are considered. (shrink)

Both anti-reductionist and reductionist accounts of linguistic meaning and mental content face challenges accounting for acquiring concepts as part of learning a first language. Anti-reductionists cannot account for a transition from the pre-conceptual to conceptual without threatening to reduce the latter to the former. Reductionists of a representationalist variety face the challenge of Fodor’s argument that language learning is impossible. This paper examines whether Ginsborg’s account of ‘primitive normativity’ might provide some resources for addressing these issues. I argue that primitive (...) normativity can be understood in either of two ways: a ‘no conception’ version and a ‘local conception’ version. Rejecting the ‘no conception’ account of normativity in favour of a ‘local conception’ of a rule expressed in context-dependent demonstrations and examples provides one response to Fodor’s argument. It also provides anti-reductionism with at least one stepping stone to learning full-blown linguistically articulated concepts based on a more primitive local form of normativity. (shrink)

Could translation be fully automated? We must first acknowledge the complexity, ambiguity, and diversity of natural languages. These aspects of natural languages, when combined with a particular dilemma known as the computational dilemma, appear to imply that the machine translator faces certain obstacles that a human translator has already managed to overcome. At the same time, science has not yet solved the problem of how human brains process natural languages and how human beings come to acquire natural language understanding. We (...) will then distinguish between the task of translation and the responsibility of the translator. Thereafter, we will conduct a survey of the methods of machine translation (viz. RBMT, SMT, NMT, foundation models or large language models). These methods will then be critically evaluated both in general and relative to Bar-Hillel’s hypothesis about the impossibility of fully automatic, high-quality machine translation (Fahqmt). Some concluding remarks will be made about the scope, prospects, and limits of machine translation. (shrink)

Several justification logics have been created, starting with the logic LP, [1]. These can be thought of as explicit versions of modal logics, or of logics of knowledge or belief, in which the unanalyzed necessity (knowledge, belief) operator has been replaced with a family of explicit justification terms. We begin by sketching the basics of justification logics and their relations with modal logics. Then we move to new material. Modal logics come in various strengths. For their corresponding justification logics, differing (...) strength is reflected in different vocabularies. What we show here is that for justification logics corresponding to modal logics extending T, various familiar extensions are actually conservative with respect to each other. Our method of proof is very simple, and general enough to handle several justification logics not directly corresponding to distinct modal logics. Our methods do not, however, allow us to prove comparable results for justification logics corresponding to modal logics that do not extend T. That is, we are able to handle explicit logics of knowledge, but not explicit logics of belief. This remains open. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Galilean Transformations and Galilean Invariants A Brief Preliminary: Why Worry? Lorentz Invariance: Collapse Theories Lorentz Invariance: Hyperplane Dependence Lorentz Invariance: Non‐Collapse Theories Choose Your Poison.

The family of all stable models for a logic program has a surprisingly simple overall structure, once two naturally occurring orderings are made explicit. In a so-called knowledge ordering based on degree of definedness, every logic program P has a smallest stable model, sk P — it is the well-founded model. There is also a dual largest stable model, S k P, which has not been considered before. There is another ordering based on degree of truth. Taking the meet and (...) the join, in the truth ordering, of the two extreme stable models sk P and S.. (shrink)

Michael and has argued that species have intrinsic essences. This paper rebuts Devitt’s arguments, but in so doing it shores up the anti-essentialist consensus in two ways that have more general interest. First, species membership can be explanatory even when species have no essences; that is, Tamsin’s membership of the tiger species can explain her stripyness, without this committing us to any further claim about essential properties of tigers. Second, even the views of species that appear most congenial to essentialism—namely (...) phenetic and genotypic cluster accounts—do not entail strong forms of intrinsic essentialism. (shrink)

Softlifting, or the illegal duplication of copyrighted software by individuals for personal use, is a serious and costly problem for software developers and distributors. Understanding the factors that determine attitude toward softlifting is important in order to ascertain what motivates individuals to engage in the behavior. We examine a number of factors, including personal moral obligation (PMO), perceived usefulness, and awareness of the laws and regulations governing software acquisition and use, along with facets of personal self-identity that may play a (...) role in the development of attitudes and therefore intentions regarding this behavior. These factors are examined across multiple settings expected to be pertinent to our survey respondents: home, work and school. Personal moral obligation and perceived usefulness are significant predictors of attitude across all settings. Past behavior is a significant predictor of intention across all settings, and a significant predictor of attitude in the home setting. We find evidence that awareness of the law causes a less favorable evaluation of softlifting in the school setting only, but has little effect in the home and work settings. As in previous studies, attitude is a significant predictor of intent. We do not find indications that one’s personal self-identity influences one’s attitude towards the behavior and the intention to perform it, except in the case of legal identity, where marginally significant effects are found in the work environment. (shrink)

Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘created’ we do not mean its influencing factors, for which there is extensive research, but how it actually forms in the person. The work that has been done in this arena tends to focus on physiological dynamics, which are certainly part of the puzzle. But they are not the whole picture, with (...) psychological, phenomenological, and socio cultural processes also playing their part. As a result, this paper offers a multidimensional overview of scholarship on the ‘architecture’ of happiness, providing a stimulus for further work into this important topic. (shrink)

is used to give a formalization of Artemov’s knowledge based reasoning approach to game theory, (KBR), [ 4 , 5 ]. Epistemic states of players are represented explicitly and reasoned about formally. We give a detailed analysis of the Centipede game using both proof theoretic and semantic machinery. This helps make the case that PDL + E can be a useful basis for the logical investigation of game theory.

The question whether God prevails or not is a vital one for many disciplines that are taught in colleges and universities, as well as for each academician personally and intellectually. In addressing this issue, Our Teleological Economic World takes a pathfinding approach by demonstrating at a scholarly level, that economic science joins physical science in affirming an Intelligent Design of the universe. Throughout the manuscript, extending from classical to advanced microeconomic and macroeconomic analyses, the authors establish correlative correspondences with those (...) of physical science. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a necessary condition of one’s perceiving God is that an experience of the right phenomenological sort be caused in one ‘directly enough’ by God and - bypassing the issue of what is necessary for an experience to be of the right phenomenological sort - discuss some difficulties in finding reasons for thinking that God has or has not ‘directly enough’ caused any such experience.

This paper provides a comment on Brian Zamulinksi's article in Religious Studies, 39 , 43–60. Contrary to Zamulinski's claim that religions are not truth-oriented but function as fictions, it is contended that they could not serve the purpose he assigns them unless their adherents regarded them as true. Religions must therefore be truth-oriented. The substantive question is whether any of them are true, and Zamulinski's paper provides no new method for addressing this question.

A rejection of the notion of substance, an emphasis on intraworldly experience and an incorporation of ideas from modern biology are just three of the distinctive features of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics or philosophy of organism. The last two features give his scheme a heavily naturalistic tinge, despite his positing of eternal objects or universal forms of definiteness, which - together with subjective aims or final causes - are instantiated in a divinity prior to worldly realization.1 Such a naturalism (...) might seem to preclude largely a comparison with the work of Jacques Derrida, with other differences between the two being left aside. Derrida began his career as a student of phenomenology and structuralism, and by far the greater number of his philosophical writings has been devoted to thinkers who are explicitly post-Kantian. Yet this does not mean that he is a transcendental philosopher who abandons experience and the empirical world in favour of language and consciousness. In this paper I argue that Derrida’s work - which has been shown to be heavily informed by systems theory and evolutionary biology - is not in fact shut off from the extra-conscious and extra-linguistic dimensions of actuality. I also suggest that his deconstructive approach is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s in rejecting essentialism, namely, the idea of fixed and determined essences that underlie accidental properties and changes. From a Derridean perspective, one might even see Whitehead’s alternative as insufficiently radical, since it seems to posit not just eternal objects and God, but a cosmology in which the most fundamental beings or “actual entities” undergo no essential changes or mutations in their respective histories. It is arguable, however, that the latter conclusion would only be consequent on a restrictive interpretation of the pathways of process possible in Whitehead’s metaphysics.. (shrink)

Classical first-order logic can be extended in two different ways to serve as a foundation for mathematics: introduce higher orders, type theory, or introduce sets. As it happens, both approaches have natural analogs for quantified modal logics, both approaches date from the 1960’s, one is not very well-known, and the other is well-known as something else. I will present the basic semantic ideas of both higher order intensional logic, and intensional set theory. Before doing so, I’ll quickly sketch some necessary (...) background material from quantified modal logic. Except for standard material concerning propositional modal logics, the paper is essentially self-contained. (shrink)

Dynamic and proof-conditional approaches to discourse (exemplified by Discourse Representation Theory and Type-Theoretical Grammar, respectively) are related through translations and transitions labeled by first-order formulas with anaphoric twists. Type-theoretic contexts are defined relative to a signature and instantiated modeltheoretically, subject to change.

In ordinary conversation, we describe all sorts of different things as vague: you can have vague plans, vague ideas and vague aches and pains. In philosophy of language, in contrast, it is parts of language – words, expressions and so on – that are said to be vague. One classic example of a vague term is the word ‘heap’. A single grain clearly does not make a heap, and a million grains (when arranged in the right way) does make a (...) heap, but where exactly does the boundary lie? How many grains do you need to make a heap? There seems to be no precise answer to this question, and because the term is imprecise in this way, we call it vague. Vague terms are extremely common in natural language. The term ‘bald’ is vague, because there is no precise number of hairs that mark the boundary between ‘bald’ and ‘not bald’; the term ‘hot’ is vague because there is no precise temperature that something must reach to count as hot – and so on. As we have seen, adjectives can be vague, but so can nouns, adverbs and perhaps all parts of language. To find terms which are precise rather than vague, we need to look to the languages of logic and mathematics. We can use vague terms to construct paradoxes known as sorites paradoxes. From an obviously true premise, such as that a collection of 1 million grains (in a certain arrangement) is a heap, together with the claim that ‘heap’ has no sharp boundary, we can derive the absurd conclusion that just 1 grain counts as a heap. Any theory of vagueness must offer some solution to this paradox. Some of the most popular theories of vagueness include supervaluationism, the degree theory of truth and the epistemic theory, and many of the available theories demand a radical rethink of classical accounts of logic and language. (shrink)