_Current Issues in Business Ethics_ analyzes the questions which underlie business activities, arguing that the prime object for a legitimate business must be sustainability. It also looks at the issues between individuals and business and asks whether businesses can support their employees as an alternative to family and church. Finally it assesses the impact of most recent trends in business looking at: * the activities of multinational companies * the changing gender balance * privatization * the loss of power of (...) the trade unions. (shrink)

`Folk Psychology' - our everyday talk of beliefs, desires and mental events - has long been compared with the technical language of `Cognitive Science'. Does folk psychology provide a correct account of the mental causes of our behaviour, or must our everyday terms ultimately be replaced by a language developed from computational models and neurobiology? This broad-ranging book addresses these questions, which lie at the heart of psychology and philosophy. Providing a critical overview of the key literature in the field, (...) including the seminal work of Fodor and Churchland, the author explores the classic `Frame Problem' and assesses the future prospects of cognitive science. The scope of the frame problem, touching on connec. (shrink)

EXISTENTIALISM IN PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC IS THE DOCTRINE THAT STATES OF AFFAIRS, PROPOSITIONS AND PROPERTIES INVOLVING OBJECTS INCLUDE THESE OBJECTS AS DIRECT CONSTITUENTS IN AT LEAST THE SENSE THAT THE NONEXISTENCE IN A WORLD w OF SOCRATES, SAY, IMPLIES THE NONEXISTENCE IN w OF SOCRATES' BEING SNUB-NOSED. JOHN POLLOCK HAS RECENTLY ARGUED (IN "THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL SEMANTICS") THAT SUCH AN EXISTENTIALISM HARBOURS AN INCONSISTENCY. THE PRESENT PAPER REBUTS POLLOCK'S ARGUMENT BY ARGUING THAT IT DEPENDS ON A CHARACTERIZATION OF EXISTENTIALISM THAT (...) EXISTENTIALISTS HAVE NO REASON TO ACCEPT, AND, INDEED, GOOD REASON TO REJECT. (shrink)

Frederic William Farrar was a cleric of the Church of England, schoolteacher and author. He was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin in 1882. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society.

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence are leading to an increasing human reliance on machine decision making. Even in collaborative efforts with Decision Support Systems (DSSs), where a human expert is expected to make the final decisions, it can be hard to keep the expert actively involved throughout the decision process. DSSs suggest their own solutions and thus invite passive decision making. To keep humans actively ‘on’ the decision-making loop and counter overreliance on machines, we propose a ‘reflection machine’ (RM). This (...) system asks users questions about their decision strategy and thereby prompts them to evaluate their own decisions critically. We discuss what forms RMs can take and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a RM that can produce feedback on users’ decisions in the medical and law domains. We show that the prototype requires very little domain knowledge to create reasonably intelligent critiquing questions. With this prototype, we demonstrate the technical feasibility to develop RMs and hope to pave the way for future research into their effectiveness and value. (shrink)

Let g E(m, n)=o mean that n is the Gödel-number of the shortest derivation from E of an equation of the form (m)=k. Hao Wang suggests that the condition for general recursiveness mn(g E(m, n)=o) can be proved constructively if one can find a speedfunction s s, with s(m) bounding the number of steps for getting a value of (m), such that mn s(m) s.t. g E(m, n)=o. This idea, he thinks, yields a constructivist notion of an effectively computable function, (...) one that doesn't get us into a vicious circle since we intuitively know, to begin with, that certain proofs are constructive and certain functions effectively computable. This paper gives a broad possibility proof for the existence of such classes of effectively computable functions, with Wang's idea of effective computability generalized along a number of dimensions. (shrink)