What is it to be a woman? What is it to be a man? We start by laying out desiderata for an analysis of 'woman' and 'man': descriptively, it should link these gender categories to sex biology without reducing them to sex biology, and politically, it should help us explain and combat traditional sexism while also allowing us to make sense of the activist view that gendering should be consensual. Using a Putnam-style 'Twin Earth' example, we argue that none of (...) the existing analyses in the feminist literature succeeds in meeting all of our desiderata. Finally, we propose a positive account that we believe can satisfy all the desiderata outlined. According to our theory, the genders 'woman' and 'man' are individuated not by their contemporary connections to sex biology, but by their historical continuity with classes that were originally closely connected to sex biology. (shrink)

Prospective developments in computer and nanotechnology suggest that there is some possibility—perhaps as early as this century—that we will have the technological means to attempt to duplicate people. For example, it has been speculated that the psychology of individuals might be emulated on a computer platform to create a personality duplicate—an “upload.” Physical duplicates might be created by advanced nanobots tasked with creating molecule-for-molecule copies of individuals. Such possibilities are discussed in the philosophical literature as (putative) cases of “fission”: one (...) person “splitting” into two. Many philosophers, perhaps most, reject the idea of fission, appealing to some form of a “no-branching” condition to rule out such possibilities. I argue, to the contrary, that there are good moral reasons to think that any account of personal identity that does not permit fission is deeply problematic, especially in connection with theorizing about criminal punishment. I discuss and reject David Lewis’ famous account of personal identity that invokes “multiple occupancy” to allow for branching. In contrast, I offer an account of personal identity that permits branching using the type/token distinction to help with such puzzling cases. (shrink)

This article gives a holistic re-examination of the semantic content and syntactic structure of the concept of relative identity: it suggests and explains an expanded and enhanced dual-track characterization of relative identity. It is expanded in this sense: its due coverage is not narrowly restricted to the equal-status case of identity statements (the symmetric case for identity simplex) but also includes the category-assimilating case (the asymmetric case for identity complex), both of which are unified by the shared semantic core content (...) of relative identity. It is enhanced in this sense: it is intended to give a more refined characterization of relative identity for the sake of enhancing our understanding of the structure and content of real-life relative-identity statements in people’s basic employment of language in view of the relation between thought, language, and the world. (shrink)

Several recent criticisms of the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) identify multiple ambiguities in the way it has been formulated by its chief proponents. Here we provide evidence that this hypothesis has also been interpreted in various different ways by the scientific community. Our diagnosis of this problem is that SMH lacks an adequate computational-level account of practical decision making. Such an account is necessary for drawing meaningful links between neurological- and psychological-level data. The paper concludes by providing a simple, five-step (...) model of practical decision making. Recasting SMH in terms of this model generates more precise and empirically tractable computational-level hypotheses about the various ways that somatic markers might influence practical decisions. (shrink)

Abstract If we take for granted that introspection is indispensable for the study of conscious mental states, the question arises what criteria have to be met in order for introspective reports to qualify as scientific evidence. There have been some attempts to argue (implicitly or explicitly) that it is possible to provide a satisfactory answer to this question while remaining agnostic with respect to questions about the nature of consciousness. Focusing on the aim of using introspection in order to generate (...) phenomenological descriptions of conscious mental states, this paper argues that such an agnostic stance cannot be maintained, because the very meaning of ?introspection? remains fuzzy as long as we don't have a clear understanding of how the mind does it. I show that current debates revolve around some of the same issues that were already in the background of debates around 1900, and I argue that a satisfactory treatment of introspection as a method cannot be separated from the aim of providing a satisfactory treatment of introspection as a feature of consciousness. (shrink)

We are grateful for the thoughtful attention the commentators and editors have given our paper. They raise many substantive points that warrant a response, but for reasons of journal space our reply must be brief. In our paper, we argue for an amended hybrid account of ‘disease’ in human medicine that takes normative ethics seriously, guards against pernicious classifications of disease and reconnects the concept with the goals of healthcare institutions in which disease diagnosis is embedded. Carel and Tekin, in (...) their respective pieces, raise issues about the objectivity and effective operationalisation of our account, Agar makes an ‘evolutionary’ case for disease concept eliminativism in mental health, and Wakefield and Conrad contend that our proposed modification to the harmful dysfunction account is unnecessary and undesirable. We will respond to each in turn. The rational moral justification component of our account raises difficult moral epistemological questions regarding which reasons are the weightiest ones and who should be allowed to participate in the rational justification process (though so too, we would note, does much bioethical inquiry). Carel suggests that inevitable disagreement on this point undermines the alleged objectivity of our proposal. We agree with Tekin, however, that this is a feature of our account rather than a bug. What constitutes a good reason in moral deliberation is a question that goes to the very philosophical foundation of ethics (see1 for a recent discussion); but disagreement over which reasons are the weightiest ones does not prevent ethicists and policy makers from objectively assessing the strength of moral arguments by evaluating their empirical adequacy and logical structure, and this can take us a long way toward adjudication. The fact that rational justification has been used to support immoral practices and institutions does not warrant abandoning a reason-based approach to ethics any more than …. (shrink)

For understanding and controlling spreading in complex networks, identifying the most influential nodes, which can be applied to disease control, viral marketing, air traffic control, and many other fields, is of great importance. By taking the effect of the spreading rate on information entropy into account, we proposed an improved information entropy method. Compared to the benchmark methods in the six different empirical networks, the IIE method has been found with a better performance on Kendall’s Tau and imprecision function under (...) the Susceptible Infected Recovered model. Especially in the Facebook network, Kendall’s Tau can grow by 120% as compared with the original IE method. And, there is also an equally good performance in the comparative analysis of imprecise functions. The imprecise functions’ value of the IIE method is smaller than the benchmark methods in six networks. (shrink)

Abstract Since their inception, distributional models of semantics have been criticized as inadequate cognitive theories of human semantic learning and representation. A principal challenge is that the representations derived by distributional models are purely symbolic and are not grounded in perception and action; this challenge has led many to favor feature-based models of semantic representation. We argue that the amount of perceptual and other semantic information that can be learned from purely distributional statistics has been underappreciated. We compare the (...) representations of three feature-based and nine distributional models using a semantic clustering task. Several distributional models demonstrated semantic clustering comparable with clustering-based on feature-based representations. Furthermore, when trained on child-directed speech, the same distributional models perform as well as sensorimotor-based feature representations of children’s lexical semantic knowledge. These results suggest that, to a large extent, information relevant for extracting semantic categories is redundantly coded in perceptual and linguistic experience. Detailed analyses of the semantic clusters of the feature-based and distributional models also reveal that the models make use of complementary cues to semantic organization from the two data streams. Rather than conceptualizing feature-based and distributional models as competing theories, we argue that future focus should be on understanding the cognitive mechanisms humans use to integrate the two sources. (shrink)

I published my first article in the Journal of Medical Ethics back in 2007 as an (almost) newly minted PhD. It was a proud moment. I respected the JME as a journal where I had read some of the most tightly argued and challenging essays in the literature. They inspired me to specialise in medical ethics and rethink some of my fundamental positions on various topics. This has been the case since, and I am proud now to join the editorial (...) team as an associate editor focusing on increasing North American presence and on the journal’s feature articles. The journal has included feature articles for several years now, and because they have worked so well, the editorial team wants to build on and invest in their success. Feature articles are primarily selected from the best extended essays or research papers. They are among the most highly cited and accessed articles in the field. On average, they have twice as many citations as a regular article published in the journal (and five times as many citations as an article in Ethics, a top philosophy journal). This may be due, in part, to the journal’s practice of making feature articles open access so that all scholars can access them. In addition, the JME is committed to helping promote these articles and their commentaries on its …. (shrink)

Due to the huge amount of data being generating from different sources, the analyzing and extracting of useful information from these data becomes a very complex task. The difficulty of dealing with big data optimization problems comes from many factors such as the high number of features, and the existing of lost data. The feature selection process becomes an important step in many data mining and machine learning algorithms to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization problems and increase the (...) performance of the classification or clustering algorithms. In this paper, a set of hybrid and efficient genetic algorithms are proposed to solve feature selection problem, when the handled data has a large feature size. The proposed algorithms use a new gene-weighted mechanism that can adaptively classify the features into strong relative features, weak or redundant features, and unstable features during the evolution of the algorithm. Based on this classification, the proposed algorithm gives the strong features high priority and the weak features less priority when generating new candidate solutions. In the same time, the proposed algorithm tries to more concentrate on unstable features that sometimes appear and sometimes disappear from the best solutions of the population. The performance of proposed algorithms is investigated by using different datasets and feature selection algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithms can outperform the other feature selection algorithms and effectively enhance the classification performance over the tested datasets. (shrink)

It is widespread that the consumers browse relevant reviews for reference before purchasing the products when online shopping. Some stores or users may write deceptive reviews to mislead consumers into making risky purchase decisions. Existing methods of deceptive review detection did not consider the valid product review sets and classification probability of feature weights. In this research, we propose a deceptive review detection algorithm based on the target product identification and the calculation of the Metapath feature weight, noted (...) as TM-DRD. The review dataset of target product is modeled as a heterogeneous review information network with the feature nodes. The classification method of graph is used to detect the deceptive reviews, which can improve the efficiency and accuracy of deceptive review detection due to the sparsity, imbalance of deceptive reviews, and the absence of category probability of feature weight calculation. The TM-DRD algorithm we proposed is validated on the real review dataset Yelp and compared with the SpEagle, NFC, and NetSpam algorithm. The experiment results demonstrate that the TM-DRD algorithm performs better than the other method with regard to the accuracy and efficiency. (shrink)

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

Courts are often criticised as undemocratic. The backlash against international courts in the last decade is also partly driven by this concern. Human rights courts’ legitimacy is particularly challenged because they aim to protect human rights against the very states that need to comply with and implement the courts’ judgements. Therefore, several international courts have developed mechanisms of deference to states. One especially interesting tool is the European Court of Human Rights’ margin of appreciation doctrine. This paper proposes that the (...) margin of appreciation can ensure the conditions of personal autonomy by protecting human rights while respecting the democratic decisions of states. Yet, states’ decisions should only be respected insofar as they realise political autonomy. Understanding the margin in this way allows us to critically evaluate arguments made under this label. The paper reviews developments in the ECtHR practice with regard to (a) different cases that use the margin of appreciation doctrine, (b) appeals to a European consensus, and (c) the procedural turn in its review and assesses whether and how they can be justified in the light of considerations about personal and political autonomy. (shrink)

Research on metaphor has over the past decades increasingly been extended to its visual and multimodal varieties. While analysts of verbal metaphors are helped by the fact that languages have grammars and vocabularies, researchers of visual and multimodal metaphors need to rely on other methods for identification and interpretation. One approach that claims to have developed a robust method for analyzing metaphor in moving images is FILMIP, which has hitherto focused on the specific genre of commercials. In this paper it (...) is argued that there are serious problems with FILMIP. First, the theoretical basis of FILMIP and two empirical studies drawing on it are discussed. Subsequently, its limited use for analyzing metaphors in the genre of feature films is demonstrated on the basis of four case studies. The paper ends with sketching some general advice pertaining to researching metaphor in film, and provides a cautious alternative to FILMIP. (shrink)

Le problème est de distinguer la valeur esthétique des autres valeurs philosophiques, de la valeur économique et des valeurs biologiques de la vie végétale ou animale. L’hypothèse soutenue est que l’expérience esthétique est caractérisée d’abord par un équilibre ou balance de forces psychologiques, par un état d'harmonie mentale. Cette hypothèse s’appuie sur l’harmonie entre le conscient et l’inconscient dans la création artistique ; entre la sensation, l’effort, le sentiment et la connaissance dans la contemplation artistique ; et entre le sujet (...) et l’objet en communication avec une oeuvre d’art ou dans la jouissance de la nature. (shrink)