ספר ויקרא, או תורת כוהנים, נראה היום פחות מעניין מאשר ספרי-קודש אחרים, כי הוא ספר מצוות - הוא כולל כארבעים אחוז מכל תרי"ג המצוות - ואף במידה רבה מצוות שאינן בתוקף מאז חורבן בית-המקדש. אך יש בו עניין, שכן הוא מוכר כספר השלם ביותר מבחינת סגנונו ותכנו, ואולי אף בכך שעריכתו כנראה עתיקה ביותר - לא לדעת דון יצחק אברבנאל, שכן הוא לא הטיל בספק כי תורה נתנה למשה מפי הגבורה - אמנם לא בסיני אך בכל-זאת למשה מפי הגבורה. החוקרים (...) המתעלמים מדעה זו.. (shrink)

We will look at several theories of indicative conditionals grouped into three categories: those that base its semantics on its logical counterpart (the material conditional); intensional analyses, which bring in alternative possible worlds; and a third subgroup which denies that indicative conditionals express propositions at all. We will also look at some problems for each kind of approach.

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is sup- ported by (...) a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particu- lar, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other’s intentions with high confidence. (shrink)

The two theories that revolutionized physics in the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, are full of predictions that defy common sense. Recently, we used three such paradoxical ideas to prove “The Free Will Theorem” (strengthened here), which is the culmination of a series of theorems about quantum mechanics that began in the 1960s. It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if (...) the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. Our argument combines the well-known consequence of relativity theory, that the time order of space-like separated events is not absolute, with the EPR paradox discovered by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935, and the Kochen-Specker Paradox of 1967 (See [2].) We follow Bohm in using a spin version of EPR and Peres in using his set of 33 directions, rather than the original configuration used by Kochen and Specker. More contentiously, the argument also involves the notion of free will, but we postpone further discussion of this to the last section of the article. Note that our proof does not mention “probabilities” or the “states” that determine them, which is.. (shrink)

Minimalism about truth-aptitude, if correct, would undercut expressivism about moral discourse. Indeed, it would undercut nonfactualism about any area of discourse. But it cannot be correct, for there are areas, about which people hold beliefs and make statements, to which nonfactualism uncontroversially applies. Or so I will argue. I will be thereby challenging John Divers and Alexander Miller’s [3] appeal to minimalism about truth-aptitude in defending a certain argument against expressivism about value. But I will not be defending expressivism. For (...) what is wrong with minimalism about truth-aptitude is, in my view, also what is wrong with expressivism: both mistakenly assume that for an utterance to qualify as a statement or a psychological state as a belief, it must be capable of being true or false. (shrink)

Psychologists of concepts’ traditional assumption that there are many properties common to all concepts has been subject to devastating critiques in psychology and in the philosophy of psychology. However, it is currently unclear what approach to concepts is best suited to replace this traditional assumption. In this article, we compare two competing approaches, the Heterogeneity Hypothesis and the hybrid theories of concepts, and we present an empirical argument that tentatively supports the former over the latter.

Philosophers like Shoemaker and Burge argue that only self-conscious creatures can exercise rational control over their mental lives. In particular they urge that reflective rationality requires possession of the I-concept, the first person concept. These philosophers maintain that rational creatures like ourselves can exercise reflective control over belief as well as action. I agree that we have this sort of control over our actions and that practical freedom presupposes self-consciousness. But I deny that anything like this is true of belief.

While a simple information market lets one trade on the probability of each value of a single variable, a full combinatorial information market lets one trade on any combination of values of a set of variables, including any conditional or joint probability. In laboratory experiments, we compare the accuracy of simple markets, two kinds of combinatorial markets, a call market and a market maker, isolated individuals who report to a scoring rule, and two ways to combine those individual reports into (...) a group prediction. We consider two environments with asymmetric information on sparsely correlated binary variables, one with three subjects and three variables, and the other with six subjects and eight variables (and so 256 states). (shrink)

In this chapter, we describe three areas within the broad field of ecogenomics or postgenomics: epigenetics, proteomics, and microbiomics. We argue that these fields challenge traditional bioethics in different ways. Since epigenetic, proteomic, and microbiomic data may contain phenotypical information, they may intensify discussions about consent, privacy, and return of results. But these fields also firmly position organisms, including human beings, as deeply entangled with their environments, as constituted by context, history, and experiences as much as genes. This yields new (...) insights into concepts of health and development. We discuss precision medicine as an example of a systemic approach to health. We argue that acknowledging the entanglement of organism and environment also means recognizing the importance of interdisciplinarity for bioethics and thinking together biomedical ethics and environmental ethics. (shrink)

Chapter 7 of Robot was my first presentation of a surprising chain of reasoning. I wanted to rewrite it, but didn't have the energy in time for publication. Now that the pressure is off, and my visceral comfort with the ideas has risen, I'd like to present them more compellingly. This piece is a start.

2009 “Tractarian Beginnings and Endings. Worlds, Facts and Subjects”, Knowledge and Judgment, (Logic, Epistemology and the Unity of Science), eds. G. Primiero & S. Rahman, Berlin: Springer..

3-6.04.08 "Torheit, Unvernünftigkeit und kognitive Werte", Wissen und Wert, Dresden..

I will speak here of three notions which are crucial for a thoroughgoing understanding of the three East Asian philosophical/religious teachings of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The first I name integrated practice ; the other two are already known to modern scholarship as essence-function and interpenetration. Despite the readily observable reliance on these fundamental and unifying elements by the major masters of the three traditions, through the past century of modern scholarly investigation in the West they have been paid almost (...) no sustained attention. While they have occasionally been identified in a fragmentary and cursory way, they have not been examined from the perspective of their role as fundamental constituents of a holistic cultural worldview, or as a set of pan-East Asian metaphysical categories which are radically distinct from basic Western paradigms, and which have retained remarkable consistency throughout the long histories and wide range of schools of thought contained in the three traditions. (shrink)

Of the many twentieth-century Austrian intellectuals who have left an indelible mark, Friedrich Hayek is without a doubt one of the most multidimensional, and for this reason also one of the most difficult to comprehend. Who was he, in fact? He presented himself as a fourth-generation economist trained in the famous “Austrian School” which Carl Menger had founded in 1871. Indeed, Hayek may well be its last representative, given his own opinion that after him the Austrian School had more or (...) less ceased to exist. (shrink)

Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical (...) work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view. (shrink)

Talk abounds regarding the loss of public trust in such institutions as science or mainstream news media, but there is little clarity about the nature of public trust. Public trust, as this paper explains, is a correlate of a certain type of power in the sphere of communication—one enjoyed by a broadcast source (such as a scientific publication or a news outlet) in proportion to a number of recipients in its broadcast area who adopt its messages, or at least are (...) open to receiving them. This essay proposes new language and ontological tools for the analysis of this sort of power, because the present crop of concepts currently in circulation for handling questions around power broadly construed, and communicative power specifically, are inadequate. The possibilities of communication, and therefore of power in and through communication, differ—as the paper will also explain—according to whether the network through which they flow is governed by an authoritarian regime or instead a western-style democracy. Communicative power is the fundament of what will be referred to here as “people power”, consonant with its usage by Chenoweth et al. (2019), a nonviolent power that constitutes a natural and enormously potent check on the power of tyrants, and thereby forms one natural limit on tyranny. Communicative power has in recent memory been associated with Science and with the free press. The concepts about power articulated here will also contribute to clear formulation of numerous research questions in connection with the internet. (shrink)

Kleene’s well-known strong three-valued logic is shown to be one of a family of logics with similar mathematical properties. These logics are produced by an intuitively natural construction. The resulting logics have direct relationships with bilattices. In addition they possess mathematical features that lend themselves well to semantical constructions based on fixpoint procedures, as in logic programming.

Kant was not a very knowledgeable historian of philosophy. He came to the study of philosophy from natural science, and later the fields of ethics, aesthetics, politics and religion came to occupy his central concerns, but his approach to philosophical issues never came by way of reflection on their history. He was well acquainted, of course, with the recent tradition of German philosophy: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Crusius, and he seems also to have had knowledge of eighteenth century French philosophy, (...) and of as much of Anglophone philosophy as had been translated into either French or German. But like many modern philosophers, he had an inadequate appreciation of the scholastic tradition, and his knowledge of classical Greek philosophy was mostly at second hand. (shrink)

This technical report describes the construction of an experimental planner that finds plans by reasoning about them defeasibly rather than by running a search algorithm. The need for such a planner is defended in the paper “The Logical Foundations of Goal-Regression Planning”.

Let’s look at Wikipedia itself, which is misunderstood constantly as “self-organizing and selfcorrecting.” In fact there is a strict hierarchy of levels of editorship. Also, “high-quality articles tend to experience entropic degradation … as various Wiki-workers … tinker with them” (423). Most Wiki-work is Sisyphean fight against constant vandalism, and most articles never converge on any stable form.

The thesis or theses I wish to present here may, and hopefully should, sound rather trivial. The public role which concerned philosophers should take these days, I suppose, is somewhat similar to the role of preachers in earlier days, namely to state what should be obvious and treated as obvious but is nonetheless systematically overlooked.

The word "brain-washing", translated from Chinese communist jargon, is a very strong metaphor, first popularized by Robert Jay Lifto n. It vividly describes one person interfering with the personality make-up of another, removing the other's ideology and replacing it, and similarly tampering with the other's tastes, pool of information to rely upon and whatever else goes into the make-up of the other's personality. Clearly, in some sense or another everyone interferes with the personality of people with whom they interact; yet (...) what is meant here is something much more drastic than friends influencing one another's tastes or opinions; it is something more dramatic and more large scale. (shrink)

1. The Real Claim of the Chicago School If anything dramatic has happened in economic theory over the last one hundred years – namely, since the advent of marginalism – then, everyone agrees, it was not the rise of the Chicago neo -classical school which, after all, only synthesized the various versions of marginalism, but the Keynesian Revolution. Assessments of this revolution were repeatedly invited, particularly by opponent, chiefly from Chicago. F. A. von Hayek has explicitly and bitterly blames Keynes (...) for all our economic troubles; Harry Johnson has repeatedly declared the most revolutionary work of Keynes, his General Theory of 1936, so poor that but for its author's name on its title page it would have totally flopped. Can such a flop cause so much damage? Are these two assessments – of Hayek and of Johnson – in conflict or no t? Don Patinkin has raised a different question: how different is Keynes from his Chicago opponents, say, Milton Friedman? How many heads need roll, to use his metaphor, before a revolution may be declared? Patinkin sees Keynes as slightly deviant but stil l a member of the mainstream – the mainstream of the mainstream being Friedman and his Chicago followers, of course. Now, can a minor deviant be a flop? Can minor deviations from the true blue doctrine be to blame for all of our economic woes? I do not kno w. Joan Robinson sees in Keynes a minor deviation from classical theory because he said once his correction of classical theory is implemented, that theory takes over once again. Moreover, Samuelson and Friedman have endorsed a (poor) version of Keynes' theory of shortterm relative price and ignored his general theory of price and money. (shrink)

Decision theory seems to offer a very attractive normative framework for individual and social choice under uncertainty. The decisionmaker should think of her choice situation, at any given moment, in terms of a set of possible outcomes, that is, specifications of the possible consequences of choice, described in light of the decisionmaker's goals; a set of possible actions; and a "state set" consisting of possible prior "states of the world." It is this framework for choice which provides the foundation for (...) expected utility theory, as demonstrated in the work of Leonard Savage. Problems arise, however, when the decisionmaker is boundedly rational: when the mental process of thinking about outcomes, actions, and states is itself expensive and time consuming. In the case of the unboundedly rational decisionmaker, decision theory enjoins her to employ maximally specific outcomes; to consider all possible actions; and to use a set of mutually exclusive and collective exhaustive states, each of which is sufficiently finely specified so that each action, together with each state, yields one and only one maximally specific outcome. In the case of the boundedly rational decisionmaker, this procedure is either infeasible or, if feasible, irrational. This paper presents the problem of bounded rationality. It surveys possible solutions, none of which are found to be attractive. And it concludes by discussing the difficulties that the problem of bounded rationality poses for the welfarist program for legal scholarship presented by Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell in their book, Fairness versus Welfare. (shrink)

When professionals are asked about the value of information technology to their work, they typically give two kinds of answers. Some see the advent or arrival of sophisticated information technology as a great boon to their professional lives. For them, the only question is how soon can the technology be deployed to open up new horizons for professional activity and end dull and tedious work. Others sense more acutely the serious..

Lys. You have seen the exhibition of the man fighting in armour, Nicias and Laches, but we did not tell you at the time the reason why my friend Melesias and I asked you to go with us and see him. I think that we may as well confess what this was, for we certainly ought not to have any reserve with you. The reason was, that we were intending to ask your advice. Some laugh at the very notion of (...) advising others, and when they are asked will not say what they think. They guess at the wishes of the person who asks them, and answer according to his, and not according to their own, opinion. But as we know that you are good judges, and will say exactly what you think, we have taken you into our counsels. The matter about which I am making all this preface is as follows: Melesias and I have two sons; that is his son, and he is named Thucydides, after his grandfather; and this is mine, who is also called after his grandfather, Aristides. Now, we are resolved to take the greatest care of the youths, and not to let them run about as they like, which is too often the way with the young. (shrink)

This paper explores the connections between inheritance systems, evolvability and modularity. I argue that the transmission of symbiotic micro-organisms is an inheritance system, and one that is evolutionarily significant because symbionts generate biologically crucial aspects of their hosts’ organisation through modular developmental pathways. More specifically, I develop and defend five theses.

The church-going philosopher who settles in for an extended reading of Dan Dennett’s new book will find himself in a familiar circumstance. What one confronts is a lot more like an extended sermon than it is a typical philosophical treatise. And, whatever one’s Sunday morning habits, one can’t help but admire the preaching skills artfully displayed. The delivery is powerful and assured; the argument is streamlined, peppered with evocative and delightful illustrations that will be recalled long after the particular points (...) have faded from memory; dangerous errors are clearly identified, and while we are urged to pity rather than to hate their purveyors, we are also repeatedly warned about the fateful consequences of their mistakes; tropes are repeated to growing effect; finally, the tone is one of earnest exhortation, relieved intermittently with some well-chosen humor, while it lays the necessary foundations for several closing points of practical application. (shrink)

Australian bills of rights are confined to the protection of civil and political rights. Economic, social and cultural rights were deliberately excluded from their coverage. This article draws on United Kingdom, Canadian and South African judgments with the aim of showing that the equality guarantees contained in these instruments can nevertheless be used as a vehicle for socio-economic claims. It further argues that there are sound moral and philosophical reasons that justify this approach.

"Estos dos modos de ver la explicación no son incompatibles entre sí; cada uno ofrece un modo razonable de analizar la explicación. De hecho, pueden ser tomados como representando dos aspectos diferentes pero compatibles de la explicación científica" (1989, p. 183). "[estos dos enfoques] se han desarrollado hasta el punto en que pueden coexistir pacíficamente como dos aspectos distintos de la explicación científica" (1992, p. 39). "No rechazo la posibilidad de una teoría [unificacionista] de este tipo; creo que ella no (...) entraría en conflicto con la explicación causal sino que la complementaría " (2001a, p. 10). (shrink)

The use of context can considerably facilitate reasoning by restricting the beliefs reasoned upon to those relevant and providing extra information specific to the context. Despite the use and formalization of context being extensively studied both in AI and ML, context has not been much utilized in agents. This may be because many agents are only applied in a single context, and so these aspects are implicit in their design, or it may be that the need to explicitly encode information (...) about various contexts is onerous. An algorithm to learn the appropriate context along with knowledge relevant to that context gets around these difficulties and opens the way for the exploitation of context in agent design. The algorithm is described and the agents compared with agents that learn and apply knowledge in a generic way within an artificial stock market. The potential for context as a principled manner of closely integrating crisp reasoning and fuzzy learning is discussed. (shrink)

When Dharma Master Heng Shun called to invite me to speak, he didn’t tell me that I was supposed to speak on the interior life. If he had, I would have said no, because here we have so many experts on the interior life, who are real professionals. I think that’s one of the great contributions of Buddhism to the world. It is a professional curriculum in the interior life. Although we have explorers of the interior life in the West, (...) too, I don’t think there’s the same kind of systematic dedication to that exploration as there was in ancient India and in particular in Buddhism. (shrink)

The point of departure for this panel is a somewhat controversial paper that I published in the American Mathematical Monthly under the title “Does mathematics need new axioms?” [4]. The paper itself was based on a lecture that I gave in 1997 to a joint session of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and it was thus written for a general mathematical audience. Basically, it was intended as an assessment of Gödel’s program for new axioms that (...) he had advanced most prominently in his 1947 paper for the Monthly, entitled “What is Cantor’s continuum problem?” [7]. My paper aimed to be an assessment of that program in the light of research in mathematical logic in the intervening years, beginning in the 1960s, but especially in more recent years. (shrink)

Suppose that the true structural equation is Y = X + U, where U is n(0,1), X is n(0,1), and X and U µ be the mean of X, y µ the mean of Y, x σ the standard deviation of are independent. Now let x..

A and B in signaling games (Lewis 1969). Members of the population, such as our prehistoric pair, are occasionally faced with the following ‘game’. Let one of the players be the receiver and the other the sender. The receiver needs to know whether B is true or not, but only possesses information about whether A is true or not. In some environmental contexts, A is sufficient for B, in others it is not. The sender knows nothing about A or B, (...) but does know that A is sufficient for B in some environments. This is a higher-order signaling game in which both players can benefit from sharing the information that they possess. How does a communication strategy evolve, and is it evolutionarily stable? (shrink)

An argument is made that to further develop the field of environmental virtue ethics it must be connected with an account of environmental sentiments. Openness as both an environmental sentiment and virtue is presented. This sentiment is shown to be reflected in the work of Barbara McClintock. As a virtue it is shown to a mean between arrogance and the disvaluing of individuals, a disposition to be open to the natural world and the values found there. Further development of EVE (...) is then shown to require a connection with an account of environmental wisdom. (shrink)

It is an article of almost religious faith in the United Kingdom that the National Health Service is far superior to a competitive market in health care services. In this brief and informal paper I show that the opposite is true. In contrast to market provision, the existence of the National Health Service entails the following. First, consumer sovereignty is virtually destroyed, since what services the consumer receives and how much he pays (through taxation) are determined by the government of (...) the day in consultation with vested and ideological interests. Second, a person may be denied a life-saving service despite having contributed more than his fair share to National Health Service over the course of his working life. Third, people often spend less on health care than they would like to spend, because any additional contributions (via increased taxes) are not linked to any benefit specifically for the person who makes them. Fourth, provision of services free at the point of need which is not linked to what a person pays encourages a wasteful misuse of resources. Fifth, absence of competition between health care providers leads to high cost and poor quality of service and a tendency to produce a standardised service rather than a tailored one; and government attempts to address this problem usually make it worse. Sixth, people’s freedom to engage in particular activities or lifestyles is likely to be curtailed because the costs of those activities are artificially socialised. I also point out that issues of inequality or poverty are much better addressed by means other than a nationalised health service. (shrink)

Since there is no normal pagination on a web page, I assign in lieu of that paragraph numbers, included in brackets and placed flush right, just above the paragraph, for purposes of scholarly reference: they are not in the previously published version above. Apart from that the texts are substantially identical.

“The expression ‘free logic’ is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘free of existence assumptions with respect to its terms, general and singular’.”1 Classical quantification theory is not a free logic in this sense, as its standard formulations commonly assume that every singular term in every model is assigned a referent, an element of the universe of discourse. Indeed, since singular terms include not only singular constants, but also variables2, standard quantification theory may be regarded as involving even the assumption of (...) the existence of the values of its variables, in accordance with Quine’s famous dictum: “to be is to be the value of a variable”. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to pick up the threads of a debate about the ontology of becoming in spacetime that was triggered by a provocative article published by Nicholas Maxwell in 1985. This debate is itself merely a recent episode in a long dialogue that goes back at least as far as the time of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Here is the question around which this debate centres: is change or becoming the distinguishing feature of the natural or physical (...) world, as suggested obscurely by Heraclitus and argued at length by Aristotle? Or is our usual uncritical belief in the reality of change the product of some sort of perceptual illusion or intellectual error, as believed by Parmenides and a small host of recent authors such as Gödel and Julian Barbour? I won’t be able to solve the whole of this momentous problem here. However, I intend both to set aside a few unwarranted assumptions which have for a long time dogged our thinking about the puzzle of becoming, and to assemble some tools which should aid in finding a solution to it. In particular, I will argue that we can do much better than is usually supposed in identifying structures which can both “live” within Minkowski spacetime and represent objective becoming. I shall also discuss whether such structures would necessarily contradict the Principle. (shrink)

Když jsem v roce 1992 začínal na filosofické fakultě UK přednášet teorii sémantiky, cítil jsem intenzivní potřebu poskytnout studentům nějaký učební text. O překotném vývoji tohoto interdisciplinárního oboru, který odstartovalo v sedmdesátých letech úspěšné “zkřížení logiky s lingvistikou” Richardem Montaguem a dalšími a který se nezpomalil dodnes, totiž v češtině neexistovaly prakticky žádné zprávy (s čestnou výjimkou přístupu tzv. transparentní intenzionální logiky, který byl dílem českého emigranta Pavla Tichého a o kterém u nás psal Pavel Materna). Přehledové publikace, jaké jsou (...) potřeba pro někoho, kdo se chce v dané problematice zorientovat, se ovšem v té době i po světě teprve začínaly objevovat: v roce 1990 vyšla kniha An Introduction to Semantics Gennara Chierchii a Sally McConell-Ginnetové a v roce 1991 vydala skupina holandských logiků pod kolektivním pseudonymem L.T.F. Gamut dvousvazkovou knihu Language and Meaning. Za této situace jsem se pokusil co nejrychleji sepsat učební text, který by moji studenti i jiní zájemci o sémantiku mohli použít; a protože o jeho vydání paradoxně projevila větší zájem filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity v Brně (kde jsem já osobně nikdy neučil; ale zájem o sémantiku tam neúnavně podněcoval a vydání mého textu tam zprostředkoval kolega Materna) než filosofická fakulta mojí domovské Karlovy univerzity, vyšel tento text v Brně, a to pod názvem Úvod do teoretické sémantiky. (shrink)

The aim here is to describe how to complete the constructive logicist program, in the author’s book Anti-Realism and Logic, of deriving all the Peano-Dedekind postulates for arithmetic within a theory of natural numbers that also accounts for their applicability in counting finite collections of objects. The axioms still to be derived are those for addition and multiplication. Frege did not derive them in a fully explicit, conceptually illuminating way. Nor has any neo-Fregean done so.

Chaos is often explained in terms of random behaviour; and having positive Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy (KSE) is taken to be indicative of randomness. Although seemly plausible, the association of positive KSE with random behaviour needs justification since the definition of the KSE does not make reference to any notion that is connected to randomness. A common way of justifying this use of the KSE is to draw parallels between the KSE and ShannonÕs information theoretic entropy. However, as it stands this no (...) more than a heuristic point, because no rigorous connection between the KSE and ShannonÕs entropy has been established yet. This paper fills this gap by proving that the KSE of a Hamiltonian dynamical system is equivalent to a generalized version of ShannonÕs information theoretic entropy under certain plausible assumptions. Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

"Essentialism," an invited paper at the meetings of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, April 2001.