Ibibio funeral art form has developed with the ethnic belief system of ancestral veneration. It has been marked with distinctive indigenization of spatial symbolization of forms to the creation of “nwommo” and cement tomb stone in their quest for relevance as an art form. The study was guided by following cardinal objectives; to identify and classify Ibibio funeral art forms according to their form and functions, to justify them as artworks, to mirror their changing features and functions through the influence (...) of Christianity, to achieve the objectives of the study. Primary and secondary sources of information were used as well as photographic materials that captured the various changing features over the period under review. Iconographical analysis, aesthetic value and social function of these funeral art forms have shown that they satisfy the condition as an art form. Keywords: . (shrink)

Through the lens of feminist speech act theory, this paper argues that artificial intelligence romance systems objectify and subordinate nonvirtual women. AI romance systems treat their users as consumers, offering them relational invulnerability and control over their (usually feminized) digital romantic partner. This paper argues that, though the output of AI chatbots may not generally constitute speech, the framework offered by an AI romance system communicates an unjust perspective on intimate relationships. Through normalizing controlling one’s intimate partner, these systems operate (...) as speakers that rank women as non-player characters and license their oppression, which is unjust even in the absence of empirical harms. Understanding AI romance systems as speakers has implications for policymakers. First, this account helps close the so-called responsibility gap in the operation of an AI system. Second, it places these systems under the purview of institutions’ policies regarding hate speech, suggesting one avenue for arguing that these systems may violate extant policies. Finally, it provides support for the pursuit of empirical research into AI romance systems’ effects on users. (shrink)

Recent work in epistemology defends the unorthodox theses that belief is (1) an evidentially weak, and (2) question-sensitive attitude, and (3) that forming beliefs is sometimes a matter of guessing. What motivates these theses are examples of rationally permissible belief-ascriptions that exhibit these traits. The main aim of this paper is to outline a semantic account of categorical and conditional belief-ascriptions that captures the motivating data. We then survey some consequences of the proposed semantics, particularly with respect to the question (...) of whether closure under rules of inference is rationally required for weak, question-sensitive belief. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

We articulate a holistic understanding of hope, going beyond the common conceptualization of hope in terms of positive affect and cognition by considering what hope means for the underprivileged. In the recognition that hope is always situated in a particular place, we explore the perspective of the privileged and the underprivileged, clarifying how spatial contexts shape their goals for the future and their agency toward attaining these goals. Where some people experience precarity due to their disability, race, gender, sexuality, and (...) social class, others enjoy enhanced agency due to their privilege. In our analysis, this loss of agency does not mean the underprivileged are hopeless; instead, it suggests that hope can incorporate negative affect and cognition. In our view, a spatial understanding acknowledges the power of hope in discouraging situations, and it points to practical measures through which hope can be cultivated by marginalized communities. (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

Recent research on algebraic models of _quasi-Nelson logic_ has brought new attention to a number of classes of algebras which result from enriching (subreducts of) Heyting algebras with a special modal operator, known in the literature as a _nucleus_. Among these various algebraic structures, for which we employ the umbrella term _intuitionistic modal algebras_, some have been studied since at least the 1970s, usually within the framework of topology and sheaf theory. Others may seem more exotic, for their primitive operations (...) arise from algebraic terms of the intuitionistic modal language which have not been previously considered. We shall for instance investigate the variety of _weak implicative semilattices_, whose members are (non-necessarily distributive) meet semilattices endowed with a nucleus and an implication operation which is not a relative pseudo-complement but satisfies the postulates of Celani and Jansana’s strict implication. For each of these new classes of algebras we establish a representation and a topological duality which generalize the known ones for Heyting algebras enriched with a nucleus. (shrink)

Are thought experiments nothing but arguments? I argue that it is not possible to make sense of the historical trajectory of certain thought experiments if one takes them to be arguments. Einstein and Bohr disagreed about the outcome of the clock-in-the-box thought experiment, and so they reconstructed it using different arguments. This is to be expected whenever scientists disagree about a thought experiment's outcome. Since any such episode consists of two arguments but just one thought experiment, the thought experiment cannot (...) be the arguments. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of the concept of recognition and its connection with identity and respect. This is related to the question of how women are or are not adequately recognised or respected for their achievements in sport and whether eliminating sex segregation in sport is a solution. This will require an analysis of the concept of excellence in sport, as well as the relationship between fairness and inclusion in an activity that is fundamentally about bodily movement. I argue (...) that attempts to address the problem of women’s recognition in sport need to do so in ways that neither eliminate sport as a fairness regulated system for developing individual excellence in bodily movement nor that prevent women’s achievement of sporting excellence, with the regard that belongs to them. Doing this requires us to decide whether sport is about champions or about individual excellence. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized (...) scenarios to facilitate an open, playful attitude, encouraging a space for collaborative interpretation. This interaction between humorist and audience is an aesthetic experience that is enjoyable in and of itself, as the feelings of mirth are intrinsically valuable. But connected to the “Ha-ha!” experience of these sorts of humorous creations is an “Aha!” or potentially revelatory experience that is a mixture of cognitive comprehension and motivated (emotional) response. The third part of the article will attempt to go beyond the consciousness-raising element with an account of how such possible worlds created in the realm of imagination through subversive humor can bleed into the real world of flesh and blood people. Finally, an example of subversive humor will be analyzed. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary theory defending the view that engagement with literature promotes readers’ empathy. Until the last century, few of the empirical claims adduced in that tradition were investigated experimentally. Recent work in psychology and neuropsychology has now shed new light on the interplay of empathy and literature. This article surveys the experimental findings, addressing three central questions: What is it to read empathically? Does reading make us more empathic? What characteristics of literature, if (...) any, affect readers’ empathy? While experimental studies have delivered no conclusive answers to these questions, it has exposed their psychological complexity and constructed a more nuanced picture of the diverse ways in which literature interacts with our empathic capacities. (shrink)

Giubilini and Minerva argue that the permissibility of abortion entails the permissibility of infanticide. Proponents of what we refer to as the Birth Strategy claim that there is a morally significant difference brought about at birth that accounts for our strong intuition that killing newborns is morally impermissible. We argue that strategy does not account for the moral intuition that late-term, non-therapeutic abortions are morally impermissible. Advocates of the Birth Strategy must either judge non-therapeutic abortions as impermissible in the later (...) stages of pregnancy or conclude that they are permissible on the basis of premises that are far less intuitively plausible than the opposite conclusion and its supporting premises. (shrink)

Quality of will accounts of moral responsibility hold that ill will is necessary for blameworthiness. But all such accounts are false to ordinary moral practice, which licenses blame for agents who act wrongly from epistemically unreasonable ignorance even if the act is not ill willed. This should be especially concerning to Strawsonians about moral responsibility, who think the genuine conditions of blameworthiness are derived from the standards internal to our practice. In response, I provide a theory of moral blameworthiness on (...) which ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. On the view I defend, “Rational Capacitarianism,” agents are blameworthy whenever they act wrongly from an unreasonable attitude which is attributable to them, where an attitude is attributable to an agent just in case she has the capacity to assess reasons for and against the attitude and modulate the attitude in light of these assessments. Acting from unreasonable ignorance is just a special case of acting from an unreasonable attitude. My theory contrasts both with both quality of will accounts of blameworthiness and the Capacitarian view, which specifies that agents who act wrongly from ignorance are culpable if they could and should have known better. On Capacitarianism, a variety of awareness-relevant capacities are pertinent, including memory; on my view it is only failures of rational capacities that render the agent culpable, because only failures of rational capacities are attributable to the agent. (shrink)

Many philosophers have appealed to the PSR in arguments for a being that exists a se, a being whose explanation is in itself. But what does it mean, exactly, for something to have its explanation ‘in itself’? Contemporary philosophers have said next to nothing about this, relying instead on phrases plucked from the accounts of various historical figures. In this article, I analyse five such accounts – those of Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz – and argue that none are (...) satisfactory. Should we abandon or restrict the PSR, then? I think that would be hasty, for many reasons. I therefore consider the prospects of explaining everything, including God, given the constraints of certain features of good explanations, and conclude with several observations about future approaches. (shrink)

About six weeks ago, our post referred to the long-winding path to a new theoretical innovation as the pursuit of “useless knowledge” in Flexner’s terms. That little creation is the freshly minted informational entropy-based definition of value, presented in a very short paper, initially regarded by its authors as a research note. (And it still is.) Well, only two and a half months since its birth, this new concept of value has had enough time to power up several of our (...) publications in different disciplinary fields. The first published paper using the new definition deals with climate change denialism. The second paper (forthcoming) discusses the problem of academic retractions amidst the growing influence of generative AI. And the third, just accepted, explains the underlying mechanism of submission mechanism employed by journal editors and peer-reviewers, and the information-value nexus associated with it. (shrink)

Eugenic thinking involves distinguishing between sorts or kinds of people in terms of the perceived desirable or undesirable traits that those people are likely to transmit to future generations. While eugenics itself is often thought of as an ideology that generated a social movement of global influence from roughly 1900 to 1945, eugenic thinking both pre-dates this period and continues to inform a range of contemporary debates and social policies, including those concerning prenatal screening, transhumanism, population control, and disability. Various (...) sciences, including the then-nascent sciences of psychology and psychiatry, played important roles in early twentieth-century eugenics, and their legacy is reflected in contemporary eugenic thinking and policies. Understanding the history of eugenics and the role of these early sciences of cognition in that history is useful in reflecting further on ongoing forms of eugenic thinking to which the contemporary cognitive sciences are relevant. (shrink)

In this field questions arise which are certainly difficult; but as I listened last time to members of the group, I felt that the main difficulty perhaps lay in determining precisely what questions we are trying to answer. I have the conviction that if we could only say clearly what the questions are, the answers to them might not appear so elusive. So I have begun with a simple list of questions about discretion which in one form or another were, (...) as it seemed to me, expressed by the group last time. I may indeed have omitted something and inserted something useless: if so, no doubt I shall be informed of this later. The central questions then seem to me to be the following: 1. What is discretion, or what is the exercise of discretion? 2. Under what conditions and why do we in fact accept or tolerate discretion in a legal system? 3. Must we accept discretion or tolerate discretion, and if so, why? 4. What values does the use of discretion menace, and what values does it maintain or promote? 5. What can be done to maximize the beneficial operation of the use of discretion and to minimize any harm that it does? (shrink)

Consumers often buy products not because of their attributes per se but rather because of the ultimate benefits that these attributes provide, in turn leading to the satisfaction of ultimate values. And Apple is a type of company which understand their customers & future aspects of innovation in a way that no other companies do. That’s the reason that apple is at No. 1 place in Top 50 Most innovative companies. This article endeavors to recognize the consumer perception towards the (...) Apple products and what is Apple’s ideology. In this article the researcher has listed down 12 variables which affect the consumer behavior most while purchasing Apple products. (shrink)

Aristotle is history’s most famous and influential proponent of the view that there are exactly five senses. But was he entitled to hold this view, given his other commitments? In particular, was he entitled to treat touch as a single sense, given the diversity of its correlated objects? In this paper I argue that Aristotle wished to individuate touch on the basis of its correlated objects, just as he had the other four senses. I also argue, contrary to what is (...) often supposed, that he was well-placed to do so, given his other commitments and views. (shrink)

The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, there is a crucial step that is left undefended, and that (...) without a defense of this step, the flight to reference is a fatally flawed strategy; it cannot succeed in resolving philosophical issues. In this paper we begin by setting out the flight to reference strategy and explaining what is wrong with arguments that invoke the strategy. We then illustrate the problem by considering arguments for and against eliminative materialism. In the final section we argue that much the same problem undermines Philip Kitcher's attempt to defend scientific realism. (shrink)

On the eve of the tercentenary of Kant’s birth, just as it was a hundred years ago, Kantianism is simultaneously on the receiving end of the blows of history and attacks by rival philosophical parties, both progressivist and reactionary. The radical wings of both parties perceive modernity as a depressing, nauseating period which must be broken with by moving toward the past or toward the future. One of the most original and profound diagnoses of this attitude was offered by Hans (...) Jonas, who discerned in radical doctrines of a hundred years ago a similarity with the gnosticism of antiquity. Jonas’s diagnosis has not lost its relevance. That is why the central question addressed in this study is as follows: what prescription does the Kantian programme offer for modernity’s “gnostic dizziness?” I maintain that Kant’s critical turn is still an effective strategy by means of which to compensate for the sudden stresses and “gnostic impulses” provoked by the modern worldview revolution, bringing back an “orientation in thinking” which reorients the world process and individual activity. The imperative to always see and respect humanity in a particular individual warns against the “category mistake” committed by modern radicals who ascribe agency (subjectivity) to non-­human abstractions which cannot possess this property. In theory, Kant grounds the view that humanity should resign itself to the fact of its perspective being limited and local. Kantian practical philosophy provides the traveler with a map of regulative ideas and a “moral compass”, along with an explanation of disruptive factors, offering a working explanation of the situation and its possible outcomes. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” brings human beings back into focus and imagination to order, allowing for the hope that new challenges will be successfully met. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the success of SPRs forces us to reconsider our views (...) about what is involved in understanding, explanation, good reasoning, and about how we ought to do philosophy of science. (shrink)

This chapter uncovers a less investigated aspect of the relationship between the two most important scholastic schools of the Renaissance, Thomism and Scotism: the influence of Scotist literature on distinctions as seen in some sixteenth-century Thomists. The chapter has a primary focus on Chrysostomus Javelli’s engagement in his discussion of divine attributes with the Scotist doctrine of distinctions, but also considers other Thomist sources. First, the beginnings of the highly specialised Scotist literature on distinctions are traced back to the start (...) of the fourteenth century; I show how some early followers of Duns Scotus, in particular Francis of Meyronnes and Petrus Thomae, systematised Scotus’ ontology of the various grades of being by compiling lists of subtle distinctions to be applied to various levels of reality. I give some indications as to the later reception of these models of distinctions in the Scotist school. Special attention is paid to Étienne Brulefer, since his summary of Petrus Thomae’s model of seven distinctions was Javelli’s source for the Scotist doctrine. I then investigate how Javelli worked with Brulefer’s summary, and how he sought to integrate the Scotist doctrine into his own discussion of divine attributes. Thomists traditionally allowed only a rational or mental kind of distinction among divine attributes, and between them and the divine essence. Javelli, however, endeavours to show how the Thomist position may be reconciled with the Scotist doctrine of a formal or ex natura rei distinction. He did not always endorse this conciliatory approach; I hypothesise that he changed his mind on the subject over time. Finally, I show how other Renaissance Thomists reacted to the Scotist system of distinctions; in particular, I draw attention to the Thomists Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Bartolomeo Manzoli, and Mattia Gibboni da Aquario, who all wrote treatises on Thomist distinction theory modelled on the Scotist system of distinctions. In some of this literature, lists of distinctions based on Thomist metaphysics were compiled in order to replace the Scotist system. I argue that Javelli’s approach is more conciliatory and, in fact, has some overlap with the concordist thought of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who himself considered Scotus and Aquinas to be in fundamental agreement as regards the distinction between divine attributes. (shrink)

Efforts by governments, firms, and patients to deliver pioneering drugs for critical health needs face a challenge of diminishing efficiency in developing those medicines. While multi-sectoral collaborations involving firms, researchers, patients, and policymakers are widely recognized as crucial for countering this decline, existing incentives to engage in drug development predominantly target drug manufacturers and thereby do little to stimulate collaborative innovation. In this mini review, we consider the unexplored potential within pharmaceutical regulations to create novel incentives to encourage a diverse (...) set of actors from the public and private spheres to engage in the kind of collaborative knowledge exchange requisite for fostering enhanced innovation in early drug development. (shrink)

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

This short article is a “conversation” in which an android, Mort, replies to Richard Marc Rubin’s android named Sol in “The Robot Sol Explains Laughter to His Android Brethren” (The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, 2022). There Sol offers an explanation for how androids can laugh--largely a reaction to frustration and unmet expectations: “my account says that laughter is one of four ways of dealing with frustration, difficulties, and insults. It is a way of getting by. If you need to label (...) my conception of humor, you might call it an adjustment theory, or perhaps an accommodation theory” (Rubin 256). Mort is intrigued but has his doubts. Mort contends that synesthesia likely has something to do with how humans develop humor. Perhaps, he considers, human designers crossed the androids' sensory wires, allowing them to be able to smash up concepts that do not otherwise seem to fit together, reconstruct incongruities in a manner that is not nonsensical, express the aha-eureka moment of a serendipitous discovery, and even feel blue when they fail at a given task that we were expected to complete. (shrink)

Abstract: In this study, we explore the challenge of identifying and preventing diseases in apple trees, which is a popular activity but can be difficult due to the susceptibility of these trees to various diseases. To address this challenge, we propose the use of Convolutional Neural Networks, which have proven effective in automatically detecting plant diseases. To validate our approach, we use images of apple leaves, including Apple Rot Leaves, Leaf Blotch, Healthy Leaves, and Scab Leaves collected from Kaggle which (...) is part from the Plant Village dataset. We generate a comprehensive training dataset using techniques such as image filtering, compression, and generation. Our model achieves impressive accuracy scores for all classes, with an overall accuracy of 99.93% on a dataset of 10,000 labeled images . (shrink)

The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or (...) two distinct olfactory modalities. I conclude that while Rozin may be right that humans have dual occurrences of an olfactory ‘sense’, the concept of a sense-modality, and hence the ‘sense’ of smell, is ambiguous between two different notions: a physiological sensory channel and an experiential modality, along the lines suggested by J. J. Gibson. Furthermore, recognising that these are complementary rather than competing conceptions of a sense-modality enables the formulation of a powerful ‘dual-concept’ framework for posing and addressing questions concerning the complex architecture of human multisensory experience. (shrink)

The fields of gender and social movements have traditionally consisted of separate literatures. Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun a fruitful exploration of the ways in which gender shapes political protest. This study adds three things to this ongoing discussion. First, the authors offer a systematic typology of the various ways in which movements are gendered and apply that typology to a wide variety of movements, including those that do not center on gender issues in any obvious way. (...) Second, the authors discuss the process by which movements become gendered. In doing so, they go beyond current scholarship by bringing “others” squarely into the gendered analysis. The article concludes by speculating about the outcomes of these processes and suggests that movements that draw on feminine stereotypes face a double bind that hampers their success. Illustrations come from movements in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. (shrink)

In this chapter we first elucidate the subjective flow of time particularly as developed by Husserl. We next discuss time and timescales in predictive processing. We then consider how the phenomenological analysis of time can be naturalized within a predictive processing framework. In the final section, we develop an analysis of the temporal disturbances characteristic of depression using the resources of both phenomenology and predictive processing.

ESP: El concepto de alma en las filosofías de Platón y Aristóteles, por la posición que ocupa en sus argumentos relativos a la esclavitud, fue central para la estructura ideológica sobre la que se sostuvo la institución esclavista durante la Colonia. Será importante remitirnos, en un primer momento, al estudio de Erwin Rohde sobre este concepto, para examinar la materialidad del hálito y plantear una relación entre la mirada y la configuración de imaginarios. Posteriormente, examinaremos el lugar que tiene el (...) alma en los argumentos de Platón y Aristóteles en favor de esclavitud, con énfasis en el papel de la mirada, el dominio sobre el cuerpo y la naturaleza de los cuerpos esclavizables. Finalmente, revisaremos en la obra de Frantz Fanon una crítica a la mirada europea y occidental que diseca el cuerpo negro al otorgarle un alma. -/- ENG: The concept of the soul in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, due to the posi-tion it occupies in their arguments concerning slavery, will be central to the ideo-logical structure on which the institution of slavery was sustained during colonial times. It will be important to refer, at first, to Erwin Rohde’s study of this concept, to examine the materiality of the breath and to propose a relationship between the gaze and the configuration of imaginaries. We will then examine the position of the soul in Plato’s and Aristotle’s arguments in favor of slavery, emphasizing the role of the gaze, the dominion over the body, and the nature of enslaved bodies. Finally, we will review in the work of Frantz Fanon a critique of the European and Western gaze that dissects the black body by granting it a soul. (shrink)

Consequentialist theories determine rightness solely based on real or expected consequences. Although such theories are popular, they often have difficulty with generalizing intuitions, which demand concern for questions like “What if everybody did that?” Rule consequentialism attempts to incorporate these intuitions by shifting the locus of evaluation from the consequences of acts to those of rules. However, detailed rule-consequentialist theories seem ad hoc or arbitrary compared to act consequentialist ones. We claim that generalizing can be better incorporated into consequentialism by (...) keeping the locus of evaluation on acts but adjusting the decision theory behind act selection. Specifically, we should adjust which types of dependencies the theory takes to be decision-relevant. Using this strategy, we formulate a new theory, generalized act consequentialism, which we argue is more compelling than rule consequentialism both in modeling the actual reasoning of generalizers and in delivering correct verdicts. (shrink)

Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their populations to flee. While the 1951 Refugee Convention provides the gold standard of international protection, it is only applied to a limited subset of people fleeing their countries, those who suffer persecution, which most people fleeing climate change cannot establish. While many journalists and non-lawyers freely use the term “climate refugees,” governments, and courts, as well as UNHCR and many refugee experts, have excluded most climate refugees (...) from the Convention as a matter of legal interpretation. In our 2015 paper, “Unable to Return in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change”, we sought to reopen the debate on “climate refugees” by arguing that some climate refugees qualify under the 1951 Convention as it is currently written (even if they are not persecuted): those who are stateless and are unable to return to their country of origin because climate change has rendered it uninhabitable. Our interpretation, however, has been rejected by Goodwin-Gill and McAdam (2021) and by Foster and Lambert (2019), which explicitly responds to our paper. Here, we address and respond to their arguments, and develop a new supplementary one, drawing on the principle of systemic integration, as enshrined in Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. (shrink)

Scientific realism says of our best scientific theories that (1) most of their important posits exist and (2) most of their central claims are approximately true. Antirealists sometimes offer the pessimistic induction in reply: since (1) and (2) are false about past successful theories, they are probably false about our own best theories too. The contemporary debate about this argument has turned (and become stuck) on the question, Do the central terms of successful scientific theories refer? For example, Larry Laudan (...) offers a list of successful theories that employed central terms that failed to refer, and Philip Kitcher replies with a view about reference in which the central terms of such theories did sometimes refer. This article attempts to break this stalemate by proposing a direct version of the pessimistic induction, one that makes no explicit appeal to a substantive notion or theory of reference. While it is premature to say that this argument succeeds in showing that realism is probably false, the direct pessimistic induction is not subject to any kind of reference-based objection that might cripple a weaker, indirect version of the argument. Any attempt to trounce the direct pessimistic induction with a theory of reference fails. (shrink)

Abstract: Colon cancer is a prevalent and life-threatening disease, necessitating accurate and timely diagnosis for effective treatment and improved patient outcomes. This research paper presents the development of a knowledge-based system for diagnosing colon cancer using the CLIPS language. Knowledge-based systems offer the potential to assist healthcare professionals in making informed diagnoses by leveraging expert knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The methodology involves acquiring and structuring medical knowledge specific to colon cancer, followed by the implementation of a knowledge- based system using (...) CLIPS. The system's design integrates relevant medical databases and employs advanced reasoning mechanisms to facilitate accurate diagnosis. Evaluation results demonstrate the system's effectiveness, with high accuracy and sensitivity rates compared to existing methods. The findings highlight the potential of knowledge-based systems in improving clinical practice and patient care. The research contributes to the growing field of medical informatics by demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of CLIPS-based knowledge systems for colon cancer diagnosis. Future research can focus on enhancing system performance and expanding its scope to encompass other types of cancer diagnoses. (shrink)

La noticia de la conclusión del primer pangenoma humano ocurre veinte años después de que se pudo contar con una versión de referencia de la información genética completa de la especie humana. Las limitaciones técnicas de ese tiempo permitieron que esa versión tuviera errores y varias lagunas de la información genética. Ahora es posible contar con un nuevo atlas gigante con información que permite evidenciar la gran diversidad genética de la especie humana. Este trabajo está siendo realizado por el Consorcio (...) Internacional de Referencia del Pangenoma Humano, del que hacen parte cerca de cien investigadores y está financiado por el Instituto Nacional de Investigación del Genoma Humano y por los Institutos Nacionales de Salud de EEUU. En este escrito que describe a grandes rasgos en qué consiste el proyecto, cuáles son sus aplicaciones posibles y las dificultades técnicas que tiene actualmente. Se repasan también algunos aspectos éticos y jurídicos y se dan pautas para su culminación: profundizar en la reflexión ética de los problemas que se generan; cuidar la formación en ética de la investigación, bioética e integridad científica en todos los actores del proceso; no perder de vista la Declaración Universal sobre el genoma humano y los derechos humanos de la UNESCO; orientar los desarrollos de la bioinformática, para que los datos obtenidos se manejen de una mejor manera; extremar la prudencia en el manejo de esos datos; revisar y reajustar las prioridades que se tienen en la investigación de estas temáticas. (shrink)

Across various fields it is argued that the self in part consists of an autobiographical self-narrative and that the self-narrative has an impact on agential behavior. Similarly, within action theory, it is claimed that the intentional structure of coherent long-term action is divided into a hierarchy of distal, proximal, and motor intentions. However, the concrete mechanisms for how narratives and distal intentions are generated and impact action is rarely fleshed out concretely. We here demonstrate how narratives and distal intentions can (...) be generated within cognitive agents and how they can impact agential behavior over long time scales. We integrate narratives and distal intentions into the LIDA model,and demonstrate how they can guide agential action in a manner that is consistent with the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. This paper serves both as an addition to the LIDA cognitive architecture and an elucidation of how narratives and distal intention emerge and play their role in cognition and action. (shrink)

We study the structure of families of theories in the language of arithmetic extended to allow these families to refer to one another and to themselves. If a theory contains schemata expressing its own truth and expressing a specific Turing index for itself, and contains some other mild axioms, then that theory is untrue. We exhibit some families of true self-referential theories that barely avoid this forbidden pattern.

Remhof contends that Nietzsche is a metaphysician. According to his Meta-Metaphysical Argument, Nietzsche’s texts satisfy the criteria for an adequate conception of metaphysics. According to his Constructivist Argument, Nietzsche adopts a metaphysical position on which concepts’ application conditions constitute the identity conditions of their objects. This article critically appraises these arguments. I maintain that the criteria advanced in the Meta-Metaphysical Argument are collectively insufficient for delineating metaphysics as a distinct field of inquiry and that the Constructivist Argument attributes a position (...) to Nietzsche that remains vulnerable to his evaluative and psychological indictments of two-world metaphysics. I conclude by discussing how these objections might help non-metaphysical readers of Nietzsche resist Remhof’s interpretation. (shrink)

Any realist interpretation of quantum theory must grapple with the measurement problem and the status of state-vector collapse. In a no-collapse approach, measurement is typically modeled as a dynamical process involving decoherence. We describe how the minimal modal interpretation closes a gap in this dynamical description, leading to a complete and consistent resolution to the measurement problem and an effective form of state collapse. Our interpretation also provides insight into the indivisible nature of measurement—the fact that you can't stop a (...) measurement part-way through and uncover the underlying 'ontic' dynamics of the system in question. Having discussed the hidden dynamics of a system's ontic state during measurement, we turn to more general forms of open-system dynamics and explore the extent to which the details of the underlying ontic behavior of a system can be described. We construct a space of ontic trajectories and describe obstructions to defining a probability measure on this space. (shrink)

This paper introduces several new classes of mathematical structures that have close connections with physics and with the theory of dynamical systems. The most general of these structures, called generalized stochastic systems, collectively encompass many important kinds of stochastic processes, including Markov chains and random dynamical systems. This paper then states and proves a new theorem that establishes a precise correspondence between any generalized stochastic system and a unitarily evolving quantum system. This theorem therefore leads to a new formulation of (...) quantum theory, alongside the Hilbert-space, path-integral, and quasiprobability formulations. The theorem also provides a first-principles explanation for why quantum systems are based on the complex numbers, Hilbert spaces, linear-unitary time evolution, and the Born rule. In addition, the theorem suggests that by selecting a suitable Hilbert space, together with an appropriate choice of unitary evolution, one can simulate any generalized stochastic system on a quantum computer, thereby potentially opening up an extensive set of novel applications for quantum computing. (shrink)

[This paper was presented at the APA Eastern Division Conference in New York City, January 2024] -/- Can one reasonably doubt that one is voluntarily making a commitment, even when one is doing so? Given that one voluntarily makes a commitment if and only if one (personally) knows that one is doing so, the answer appears to be “No.” After all, knowing implies justifiably believing, and it seems impossible that one could (synchronically and from a single personal perspective) reasonably doubt (...) what one justifiably believes. Indeed, assuming that one reasonably doubts that P only if one has sufficient evidence to believe that not-P, traditional epistemologists may hold that such “epistemic ambivalence” entails one’s believing a contradiction, while some Bayesians should hold that it entails violating “probabilism” (the norm that credences must conform to the axioms of probability). However, I argue that in at least some cases of romantic commitment-making, such ambivalence may not only be epistemically permissible, but even required, and perhaps best dealt with pragmatically. (shrink)

Theory development is an important component of academic research since it can lead to the acquisition of new knowledge, the development of a field of study, and the formation of theoretical foundations to explain various phenomena. The contribution of qualitative researchers to theory development and advancement remains significant and highly valued, especially in an era of various epochal shifts and technological innovation in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even so, the academic community has not yet fully explored the dynamics (...) of AI in research and there are significant gaps in our understanding of how AI can be used most effectively in the context of theory building. The aim of this paper, which is driven by critical and conceptualization methodological dynamics, is to investigate the role of AI in the theory development process. As such, it critically evaluates the opportunities and limitations of AI in theory building, delivers a conceptual map of the nexus between AI and theory development, and presents key considerations for the use of AI in the creation of new theories or the advancement of existing ones. Though the necessity of AI tools in theory creation is contested given that the researchers' cognitive and evaluative skills are regarded as critical in this process, the value of AI in advancing theory is not to be underestimated. (shrink)

Causation is defined as a relation between facts: C causes E if and only if C and E are nomologically independent facts and C is a necessary part of a nomologically sufficient condition for E. The analysis is applied to problems of overdetermination, preemption, trumping, intransitivity, switching, and double prevention. Preventing and allowing are defined and distinguished from causing. The analysis explains the direction of causation in terms of the logical form of dynamic laws. Even in a universe that is (...) deterministic in both temporal directions, not every fact must have a cause and present facts may have no future causes. (shrink)

The first purpose of this series of articles is to introduce case studies on how current AI models can be used in the development of a possible theory of quantum gravity, their limitations, and the role the researcher has in steering the development in the right direction, even highlighting the errors, weaknesses and strengths of the whole process. The second is to introduce the new Presentist Fragmentalist ontology as a framework and use it for developing theories of quantum gravity and (...) speculate on achieving a TOE. We emphasize it is necessary for the researcher to check everything in these articles for themselves. While there are many good ideas in this series of papers, the AI is known to make even arithmetic and algebraic mistakes. To select just five apparently good ideas, there is a causal interaction tensor Cαβγδ(F1, F2) that encodes the causal relationship and the strength of the (possibly non-local) interaction between two fragments of reality (formed by each quantum system). There is a quantitative prediction for a testable table-top experiment. There is an explanation of how spacetime emerges from the fragments and their interactions. There is an explicit account of the double-slit experiment. And there is an explanation how this theory accommodates dark matter and dark energy simultaneously. We explore ideas, equations they lead to, concrete calculations, and give corrections along the way. While these are generally morally right within this framework they must be checked by the researcher. Given this caveat, we believe we have made significant progress with the PF interpretation in developing a theory of quantum gravity and pointing out a possible path to a TOE. (shrink)

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of remedial instruction in improving the numeracy skills of Grade 7 students at Malbug National High School during the school year 2023-2024. Adopting a quasi-experimental research design, the research focused on Grade 7 students at Malbug National High School, Cawayan East District, Masbate Province Division, Philippines, identified as non-numerates, employing pre-tests and post-tests as essential research tools. The independent variable was the remedial instruction in numeracy, while the dependent variable was students' numeracy performance (...) measured through pre-tests and post-tests. Before the intervention, the pre-test numeracy performance exhibited a varied distribution of students across different score ranges. A majority fell into the "Needs Major Support" category, emphasizing the necessity for targeted interventions. The post-test results, however, revealed a remarkable improvement, with 87.88% of initially non-numerate students achieving scores in the "Transforming" range. A thorough statistical examination validated a notable disparity in the scores obtained before and after the instructional intervention, substantiating the favorable influence of remedial instruction. The calculated t-value of 19.594, exceeding the critical t-value, led to rejecting the null hypothesis. In conclusion, the study emphasizes the need for tailored interventions based on the initial deficiency in numeracy skills. The post-test results underscored the success of remedial instruction in fostering substantial growth. The study recommends sustaining the remedial program, implementing periodic assessments, providing teacher training, involving parents in students' development, allocating adequate resources, and further research in other schools to strengthen findings. (shrink)

In this paper I articulate and defend a new anti-theodicy challenge to Skeptical Theism. More specifically, I defend the Threshold Problem according to which there is a threshold to the kinds of evils that are in principle justifiable for God to permit, and certain instances of evil are beyond that threshold. I further argue that Skeptical Theism does not have the resources to adequately rebut the Threshold Problem. I argue for this claim by drawing a distinction between a weak and (...) strong version of Skeptical Theism, such that the strong version must be defended in order to rebut the Threshold Problem. However, the skeptical theist’s appeal to our limited cognitive faculties only supports the weak version. (shrink)

How have and how might philosophers contribute to linking disability and activism in these peri-COVID-19 times, especially in forms of public engagement that go beyond podcasted talks and articles aimed at a public audience? How do we harness philosophical thinking to contribute positively to those living with disability whose vulnerabilities are heightened by this pandemic and the ableism highlighted by collective responses to it?

General Introduction: In [1] a Calculus of Qualia (CQ) was proposed. The key idea is that, for example, blackness is radically different than █. The former term, “blackness” refers to or is about a quale, whereas the latter term, “█” instantiates a quale in the reader’s mind and is non-referential; it does not even refer to itself. The meaning and behavior of these terms is radically different. All of philosophy, from Plato through Descartes through Chalmers, including hieroglyphics and emojis, used (...) referential terms up until CQ. This paper in this series of papers includes a relatively short but comprehensive discussion with the AI Claude 3.5 Sonnet on how the CQ impacts various theories of consciousness, including Materialism, Dualism, Idealism, and 14 others. (shrink)

In Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, Watson and Hartley dispute the claim that Rawls’s doctrine of political liberalism must tolerate gender hierarchy because it counts conservative and orthodox religions as reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I argue that their defense in fact contains two arguments, both of which fail. The first, which I call the “Deliberative Equality Argument”, fails because it does not establish conclusively that political liberalism’s demand for equal citizenship forbids social practices of domination, as the authors contend. The second, (...) which I call the “Equal Liberties Argument”, fails because it supports a particular version of political liberalism and not the doctrine itself. (shrink)