Results for 'D. G. Williams'

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  1. AI Language Models Cannot Replace Human Research Participants.Jacqueline Harding, William D’Alessandro, N. G. Laskowski & Robert Long - forthcoming - AI and Society:1-3.
    In a recent letter, Dillion et. al (2023) make various suggestions regarding the idea of artificially intelligent systems, such as large language models, replacing human subjects in empirical moral psychology. We argue that human subjects are in various ways indispensable.
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  2. CIDO: The Community-Based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology.Yongqun He, Hong Yu, Edison Ong, Yang Wang, Yingtong Liu, Anthony Huffman, Hsin-hui Huang, Beverley John, Asiyah Yu Lin, Duncan William D., Sivaram Arabandi, Jiangan Xie, Junguk Hur, Xiaolin Yang, Luonan Chen, Gilbert S. Omenn, Brian Athey & Barry Smith - 2021 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) and 10th Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences (ODLS).
    Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have initiated the development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). (...)
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    Dispensing with Experiential Acquaintance.William S. Robinson - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    : Experiential acquaintance is an alleged relation between ourselves and our experiences that has sometimes been hypothesized as necessary for knowledge of our experiences. This paper begins with a clarification of ‘acquaintance’ and an explanation of ‘experience’ that focuses attention on a famous, but flawed, argument by G. E. Moore. It goes on to critically examine several recent arguments concerning experiential acquaintance and to show how internalist foundationalism can respond to a famous Sellarsian dilemma without appeal to a relation of (...)
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  4. What If Plato Took Surveys? Thoughts about Philosophy Experiments.William M. Goodman - 2012 - In Patricia Hanna (ed.), An Anthology of Philosophical Studies - Volume 6. Athiner.
    The movement called Experimental Philosophy (‘x-Phi’) has now passed its tenth anniversary. Its central insight is compelling: When an argument hinges on accepting certain ‘facts’ about human perception, knowledge, or judging, the evoking of relevant intuitions by thought experiments is intended to make those facts seem obvious. But these intuitions may not be shared universally. Experimentalists propose testing claims that traditionally were intuition-based using real experiments, with real samples. Demanding that empirical claims be empirically supported is certainly reasonable; though experiments (...)
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  5. Dispensing with experiential acquaintance.William S. Robinson - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Experiential acquaintance is an alleged relation between ourselves and our experiences that has sometimes been hypothesised as necessary for knowledge of our experiences. This paper begins with a clarification of ‘acquaintance’ and an explanation of ‘experience’ that focuses attention on a famous, but flawed, argument by G. E. Moore. It goes on to critically examine several recent arguments concerning experiential acquaintance and to show how internalist foundationalism can respond to a famous Sellarsian dilemma without appeal to a relation of acquaintance (...)
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  6. Van Gordon, W., Shonin, E., Griffiths, M. D., Singh, N. N. (2014). There is only one mindfulness: Why science and Buddhism need to work more closely together. Mindfulness, In Press.William Van Gordon, Edo Shonin, Mark Griffiths & Nirbhay Singh - 2014 - Mindfulness:In Press.
    The paper by Monteiro, Musten and Compson (2014) is to be commended for providing a comprehensive discussion of the compatibility issues arising from the integration of mindfulness – a 2,500-year-old Buddhist practice – into research and applied psychological domains. Consistent with the observations of various others (e.g., Dunne, 2011; Kang & Whittingham, 2010), Monteiro and colleagues have not only highlighted that there are differences in how Buddhism and contemporary mindfulness interventional approaches interpret and contextualize mindfulness, but there are also differing (...)
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  7. Is It Bad to Prefer Attractive Partners?William D'Alessandro - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (2):335-354.
    Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...)
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  8. Large Language Models and Biorisk.William D’Alessandro, Harry R. Lloyd & Nathaniel Sharadin - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics 23 (10):115-118.
    We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced surveillance and lab screening procedures, restrictions on AI training data, and access (...)
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  9. Explicitism about Truth in Fiction.William D’Alessandro - 2016 - British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (1):53-65.
    The problem of truth in fiction concerns how to tell whether a given proposition is true in a given fiction. Thus far, the nearly universal consensus has been that some propositions are ‘implicitly true’ in some fictions: such propositions are not expressed by any explicit statements in the relevant work, but are nevertheless held to be true in those works on the basis of some other set of criteria. I call this family of views ‘implicitism’. I argue that implicitism faces (...)
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  10. Arithmetic, Set Theory, Reduction and Explanation.William D’Alessandro - 2018 - Synthese 195 (11):5059-5089.
    Philosophers of science since Nagel have been interested in the links between intertheoretic reduction and explanation, understanding and other forms of epistemic progress. Although intertheoretic reduction is widely agreed to occur in pure mathematics as well as empirical science, the relationship between reduction and explanation in the mathematical setting has rarely been investigated in a similarly serious way. This paper examines an important particular case: the reduction of arithmetic to set theory. I claim that the reduction is unexplanatory. In defense (...)
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  11. Explanation in mathematics: Proofs and practice.William D'Alessandro - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (11):e12629.
    Mathematicians distinguish between proofs that explain their results and those that merely prove. This paper explores the nature of explanatory proofs, their role in mathematical practice, and some of the reasons why philosophers should care about them. Among the questions addressed are the following: what kinds of proofs are generally explanatory (or not)? What makes a proof explanatory? Do all mathematical explanations involve proof in an essential way? Are there really such things as explanatory proofs, and if so, how do (...)
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  12. Viewing-as explanations and ontic dependence.William D’Alessandro - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (3):769-792.
    According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science, all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I call “viewing-as explanations”, are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren’t supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the thesis isn’t true in general. The first part of the paper defends this claim (...)
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  13. Bio-ethics and one health: a case study approach to building reflexive governance.Antoine Boudreau LeBlanc, Bryn Williams-Jones & Cécile Aenishaenslin - 2022 - Frontiers in Public Health 10 (648593).
    Surveillance programs supporting the management of One Health issues such as antibiotic resistance are complex systems in themselves. Designing ethical surveillance systems is thus a complex task (retroactive and iterative), yet one that is also complicated to implement and evaluate (e.g., sharing, collaboration, and governance). The governance of health surveillance requires attention to ethical concerns about data and knowledge (e.g., performance, trust, accountability, and transparency) and empowerment ethics, also referred to as a form of responsible self-governance. Ethics in reflexive governance (...)
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  14. Deontology and Safe Artificial Intelligence.William D'Alessandro - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    The field of AI safety aims to prevent increasingly capable artificially intelligent systems from causing humans harm. Research on moral alignment is widely thought to offer a promising safety strategy: if we can equip AI systems with appropriate ethical rules, according to this line of thought, they'll be unlikely to disempower, destroy or otherwise seriously harm us. Deontological morality looks like a particularly attractive candidate for an alignment target, given its popularity, relative technical tractability and commitment to harm-avoidance principles. I (...)
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  15. Proving Quadratic Reciprocity: Explanation, Disagreement, Transparency and Depth.William D’Alessandro - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-44.
    Gauss’s quadratic reciprocity theorem is among the most important results in the history of number theory. It’s also among the most mysterious: since its discovery in the late 18th century, mathematicians have regarded reciprocity as a deeply surprising fact in need of explanation. Intriguingly, though, there’s little agreement on how the theorem is best explained. Two quite different kinds of proof are most often praised as explanatory: an elementary argument that gives the theorem an intuitive geometric interpretation, due to Gauss (...)
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  16. Unrealistic Models in Mathematics.William D'Alessandro - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint.
    Models are indispensable tools of scientific inquiry, and one of their main uses is to improve our understanding of the phenomena they represent. How do models accomplish this? And what does this tell us about the nature of understanding? While much recent work has aimed at answering these questions, philosophers' focus has been squarely on models in empirical science. I aim to show that pure mathematics also deserves a seat at the table. I begin by presenting two cases: Cramér’s random (...)
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  17. Artificial Intelligence: Arguments for Catastrophic Risk.Adam Bales, William D'Alessandro & Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (2):e12964.
    Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology’s transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show how AI could pose catastrophic risks. The first argument — the Problem of Power-Seeking — claims that, under certain assumptions, advanced AI systems are likely to engage in dangerous power-seeking behavior in pursuit of their goals. We review reasons for thinking that AI systems might seek power, that (...)
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  18. Transferable and Fixable Proofs.William D'Alessandro - forthcoming - Episteme:1-12.
    A proof P of a theorem T is transferable when a typical expert can become convinced of T solely on the basis of their prior knowledge and the information contained in P. Easwaran has argued that transferability is a constraint on acceptable proof. Meanwhile, a proof P is fixable when it’s possible for other experts to correct any mistakes P contains without having to develop significant new mathematics. Habgood-Coote and Tanswell have observed that some acceptable proofs are both fixable and (...)
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  19. Teaching and Learning Guide for: Explanation in Mathematics: Proofs and Practice.William D'Alessandro - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (11):e12629.
    This is a teaching and learning guide to accompany "Explanation in Mathematics: Proofs and Practice".
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  20. Fairness in Distributive Justice by 3- and 5-Year-Olds Across Seven Cultures.Philippe Rochat, Maria D. G. Dias, Guo Liping, Tanya Broesch, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Ashley Winning & Britt Berg - 2009 - Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 40 (3):416-442.
    This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice (...)
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  21. Publicity and Common Commitment to Believe.J. R. G. Williams - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1059-1080.
    Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...)
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  22. Interview with Kenny Easwaran.Kenny Easwaran & William D'Alessandro - 2021 - The Reasoner 15 (2):9-12.
    Bill D'Alessandro talks to Kenny Easwaran about fractal music, Zoom conferences, being a good referee, teaching in math and philosophy, the rationalist community and its relationship to academia, decision-theoretic pluralism, and the city of Manhattan, Kansas.
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  23. Challenging Myths.Eugenia D. G. - 2009 - School Magazine, Papel de Babel 1:16-17.
    The article offers insights into teaching-related challenges posed by Advanced English methods as applied to adult Spanish learners. -/- The analyisis highlights the importance of cognitive approaches adapted to classroom milieus and stresses the inevitability of searching for help from the philosophy of the English language as the ultimate resort for attainment of understanding.
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  24. Em defesa de um conceito pluralista de felicidade, a partir de Stuart Mill.Sagid Salles & D. G. Alves Júnior - 2008 - Revista da Pesquisa and Pós-Graduação (UFOP) 8 (2):40-45.
    O objetivo deste texto é responder a uma objeção comum à doutrina utilitarista. Essa doutrina é comumente descrita como aquela que aceita que a ação moralmente correta é a que promove a maior felicidade possível para as pessoas envolvidas. A objeção que trabalhamos aqui nega a afirmação utilitarista de que a felicidade é o único fim da vida humana. Diferentes respostas podem ser formuladas de acordo com o modo que definimos o bem ou a felicidade. Sustentaremos que a versão da (...)
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  25. A compendium of paradoxes. [REVIEW]William D’Alessandro - 2022 - Metascience 31 (3):1-4.
    A review of Matt Cook's book Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy.
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  26. Enhancing FunGramKB: Further Verbs of Feeling in English.Eugenia D. G. - 2012 - Dissertation,
    The present dissertation aims at analyzing some linguistic aspects related to the lexical, semantic and syntactic behaviour of a number of verbs of FEELING in English whose lexical, grammatical and idiosyncratic properties have been entered into the FunGramKB Editor in application of study of the theoretical assumptions propounded by the Lexical-Constructional Model. -/- Analysis and subsequent input of data have been assessed against the background of some of the 20th-century trends in linguistics which find their expression in the first decade (...)
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  27. When data drive health: an archaeology of medical records technology.Colin Koopman, Paul D. G. Showler, Patrick Jones, Mary McLevey & Valerie Simon - 2022 - Biosocieties 17 (4):782-804.
    Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational (...)
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  28. Thomas Aquinas’s Understanding of Faith & Reason: Jacques Maritain and Norman Geisler in Dialogue.Scott D. G. Ventureyra - 2023 - American Journal of Biblical Theology 24 (38):1-19.
    This article examines the thoughts and works of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and evangelical philosopher Norman Geisler in light of their understanding of Thomas Aquinas’s view of faith and reason.
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  29. A Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy.Elizabeth Barnes & J. Robert G. Williams - 2011 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 6. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 103-148.
    If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.
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  30. COVID-19: A Dystopian Delusion: Examining the Machinations of Governments, Health Organizations, the Globalist Elites, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the Legacy Media.Scott D. G. Ventureyra (ed.) - 2022 - Ottawa, ON, Canada: True Freedom Press.
    Since March of 2020, the world has been brought to its knees by unscientific and unethical mandates. These mandates have destroyed the world economy and the lives of countless innocent individuals. The “cure” that has been offered by medical bureaucrats and politicians has been more deadly than the disease (COVID-19). The imposition of ludicrous lockdowns, mask-wearing, coerced vaccination, and vaccine passports have not only proved to be ineffective, but also much more harmful than SARS-CoV-2 and all its variants. COVID-19 has (...)
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  31. Making Sense of Nonsense: Navigating Through the West's Current Quagmire.Scott D. G. Ventureyra (ed.) - 2022 - Ottawa, ON, Canada: True Freedom Press.
    In recent years, there has been a concerted attack on many of the precepts of Western civilization relating to the concept of God, truth, Christianity, morality, sex, the family, and even modern science, especially biology. The concern of this volume is to explore these and other attacks through the tools of philosophy, theology, science, and intuition. It seeks to bring clarity to the ongoing struggle of Western civilization to preserve its values and traditions. -/- The West is crumbling at an (...)
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  32. On the Origin of Consciousness: An Exploration through the lens of the Christian Conception of God and Creation.Scott D. G. Ventureyra - 2018 - Eugene, OR, USA: Wipf and Stock.
    Have you ever thought about how self-consciousness (self-awareness) originated in the universe? Understanding consciousness is one of the toughest "nuts to crack." In recent years, scientists and philosophers have attempted to provide an answer to this mystery. The reason for this is simply because it cannot be confined to solely a materialistic interpretation of the world. Some scientific materialists have suggested that consciousness is merely an illusion in order to insulate their worldviews. Yet, consciousness is the most fundamental thing we (...)
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  33. Giving patients granular control of personal health information: Using an ethics ‘Points to Consider’ to inform informatics system designers.Eric M. Meslin, Sheri A. Alpert, Aaron E. Carroll, Jere D. Odell, William M. Tierney & Peter H. Schwartz - 2013 - International Journal of Medical Informatics 82:1136-1143.
    Objective: There are benefits and risks of giving patients more granular control of their personal health information in electronic health record (EHR) systems. When designing EHR systems and policies, informaticists and system developers must balance these benefits and risks. Ethical considerations should be an explicit part of this balancing. Our objective was to develop a structured ethics framework to accomplish this. -/- Methods: We reviewed existing literature on the ethical and policy issues, developed an ethics framework called a “Points to (...)
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  34.  60
    Review of The Creation of Self: A Case for the Soul. [REVIEW]Scott D. G. Ventureyra - 2024 - Science Et Esprit 76 (2):281-283.
    A review of Joshua Farris's The Creation of Self: A Case for the Soul.
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  35. Ownership reasoning in children across cultures.Philippe Rochat, Erin Robbins, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Angela Donato Oliva, Maria D. G. Dias & Liping Guo - 2014 - Cognition 132 (3):471-484.
    To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socio-economic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three- and five-year-old children (N = 176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of possession. The child (...)
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  36. Eligibility and inscrutability.J. Robert G. Williams - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (3):361-399.
    Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘ eligibility ’ response: some theories are better than others, not because they fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but (...)
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  37. Defending Conditional Excluded Middle.J. Robert G. Williams - 2010 - Noûs 44 (4):650-668.
    Lewis (1973) gave a short argument against conditional excluded middle, based on his treatment of ‘might’ counterfactuals. Bennett (2003), with much of the recent literature, gives an alternative take on ‘might’ counterfactuals. But Bennett claims the might-argument against CEM still goes through. This turns on a specific claim I call Bennett’s Hypothesis. I argue that independently of issues to do with the proper analysis of might-counterfactuals, Bennett’s Hypothesis is inconsistent with CEM. But Bennett’s Hypothesis is independently objectionable, so we should (...)
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  38. Generalized probabilism: Dutch books and accuracy domi- nation.J. Robert G. Williams - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (5):811-840.
    Jeff Paris proves a generalized Dutch Book theorem. If a belief state is not a generalized probability then one faces ‘sure loss’ books of bets. In Williams I showed that Joyce’s accuracy-domination theorem applies to the same set of generalized probabilities. What is the relationship between these two results? This note shows that both results are easy corollaries of the core result that Paris appeals to in proving his dutch book theorem. We see that every point of accuracy-domination defines (...)
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  39. Illusions of gunk.J. Robert G. Williams - 2006 - Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):493–513.
    Worlds where things divide forever ("gunk" worlds) are apparently conceivable. The conceivability of such scenarios has been used as an argument against "nihilist" or "near-nihilist" answers to the special composition question. I argue that the mereological nihilist has the resources to explain away the illusion that gunk is possible.
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  40. Indeterminate Oughts.J. Robert G. Williams - 2017 - Ethics 127 (3):645-673.
    Sometimes it is indeterminate what an agent morally ought do. This generates a Decision Ought Challenge—to give moral guidance to agents in such a scenario. This article is a field guide to the options for a theory of the decision ought for cases of indeterminacy. Three categories of view are evaluated, and the best representative for each is identified.
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  41. Indeterminacy and normative silence.J. R. G. Williams - 2012 - Analysis 72 (2):217-225.
    This paper examines two puzzles of indeterminacy. The first puzzle concerns the hypothesis that there is a unified phenomenon of indeterminacy. How are we to reconcile this with the apparent diversity of reactions that indeterminacy prompts? The second puzzle focuses narrowly on borderline cases of vague predicates. How are we to account for the lack of theoretical consensus about what the proper reaction to borderline cases is? I suggest (building on work by Maudlin) that the characteristic feature of indeterminacy is (...)
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  42. The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe.Evan G. Williams - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5):971-982.
    This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, (...)
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  43. Rational Illogicality.J. Robert G. Williams - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1):127-141.
    Many accounts of structural rationality give a special role to logic. This paper reviews the problem case of clear-eyed logical uncertainty. An account of rational norms on belief that does not give a special role to logic is developed: doxastic probabilism.
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  44. Supervaluationism and Logical Revisionism.J. R. G. Williams - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (4):192-212.
    In the literature on supervaluationism, a central source of concern has been the acceptability, or otherwise, of its alleged logical revisionism. I attack the presupposition of this debate: arguing that when properly construed, there is no sense in which supervaluational consequence is revisionary. I provide new considerations supporting the claim that the supervaluational consequence should be characterized in a ‘global’ way. But pace Williamson (1994) and Keefe (2000), I argue that supervaluationism does not give rise to counterexamples to familiar inference-patterns (...)
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  45. Degree supervaluational logic.J. Robert G. Williams - 2011 - Review of Symbolic Logic 4 (1):130-149.
    Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...)
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  46. Decision-Making Under Indeterminacy.J. Robert G. Williams - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    Decisions are made under uncertainty when there are distinct outcomes of a given action, and one is uncertain to which the act will lead. Decisions are made under indeterminacy when there are distinct outcomes of a given action, and it is indeterminate to which the act will lead. This paper develops a theory of (synchronic and diachronic) decision-making under indeterminacy that portrays the rational response to such situations as inconstant. Rational agents have to capriciously and randomly choose how to resolve (...)
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  47. The possibility of onion worlds: Rebutting an argument for structural universals.J. Robert G. Williams - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2):193 – 203.
    Some argue that theories of universals should incorporate structural universals, in order to allow for the metaphysical possibility of worlds of 'infinite descending complexity' ('onion worlds'). I argue that the possibility of such worlds does not establish the need for structural universals. So long as we admit the metaphysical possibility of emergent universals, there is an attractive alternative description of such cases.
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  48. Representational Scepticism: The Bubble Puzzle.J. Robert G. Williams - 2016 - Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1):419-442.
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  49. The ImmPort Antibody Ontology.William Duncan, Travis Allen, Jonathan Bona, Olivia Helfer, Barry Smith, Alan Ruttenberg & Alexander D. Diehl - 2016 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Biological Ontology 1747.
    Monoclonal antibodies are essential biomedical research and clinical reagents that are produced by companies and research laboratories. The NIAID ImmPort (Immunology Database and Analysis Portal) resource provides a long-term, sustainable data warehouse for immunological data generated by NIAID, DAIT and DMID funded investigators for data archiving and re-use. A variety of immunological data is generated using techniques that rely upon monoclonal antibody reagents, including flow cytometry, immunofluorescence, and ELISA. In order to facilitate querying, integration, and reuse of data, standardized terminology (...)
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  50. Ontic vagueness and metaphysical indeterminacy.J. Robert G. Williams - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (4):763-788.
    Might it be that world itself, independently of what we know about it or how we represent it, is metaphysically indeterminate? This article tackles in turn a series of questions: In what sorts of cases might we posit metaphysical indeterminacy? What is it for a given case of indefiniteness to be 'metaphysical'? How does the phenomenon relate to 'ontic vagueness', the existence of 'vague objects', 'de re indeterminacy' and the like? How might the logic work? Are there reasons for postulating (...)
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