What is the relationship between objects and properties? According to a standard view, there are primitive individuals that ‘instantiate’ or ‘have’ various properties. According to a rival view, objects are mere ‘bundles’ of properties. While there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of primitive individuals, there are also a number of challenges that the bundle theorist faces. The goal of this paper is to formulate a view about the relationship between objects and properties that avoids many of the (...) problems inherent in both of these views. The view I will end up defending implies a particularly radical version of Monism, and it collapses the object-property distinction altogether. (shrink)

Causation is a macroscopic phenomenon. The temporal asymmetry displayed by causation must somehow emerge along with other asymmetric macroscopic phenomena like entropy increase and the arrow of radiation. I shall approach this issue by considering ‘causal inference’ techniques that allow causal relations to be inferred from sets of observed correlations. I shall show that these techniques are best explained by a reduction of causation to structures of equations with probabilistically independent exogenous terms. This exogenous probabilistic independence imposes a recursive order (...) on these equations and a consequent distinction between dependent and independent variables that lines up with the temporal asymmetry of causation. (shrink)

In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their core (...) properties. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience claims that perception is constituted by bodily interaction with the environment, drawing on practical knowledge of the systematic ways that sensory inputs are disposed to change as a result of movement. Despite the theory’s associations with enactivism, it is sometimes claimed that the appeal to ‘knowledge’ means that the theory is committed to giving an essential theoretical role to internal representation, and therefore to a form of orthodox cognitive science. This paper defends the role (...) ascribed to knowledge by the theory, but argues that this knowledge can and should be identified with bodily skill rather than representation. Making the further argument that the notion of ‘representation hunger’ can be replaced with ‘prima facie representation hunger’, it concludes that although the theory could optionally be developed scientifically in part by reference to internal representation, it makes a strong and natural fit with anti-representationalist embodied or enactive cognitive science. (shrink)

The authors argue against direction of fit accounts of the distinction between belief and desire.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.

According to the priority view, or prioritarianism, it matters more to benefit people the worse off they are. But how exactly should the priority view be defined? This article argues for a highly general characterization which essentially involves risk, but makes no use of evaluative measurements or the expected utility axioms. A representation theorem is provided, and when further assumptions are added, common accounts of the priority view are recovered. A defense of the key idea behind the priority view, the (...) priority principle, is provided. But it is argued that the priority view fails on both ethical and conceptual grounds. (shrink)

An orthodox view in marketing ethics is that it is morally impermissible to market goods to specially vulnerable populations in ways that take advantage of their vulnerabilities. In his signature article “Marketing and the Vulnerable,” Brenkert (Bus Ethics Q Ruffin Ser 1:7–20, 1998) provided the first substantive defense of this position, one which has become a well-established view in marketing ethics. In what follows, we throw new light on marketing to the vulnerable by critically evaluating key components of Brenkert’s general (...) arguments. Specifically, we contend that Brenkert has failed to offer us any persuasive reasons to think that it is immoral to market to the vulnerable in ways that take advantage of their vulnerability. Although Brenkert does highlight the fact that the specially vulnerable are at greater risk of being harmed by already immoral marketing practices (e.g., deception, manipulation), he fails to establish that the specially vulnerable are a unique moral category of market clients or that there are special moral standards that apply to them. Moreover, even if Brenkert’s position were theoretically defensible, the practical implications of his position are far less tenable than he suggests. If our criticisms are sound, then Brenkert and others who endorse his position are seriously mistaken regarding how one can permissibly market products to vulnerable populations, and, in addition, they have improperly categorized certain morally permissible marketing practices as being immoral. (shrink)

Beach's Gaelic Symphony is plausibly an abstract object that Beach created. The view that people create some abstract objects is called abstract creationism. There are abstract creationists about many kinds of objects, including musical works, fictional characters, arguments, words, internet memes, installation artworks, bitcoins, and restaurants. Alternative theories include materialism and Platonism. This paper discusses some of the most serious objections against abstract creationism. Arguably, these objections have ramifications for questions in metaphysics pertaining to the abstract/concrete distinction, time, causation, vague (...) existence, vague identity, and inadvertent creation. (shrink)

Environmental health research produces scientific knowledge about environmental hazards crucial for public health and environmental justice movements that seek to prevent or reduce exposure to these hazards. The environment in environmental health research is conceptualized as the range of possible social, biological, chemical, and/or physical hazards or risks to human health, some of which merit study due to factors such as their probability and severity, the feasibility of their remediation, and injustice in their distribution. This paper explores the ethics of (...) identifying the relevant environment for environmental health research, as judgments involved in defining an environmental hazard or risk, judgments of that hazard or risk's probability, severity, and/ or injustice, as well as the feasibility of its remediation, all ought to appeal to non-epistemic as well as epistemic values. I illustrate by discussing the case of environmental lead, a housing-related hazard that remains unjustly distributed by race and class and is particularly dangerous to children. Examining a controversy in environmental health research ethics where researchers tested multiple levels of lead abatement in lead-contaminated households, I argue that the broader perspective on the ethics of environmental health research provided in the first part of this paper may have helped prevent this controversy. (shrink)

We have a mentalistic view of objects. This is due to the interdependence of folk psychology and folk physics, where these are interconnected by what I call Teleological Commingling. When considering events that don’t involve agents, we naturally default to tracking intentions, goal-directed processes, despite the fact that agents aren’t involved. We have a deep-seated intentionality bias which is the result of the pervasive detection of agency cues, such as order or non-randomness. And this gives rise to the Agentive Worldview: (...) we view nature as a whole as being infused with agency and purpose. Teleological Commingling and the Agentive Worldview it gives rise to are at the core of our conception of objects. I maintain that the ordinary view of material objects is rooted in an implicit, false theory. It should be given no weight in metaphysical debates about the nature of material objects. And this problematizes the central methodological assumption that metaphysical theories of material objects should be beholden to common sense. (shrink)

Jerome Wakefield has argued that a disorder is a harmful dysfunction. This paper develops how Wakefield should construe harmful in his harmful dysfunction analysis. Recently, Neil Feit has argued that classic puzzles involved in analyzing harm render Wakefield’s HDA better off without harm as a necessary condition. Whether or not one conceives of harm as comparative or non-comparative, the concern is that the HDA forces people to classify as mere dysfunction what they know to be a disorder. For instance, one (...) can conceive of cases where simultaneous disorders prevent each other from being, in any traditional sense, actually harmful; in such cases, according to the HDA, neither would be a disorder. I argue that the sense of harm that Wakefield should employ in the HDA is dispositional, similar to the sense of harm used when describing a vile of poison: “Be careful! That’s poison. It’s harmful.” I call this harm in the damage sense. Using this sense of harm enables the HDA to avoid Feit’s arguments, and thus it should be preferred to other senses when analyzing harmful dysfunction. (shrink)

Kagan argues that human beings who are neither persons nor even potential persons — if their impairment is independent of genetic constitution — are modal persons: individuals who might have been persons. Moreover, he proposes a view according to which both personhood and modal personhood are sufficient for counting more, morally, than nonhuman animals. In response to this proposal, I raise one relatively minor concern about Kagan's reasoning — that he judges too quickly that insentient beings can have interests — (...) before engaging the appeal to modal personhood. I challenge the thesis that modal personhood is relevant to one's moral status, first, by way of analogy to a kicker who misses a field goal though he might have made it; second, by casting doubt on implications for two impaired infants ; and, finally, by examining implications for dogs who would count as modal persons when genetic enhancements are capable of transforming them into persons. (shrink)

Cognitive categories in the geographic realm appear to manifest certain special features as contrasted with categories for objects at surveyable scales. We have argued that these features reflect specific ontological characteristics of geographic objects. This paper presents hypotheses as to the nature of the features mentioned, reviews previous empirical work on geographic categories, and presents the results of pilot experiments that used English-speaking subjects to test our hypotheses. Our experiments show geographic categories to be similar to their non-geographic counterparts in (...) the ways in which they generate instances of different relative frequencies at different levels. Other tests, however, provide preliminary evidence for the existence of important differences in subjects’ categorizations of geographic and non-geographic objects, and suggest further experimental work especially with regard to the role in cognitive categorization of different types of object-boundaries at different scales. (shrink)

When people make sense of situations, illustrations, instructions and problems they do more than just think with their heads. They gesture, talk, point, annotate, make notes and so on. What extra do they get from interacting with their environment in this way? To study this fundamental problem, I looked at how people project structure onto geometric drawings, visual proofs, and games like tic tac toe. Two experiments were run to learn more about projection. Projection is a special capacity, similar to (...) perception, but less tied to what is in the environment. Projection, unlike pure imagery, requires external structure to anchor it, but it adds ‘mental’ structure to the external scene much like an augmented reality system adds structure to an outside scene. A person projects when they look at a chessboard and can see where a knight may be moved. Because of the cognitive costs of sustaining and extending projection, humans make some of their projections real. They create structure externally. They move the piece, they talk, point, notate, represent. Much of our interactivity during sense making and problem solving involves a cycle of projecting then creating structure. (shrink)

Truthmaker theorists claim that for every truth, there is something in virtue of which it is true—or, more cautiously, that for every truth in some specified class of truths, there is something in virtue of which it is true. I argue that it is hard to see how the thought that truth is grounded in reality lends any support to truthmaker theory.

We provide conditions under which an incomplete strongly independent preorder on a convex set X can be represented by a set of mixture preserving real-valued functions. We allow X to be infi nite dimensional. The main continuity condition we focus on is mixture continuity. This is sufficient for such a representation provided X has countable dimension or satisfi es a condition that we call Polarization.

In their monograph Narrow Content, Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne argue that all versions of internalism about mental content are either false or "pointless" (roughly, of no interest). We overview Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne's main line of argument and suggest that, while largely correct, it does not touch the core internalist claim that mental states have internally determined contents. Instead of engaging with this claim, Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne attack a variety of stronger or weaker claims. The stronger claims fall prey to the Mirror (...) Man argument and other considerations. The weaker claims fall prey to the charge of pointlessness. But the core internalist view is left untouched. (shrink)

Mark David Webster ABSTRACT: Using qualitative methods, the author sought to better understand how philosophical assumptions about technology affect the thinking, and influence the decision making, of educational technology leaders in their professional practice. One of the research questions focused on examining whether assumptions of technological determinism were present in thinking and influenced the decisions that leaders make. The core category that emerged from data analysis, Keep up with technology (or be left behind), was interpreted to be a manifestation (...) of the technological imperative, an assumption associated with the philosophical perspective of technological determinism. The article presents a literature review and critique of philosophical issues surrounding technological determinism. Data analysis led to the conclusion that technology leaders working in K-12 education place weighted priority on the technological imperative, and there is philosophical tension between Keep up with technology (or be left behind), and a concurrently held perspective based on the logic of the instrumental view of technology. The findings suggest that different accounts of technological determinism, including Bimber’s three accounts of normative, nomological, and unintended consequences, are significant in the thinking of participants. School technology leaders placed priority on embracing technological change, sometimes adopting technology for its own sake. (shrink)

David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main (...) conclusions. (shrink)

I discuss the relevance of the current predicament in cosmology to the debate over scientific realism. I argue that the existence of two, empirically successful but ontologically inconsistent cosmological theories presents difficulties for the realist position.

Robbie Williams’ (2020) book The Metaphysics of Representation is the new leading edge of the program of naturalizing intentionality. Williams brings sophistica.

Zetetic norms govern our acts of inquiry. Epistemic norms govern our beliefs and acts of belief formation. Recently, Jane Friedman (2020) has defended that we should think of these norms as conforming a single normative domain: epistemology should take a zetetic turn. Though this unification project implies a substantive re-elaboration of our traditional epistemic norms, Friedman argues that the reasons supporting the turn are robust enough to warrant its revisionary implications. In this paper, I suggest we should read Friedman’s proposal (...) as a dilemma. Either we believe the zetetic turn is well-motivated and undertake the task of looking for the proper revision of our traditional epistemic norms, or we take the revisionary implications of the turn to be unacceptable, in which case our challenge is to show why a zetetic epistemology is not a well-motivated project after all. After presenting this dilemma, I make a case for endorsing its second horn by presenting a two-pronged argument against Friedman’s project. First, I show that the revisionary implications of the zetetic turn are more far-reaching than expected. Second, I defend that the most persuasive reasons for endorsing the turn are not strong enough to support it. Taken together, these considerations speak against accepting the zetetic turn and the revisionary implications that come with it. (shrink)

A high level of confidence in the identity of individuals is required to let them die as ordered by an advance directive. Thus, if we are animalists, then we should lack the confidence required to apply lethal advance directives to the cheerfully demented, or so I argue. In short, there is consensus among animalists that the best way to avoid serious objections to their account is to adopt an ontology that denies the existence of brains, hands, tables, chairs, iced-tea, and (...) lemonade. The adoption of such an ontology reduces the justificatory force of commonsense, which is key in arguing that we are animals and that we persist as long as we are biologically alive. With this loss of justification comes the loss of a high level of confidence that Quinn-pre-dementia’s lethal advanced directive applies to Quinn-post-dementia, via identity. If we do not have a high level of confidence that Quinn-pre-dementia’s advanced directive applies to Quinn-post- dementia, then it is not enough (on its own) to let Quinn-post-dementia die. (shrink)

When it comes to caring about and helping those in need, our imaginations tend to be weak and our motivation tends to be parochial. This is a major moral problem in view of how much unmet need there is in the world and how much material capacity there is to address that need. With this problem in mind, the present paper will focus on genetic means to the enhancement of a moral capacity—a disposition to altruism—and of a cognitive capacity that (...) facilitates use of the moral capacity: the ability to grasp vividly the needs of individuals who are unknown and not present. I will address two questions, with more extensive attention to the first question. First, assuming we had excellent reason to believe that the enhancements were safe, effective, and available to all who desired them, would seeking these enhancements be inherently morally acceptable—that is, free of inherent wrongness? Second, would it be wise for a society to pursue these enhancements? I will defend an affirmative answer to the first question while leaving the second question open. (shrink)

O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor approach rejects the old-fashioned view that perceptual experience in humans depends solely on the activation of internal representations. Reflecting a wealth of empirical work, for example active vision, the approach suggests that perceiving is, instead, a matter of bodily exploration of the outside environment. To this end, the approach says the perceiver must deploy knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies, the ways sense input changes with movement by the perceiver or object perceived. Clark has observed that the approach (...) faces a challenge accounting for the experience of temporal duration, since event-like properties cannot be characterised by reference to the sensory consequences of possible movements. This paper argues that the account can best be shored up by emphasising, more than Noë does, the dependence of perceptual experience, in general, on temporally extended, organismic interaction with the outside environment. The paper argues, moreover, that an ‘extensionalist’ account of temporal experience could help make sense of object experience, which is itself, plausibly, an experience of temporal duration. (shrink)

“The Ethics of Infection Challenges in Primates,” by Anne Barnhill, Steven Joffe, and Franklin Miller, is an exceptionally timely contribution to the literature on animal research ethics. Animal research has long been both a source of high hopes and a cause for moral concern. When it comes to infection challenge studies with nonhuman primates, neither the hope—to save thousands of human lives from such diseases as Ebola and Marburg—nor the concern—the conviction that primates deserve especially strong protections—could be much higher. (...) Coming just a few years after the National Institutes of Health adopted the Institute of Medicine's recommendations regarding chimpanzees, Barnhill and colleagues attempt to nudge the clarification and specification—one might say the evolution—of NHP research ethics and regulation. They assert that NHP challenge studies “are not justified by marginal gains in human safety or by efficacy gains that are unlikely to translate directly into saving human lives or preventing morbidity.” How, in turn, is their standard—which, although stringent, does permit causing NHPs to suffer and die for human benefit—to be justified? (shrink)

Many people argue that history makes a special difference to the subjects of biology and psychology, and that history does not make this special difference to other parts of the world. This paper will show that historical properties make no more or less of a difference to biology or psychology than to chemistry, physics, or other sciences. Although historical properties indeed make a certain kind of difference to biology and psychology, this paper will show that historical properties make the same (...) kind of difference to geology, sociology, astronomy, and other sciences. Similarly, many people argue that nonhistorical properties make a special difference to the nonbiological and the nonpsychological world. This paper will show that nonhistorical properties make the same difference to all things in the world when it comes to their causal behavior and that historical properties make the same difference to all things in the world when it comes to their distributions. Although history is special, it is special in the same way to all parts of the world. (shrink)

As an evaluative view in the philosophy of life, nihilism maintains that no lives are, all things considered, worth living. Prominent defenders of the view hold that, even so, it can be all-things-considered better for us to continue living than for us to cease living, thus endorsing a 'soft' nihilism that appears more palatable than its 'hard' counterpart. In support of an intuitive assumption about what nihilism implies, I argue that soft nihilism is incoherent.

We present data and argument to show that in Tetris—a real-time interactive video game—certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as being used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction. To substantiate our position we have implemented a computational laboratory that lets us record keystrokes and game (...) situations, as well as allows us to dynamically create situations. Using the data of over 30 subjects playing 6 games, tachistoscopic tests of some of these subjects, and results from our own successful efforts at building expert systems to play Tetris, we show why knowing how to use one’s environment to enhance speed and robustness are important components in skilled play. (shrink)

The article is a plea for ethicists to regard probability as one of their most important concerns. It outlines a series of topics of central importance in ethical theory in which probability is implicated, often in a surprisingly deep way, and lists a number of open problems. Topics covered include: interpretations of probability in ethical contexts; the evaluative and normative significance of risk or uncertainty; uses and abuses of expected utility theory; veils of ignorance; Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem; population size problems; (...) equality; fairness; giving priority to the worse off; continuity; incommensurability; nonexpected utility theory; evaluative measurement; aggregation; causal and evidential decision theory; act consequentialism; rule consequentialism; and deontology. (shrink)

In two papers, Ned Block has argued that representationalists have trouble with the empirical discovery that differences in the degree of visual attention to an object can lead to a difference in h...

The degree to which information is encoded explicitly in a representation is related to the computational cost of recovering or using the information. Knowledge that is implicit in a system need not be represented at all, even implicitly, if the cost of recurring it is prohibitive.

Metacognition is associated with planning, monitoring, evaluating and repairing performance Designers of elearning systems can improve the quality of their environments by explicitly structuring the visual and interactive display of learning contexts to facilitate metacognition. Typically page layout, navigational appearance, visual and interactivity design are not viewed as major factors in metacognition. This is because metacognition tends to be interpreted as a process in the head, rather than an interactive one. It is argued here, that cognition and metacognition are part (...) of a continuum and that both are highly interactive. The tenets of this view are explained by reviewing some of the core assumptions of the situated and distribute approach to cognition and then further elaborated by exploring the notions of active vision, visual complexity, affordance landscape and cue structure. The way visual cues are structured and the way interaction is designed can make an important difference in the ease and effectiveness of cognition and metacognition. Documents that make effective use of markers such as headings, callouts, italics can improve students’ ability to comprehend documents and ‘plan’ the way they review and process content. Interaction can be designed to improve ‘the proximal zone of planning’ – the look ahead and apprehension of what is nearby in activity space that facilitates decisions. This final concept is elaborated in a discussion of how e-newspapers combine effective visual and interactive design to enhance user control over their reading experience. (shrink)

The question of how to conceive and represent the context of work is explored from the theoretical perspective of distributed cognition. It is argued that to understand the office work context we need to go beyond tracking superficial physical attributes such as who or what is where and when and consider the state of digital resources, people’s concepts, task state, social relations, and the local work culture, to name a few. In analyzing an office more deeply, three concepts are especially (...) helpful: entry points, action landscapes, and coordinating mechanisms. An entry point is a structure or cue that represents an invitation to enter an information space or office task. An activity landscape is part mental construct and part physical; it is the space users interactively construct out of the resources they find when trying to accomplish a task. A coordinating mechanism is an artifact, such as a schedule or clock, or an environmental structure such as the layout of papers to be signed, which helps a user manage the complexity of his task. Using these three concepts we can abstract away from many of the surface attributes of work context and define the deep structure of a setting—the invariant structure that many office settings share. A long-term challenge for context-aware computing is to operationalize these analytic concepts. (shrink)

An internalist slogan says that justification depends on internal factors. But which factors are those? This paper examines some common motivations favoring internalism over externalism, and says they are compatible with including dispositional and even past mental states in the internal.

A methodology of science must satisfy two requirements: (i) It must be ampliative: the theories which it generates must make statements that go far beyond any data or observations that may have motivated those theories in the first place. (ii) It must be epistemically probative: it must somehow provide a warrant for believing that the theories so produced are correct, or at least partially correct, even if they can never be fully confirmed. These two requirements pull in opposite directions, and (...) attempts to specify the “scientific method” often focus on one to the exclusion of the other. On a few points there now exists something approaching a consensus. (i) Scientific hypotheses — including, particularly, statements about unobserved or unobservable entities or mechanisms — remain conjectural, no matter how frequently predictions based on those hypotheses are found to coincide with data. (ii) A good (best?) indicator of a theory’s verisimilitude is its ability to successfully predict phenomena which it was not specifically designed to predict. I discuss these ideas with particular reference to cosmological theories. (shrink)

We propose as a UCGIS research priority the topic of “Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information.” Under this umbrella we unify several interrelated research subfields, each of which deals with different perspectives on geospatial ontologies and their roles in geographic information science. While each of these subfields could be addressed separately, we believe it is important to address ontological research in a unitary, systematic fashion, embracing conceptual issues concerning what would be required to establish an exhaustive ontology of the geospatial domain, (...) issues relating to the choice of appropriate methods for formalizing ontologies, and considerations regarding the design of ontology-driven information systems. This integrated approach is necessary, because there is a strong dependency between the methods used to specify an ontology, and the conceptual richness, robustness and tractability of the ontology itself. Likewise, information system implementations are needed as testbeds of the usefulness of every aspect of an exhaustive ontology of the geospatial domain. None of the current UCGIS research priorities provides such an integrative perspective, and therefore the topic of “Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information Science” is unique. (shrink)

This article strives to make novel headway in the debate concerning esports' relationship to sports by focusing on the relationship between esports and physicality. More precisely, the aim of this article is to critically assess the claim that esports fails to be sports because it is never properly “direct” or “immediate” compared to physical sports. To do so, I focus on the account of physicality presented by Jason Holt, who provides a theoretical framework meant to justify the claim that esports (...) is never properly immediate and therefore never sports. I begin by motivating Holt's account of physicality by contrasting it with a more classical way of discussing physicality and sports, namely in terms of physical motor skills. Afterwards, I introduce Holt's account of physicality as immediacy and engage with its assumptions more thoroughly to problematize the claim that esports is fundamentally indirect. Lastly, I argue that the assumption that esports necessarily lacks immediacy is based on a narrow understanding of body and, consequently, of space. In response, I offer a different way of thinking about body and space, focusing on the subjective, bodily engagement of the esports practitioners with their practice, whereby physical space and virtual space can be appreciated as immediately interconnected during performance in a hybrid manner. In providing such an account, the article contributes directly to the broader, growing discussion on the relationship between physicality and virtuality in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

To discover how to couple reflection with reaction we have been studying how people play the computer game Tetris. Our basic intuition is that the job of the reasoned is to monitor the environment and the agent’s behavior over time to discover trends or deviations from the agent’s normative policy and tune the priorities of the Attentional system accordingly.

We propose a domain-level ontology of plays for the facilitation of play-based collaborative autonomy among unmanned and manned-unmanned aircraft teams in the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) mission domain. We define a play as a type of plan that prescribes some pattern of intentional acts that are intended to reliably result in some goal in some competitive context, and which specifies one or more roles that are realized by those prescribed intentional acts. The ontology is well suited to be extended (...) to other types of military and nonmilitary unmanned vehicle operations. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory is an influential account of perception and phenomenal qualities that builds, in an empirically supported way, on the basic claim that conscious experience is best construed as an attribute of the whole embodied agent's skill-driven interactions with the environment. This paper, in addition to situating the theory as a response to certain well-known problems of consciousness, develops a sensorimotor account of why we are perceptually conscious rather than not.

I argue that Donald Davidson's rejection of the notion of language, as commonly understood in philosophy and linguistics, is justified. However, I argue that his position needs to be supplemented by an account of the development and nurture of pre-linguistic communicative skills. Davidson argues (in 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' and elsewhere) that knowledge of a language (conceived of as a set of rules or conventions) is neither sufficient nor necessary for 'linguistic' communication. The strongest argument against the initial formulation (...) is that while Davidson may have shown that knowledge of a language is not sufficient, he failed to show that it is not necessary. Subsequently, Davidson has invoked his 'triangulation' thesis, to show that understanding can rest on the apprehension of mutuality in a shared objective world, and does not presuppose the sharing of rules or practices. I argue that the starting position arrived at from the triangulation thesis itself presupposes the possibility of communication. The triangulation thesis needs, therefore, to be supplemented by a (non-reductive) naturalistic account of non-linguistic communicative skills. In such an account we must posit shared practices (practices of mutual engagement with a shared world), but not an account of practices conceived on the model of rules or conventions. I note, finally, that by adopting such an approach we offer a way of explicating the formulation of passing theories, which in Davidson's account are the point at which communicative understanding occurs. (shrink)

The question of whether lies by those who govern are acceptable receives a clear focus and an ideal case in the Republic. Against C. D. C. Reeve, and T. C. Brickhouse and N. D Smith, I argue that the Republic’s apparent recommendation of administrative lies is incoherent. While lies may be a necessary part of the City’s administration, the process and practice of lying undermines that nature which is necessary for any suitable ruler – rendering the ideal impossible. I argue (...) that this analysis, while concerned with an ideal case, also applies to the political realist’s regrettable-but-necessary defence of such practices. (shrink)

In the quest and search for a physical theory of everything from the macroscopic large body matter to the microscopic elementary particles, with strange and weird concepts springing from quantum physics discovery, irreconcilable positions and inconvenient facts complicated physics – from Newtonian physics to quantum science, the question is- how do we close the gap? Indeed, there is a scientific and mathematical fireworks when the issue of quantum uncertainties and entanglements cannot be explained with classical physics. The Copenhagen interpretation is (...) an expression of few wise men on quantum physics that was largely formulated from 1925 to 1927 namely by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. From this point on, there is a divergence of quantum science into the realms of indeterminacy, complementarity and entanglement which are principles expounded in Yijing, an ancient Chinese knowledge constructed on symbols, with a vintage of at least 3 millennia, with broken and unbroken lines to form stacked 6-line structure called the hexagram. It is premised on probability development of the hexagram in a space-time continuum. The discovery of the quantization of action meant that quantum physics could not convincingly explain the principles of classical physics. This paper will draw the great departure from classical physics into the realm of probabilistic realities. The probabilistic nature and reality interpretation had a significant influence on Bohr’s line of thought. Apparently, Bohr realized that speaking of disturbance seemed to indicate that atomic objects were classical particles with definite inherent kinematic and dynamic properties (Hanson, 1959). Disturbances, energy excitation and entanglements are processual evolutionary phases in Yijing. This paper will explore the similarities in quantum physics and the methodological ways where Yijing is pivoted to interpret observable realities involving interactions which are uncontrollable and probabilistic and forms an inseparable unity due to the entanglement, superposition Transgressing disciplinary boundaries in the discussion of Yijing, originally from the Western Zhou period (1000-750 BC), over a period of warring states and the early imperial period (500-200 BC) which was compiled, transcribed and transformed into a cosmological texts with philosophical commentaries known as the “Ten Wings” and closely associated with Confucius (551- 479 BC) with the Copenhagen Interpretation (1925-1927) by the few wise men including Niel Bohr and Werner Heisensberg would seem like a subversive undertaking. Subversive as the interpretations from Yijing is based on wisdom derived from thousands of years from ancient China to recently discovered quantum concepts. The subversive undertaking does seem to violate the sanctuaries of accepted ways in looking at Yijing principles, classical physics and quantum science because of the fortified boundaries that have been erected between Yijing and the sciences. Subversive as this paper may be, it is an attempt to re-cast an ancient framework where indeterminism, complementarity, non-linearity entanglement, superposition and probability interpretation is seen in today quantum’s realities. (shrink)

The shape of the Earth's surface, its topography, is a fundamental dimension of the environment, shaping or mediating many other environmental flows or functions. But there is a major divergence in the way that topography is conceptualized in different domains. Topographic cartographers, information scientists, geomorphologists and environmental modelers typically conceptualize topographic variability as a continuous field of elevations or as some discrete approximation to such a field. Pilots, explorers, anthropologists, ecologists, hikers, and archeologists, on the other hand, typically conceptualize this (...) same variability in terms of hills and valleys, mountains and plains, barrows and trenches, that is, as (special sorts of) objects, with locations, shapes, and often names of their own. In this chapter, we sketch an approach to bridging this fundamental gap in geographic information infrastructure. (shrink)