According to many philosophers, psychological explanation canlegitimately be given in terms of belief and desire, but not in termsof knowledge. To explain why someone does what they do (so the common wisdom holds) you can appeal to what they think or what they want, but not what they know. Timothy Williamson has recently argued against this view. Knowledge, Williamson insists, plays an essential role in ordinary psychological explanation.Williamson's argument works on two fronts.First, he argues against the claim that, unlike knowledge, (...) belief is``composite'' (representable as a conjunction of a narrow and a broadcondition). Belief's failure to be composite, Williamson thinks, undermines the usual motivations for psychological explanation in terms of belief rather than knowledge.Unfortunately, we claim, the motivations Williamson argues against donot depend on the claim that belief is composite, so what he saysleaves the case for a psychology of belief unscathed.Second, Williamson argues that knowledge can sometimes provide abetter explanation of action than belief can.We argue that, in the cases considered, explanations that cite beliefs(but not knowledge) are no less successful than explanations that citeknowledge. Thus, we conclude that Williamson's arguments fail both coming andgoing: they fail to undermine a psychology of belief, and they fail tomotivate a psychology of knowledge. (shrink)

Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases, and extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery. A community-based Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions (OHMI) was developed following the OBO Foundry principles. OHMI leverages established (...) ontologies to create logically structured representations of microbiomes, microbial taxonomy, host species, host anatomical entities, and HMIs under different conditions and associated study protocols and types of data analysis and experimental results. (shrink)

Understanding the relationship between wilderness outings and the resulting experience has been a central theme in resource-based, outdoor recreation research for nearly 50 years. The authors provide a review and synthesis of literature that examines how people, over time, build relationships with wilderness places and express their identities as consequences of multiple, ongoing wilderness engagements (i.e., continued participation). The paper reviews studies of everyday places and those specifically protected for wilderness and backcountry qualities. Beginning with early origins and working through (...) contemporary research the authors synthesize what diverse social scientists have learned about the long-term and continual nature of wilderness participation and its impact on the formation of identity. The thrust of the paper points researchers, planners, and managers in non-traditional directions and reframes goals and objectives for visitor planning and management in wilderness and other protected areas. (shrink)

Why does Hegel change “Dreaming Soul” to “Feeling Soul” in the 1830 edition of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit? By tracing the content of the Dreaming Soul section, through Hegel’s 1794 manuscript on psychology, to sources such as C.P. Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, the paper shows how the section embraces a late Enlightenment mission: combating supposedly supernatural expressions of spiritual enthrallment by explaining them as pathological conditions of the soul. Responding to perceived attacks on the 1827 edition of the Encyclopedia (...) by Schleiermacher, Hegel alters the section and its heading, thereby including the pastor’s religion of feeling in the pathology of Schwärmerei. (shrink)

This short paper defends Oliver Williamson’s (1993) claim that talk of trust is ‘redundant at best and can be misleading’ when trust is defined as a form of calculated risk (p. 463). And this paper accepts Williamson’s claim that ‘Calculative trust is a contradiction in terms’ (p. 463). But the present paper defends a conception of genuine, non-calculative trust that is compatible with calculative considerations and calculative antecedents. This conception of trust creates space for genuine (non-calculative) trust relationships in the (...) economic order—in which calculative considerations and antecedents (most often) play an essential role. (shrink)

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where ‘theory of mind’ and moral judgment meet. Preschool children’s judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side-effect is brought about 'on purpose' when the side-effect itself is morally bad but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of ‘on-purpose’ (as opposed to purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentional action are usually (...) assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative — even in preschoolers — challenges current understanding. Young children’s judgments regarding foreseen side-effects depend upon whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side-effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the ‘theory of mind’ concept, NOT CARE THAT P, children show the side-effect effect.idea.. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen attempts to provide a case for socialism that takes into consideration the reasons why socialism is desirable and some of the problems for its feasibility. He finds that the kind of community sentiment that socialism requires is possible, but the devices of social organization that can facilitate the growth of socialist sentiment along with the effective transmission of information are not currently known. In short, Cohen thinks social scientists and philosophers need to find out how to (...) harness the information transmission capacity of market exchange without the motivational encouragement of rapacious self-interest that market exchange fosters. This paper argues that Cohen’s appraisal of the ineffectiveness of informational transmission in socialist planned economies in incorrect. A democratically planned socialist economy can serve as the basis for the fostering of the socialist community sentiment that Cohen advocates along with the required transmission of economic information. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen’s critique of the Rawlsian difference principle points out an inconsistency in its presentation. The initial equality decided by the participants in the original position under the veil of ignorance is not preserved by the inequality sanctioned by the difference principle. Cohen shows how the breakdown of the initial equality of the original position prevents the desired results of the Rawlsian system from being realized. Cohen argues that an egalitarian ethos is required within a society for (...) equality preserving economic distributions and Pareto superior outcomes to occur. Nonetheless, Cohen’s analysis of Rawls misses the ultimate cause of inequality, which is the dynamics of capital accumulation. An egalitarian ethos is only possible if there is a socialist mode of production to facilitate its development. Additionally, Cohen’s critique of Rawlsian constructivism through an argument for intuitionism does not address the natural-material existence of human beings. This existence must be considered for any advantageous social formation. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

A response to critical commentaries. Crookston begins her commentary by noting that my book would have been better with answers to “the following three questions: (1) Why is the harm principle the right principle upon which to base a theory of toleration? (2) How is Cohen thinking of the concept of volenti? (p. x ) Is interference (i.e., the abandonment of toleration) ever morally required by the harm principle?” (p. x ). She is right, and I address these questions (...) below in Sections 2, 3, and 4. That is the bulk of this essay. I then turn to Kelley's issues in Sections 6, 7, and 8; these have to do with “the link between toleration and relativism,” the way I distinguish “the concepts of toleration and endurance,” and a “question about moral toleration” (p. x ). Despite much agreement, there are points of contention and I try to make my position clearer in response . (shrink)

The four volume work of which this book is a part has been praised as one of the great monuments of theoretical scholarship in sociology of the century. The praise has come largely from the older generation of students of Parsons and Merton. A great deal of dispraise has come from Alexander's own generation. Alan Sica's (1983) brilliant, biting review of Volume I speaks for many of Alexander's peers. Volume II is likely to be even more controversial. This volume begins (...) the substantive task of the text, the reinterpretation of the 'theoretical logic' of the classical sociologists, a reinterpretation governed by the intention of transcending the errors and limitations of the 'presuppositional' reasoning of the classical thinkers. For Alexander's sociological audience the second volume is the beginning of what really counts, and Volume II is indeed quite a different affair from the first, 'philosophical' volume: the prose tightens, and the air of getting down to work is palpable. (shrink)

Cohen’s hostility to Rawls’ justification of the Difference Principle by social facts spawned Cohen’s general thesis that ultimate principles of justice and morality are fact-insensitive, but explain how any fact-sensitive principle is grounded in facts. The problem with this thesis, however, is that when facts F ground principle P, reformulating this relation as the "fact-insensitive" conditional “If F, then P” is trivial and thus explanatorily impotent. Explanatory, hence justificatory, force derives either from subsumption under more general principles, or (...) precisely exhibiting value in light of relevant (actual or hypothetical) facts. In examples where no subsumption occurs, actual facts trivially become hypothetical facts in "fact-insensitive" conditionals, an empty formalism. Indeed, Rawls’ grounding of principles of justice in “conditions of life” can easily be reformulated as a conditional principle “sensitive” only to hypothetical such conditions, and thus formally fact-insensitive in Cohen's sense, for all Cohen’s ire against Rawls’s grounding.Moreover, any plausible “ultimate fact-insensitive principle” must be intricately qualified, which tacit ceteris paribus clauses mask. Each qualification implies prioritisation of one principle over another in conceivable circumstances, and wherever the now qualified principle is given scope, that too implies prioritisation over competing principles in typical circumstances. Any principle is thus sensitive to conceivable circumstances of application, as recognised by more sophisticated intuitionisms. Non-trivial ultimate principles – luck egalitarianism, act utilitarianism, etc. - require defense, which inevitably involves showing how they best interpret and respond to facts about human needs, goals, and capacities in predictable circumstances. Finally, the substantive debate between Rawls and Cohen about which facts are relevant to the DP is only obscured by the doctrine of fact-insensitivity. (shrink)

John P. Burgess is the John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Logic and Methodology program at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Jack H. Silver with a thesis on descriptive set theory. He is a very distinguished and influential philosopher of mathematics. He has written several books: A Subject with No Object (with G. Rosen, Oxford University Press, 1997), Computability and Logic (with G. Boolos and R. (...) class='Hi'>Jeffrey, 5th ed., Cambridge University Press, 2007), Fixing Frege (Princeton University Press, 2005), Mathematics, Models, and Modality (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Philosophical Logic (Princeton University Press, 2009), Truth (with A. G. Burgess, Princeton University Press, 2011), Saul Kripke: Puzzles & Mysteries (Polity Press, 2012), Rigor & Structure (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Set Theory (Cambridge Elements, Forthcoming). In this interview, Professor Burgess talks about how his interests in mathematics and philosophy developed and relate to each other. He then answers questions about specific themes of his philosophical work, with a focus on issues pertaining to philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Monsters lurk within mathematical as well as literary haunts. I propose to trace some pathways between these two monstrous habitats. I start from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s influential account of monster culture and explore how well mathematical monsters fit each of his seven theses. The mathematical monsters I discuss are drawn primarily from three distinct but overlapping domains. Firstly, late nineteenth-century mathematicians made numerous unsettling discoveries that threatened their understanding of their own discipline and challenged their intuitions. The great (...) French mathematician Henri Poincaré characterised these anomalies as ‘monsters’, a name that stuck. Secondly, the twentieth-century philosopher Imre Lakatos composed a seminal work on the nature of mathematical proof, in which monsters play a conspicuous role. Lakatos coined such terms as ‘monster-barring’ and ‘monster-adjusting’ to describe strategies for dealing with entities whose properties seem to falsify a conjecture. Thirdly, and most recently, mathematicians dubbed the largest of the sporadic groups ‘the Monster’, because of its vast size and uncanny properties, and because its existence was suspected long before it could be confirmed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we discuss the benefits of Bayesian statistics and how to utilize them in studies of moral education. To demonstrate concrete examples of the applications of Bayesian statistics to studies of moral education, we reanalyzed two data sets previously collected: one small data set collected from a moral educational intervention experiment, and one big data set from a large-scale Defining Issues Test-2 survey. The results suggest that Bayesian analysis of data sets collected from moral educational studies can provide (...) additional useful statistical information, particularly that associated with the strength of evidence supporting alternative hypotheses, which has not been provided by the classical frequentist approach focusing on P-values. Finally, we introduce several practical guidelines pertaining to how to utilize Bayesian statistics, including the utilization of newly developed free statistical software, Jeffrey’s Amazing Statistics Program, and thresholding based on Bayes Factors, to scholars in the field of moral education. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the difficulties of high school students in bridging their computational understanding with their visualization skills in understanding the notion of the limits in their calculus class. This research used a pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design research on 62 grade 10 students enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Engineering Program (STEP) in one of the public high schools in Zamboanga del Sur, Philippines. A series of remedial sessions were given to help them understand the function values, one-sided (...) limits, limits of a function, and its discontinuities with the aid of the GeoGebra. Results revealed that there is a significant improvement in their mathematics performance before and after the remediation, t(61) = -19.99, p<.05. The real-time feedback provided by the drawing interface of GeoGebra has provided the students the insights into how objects behave in geometrical space, bridging their understanding in locating the values shown by the computational algebraic processes. Additionally, the significant difference in the achievement reveals a large effect size (Cohen’s =2.54) which could be accounted for by the remediation using interactive activities in the GeoGebra. (shrink)

Our main aims in this paper is to discuss and criticise the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified (a thesis we label Standard Phenomenal Conservatism). This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, we embed it, first, in a (...) probabilistic framework in which updating on new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. We spell out problems for both views, and then generalize some of these to non-probabilistic frameworks. The main theme of our discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming (or experience) should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating on (...) new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. The article spells out problems for both views, and then generalizes some of these to nonprobabilistic frameworks. The main theme of the discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

This paper was presented at the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium on “Knowledge and Belief”, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria (3rd - 10th August 2003). The focus of study is a dialogue situation in which one party holds that P while the other holds that ~P. A simple way to establish harmony between the parties in dialogue is to insist that each should include the other’s point of view. This is unsatisfactory because it results in an inconsistent set of beliefs. Clarity is (...) essential, therefore, on how to deal with inconsistency. In this paper, I will proceed in two steps. In the first, I will indicate how some attempts at trying to manage contradictions in terms of ontology remain unsatisfactory. In the second step, I will introduce and evaluate another way in terms of belief and acceptance. I make an original application of L.J. Cohen’s distinction between belief and acceptance, the former being a matter of feeling, the latter a matter of policy in reasoning. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that our initial intuitions regarding knowledge attributions in stakes-shifting cases (e.g., Cohen’s Airport) are best explained by standards variantism, the view that the standards for knowledge may vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. Against standards variantism, I argue that no prominent account of the standards for knowledge can explain our intuitions regarding stakes-shifting cases. I argue that the only way to preserve our initial intuitions regarding such cases is to endorse position variantism, the (...) view that one’s epistemic position may vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. Some had argued that epistemic position is incompatible with intellectualism. In reply, I point out that position variantism and intellectualism are compatible, if one’s truth-relevant factors with respect to p can vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. (shrink)

Carl Hempel (1965) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Richard Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive (...) causal explanation is described and defended. It provides a new limit on what probabilistic hypotheses can explain; the limitation is that P cannot explain why E is true rather than A if P assign E a probability that is less than or equal to the probability that P assigns to A. The view entails that a true deterministic theory and a true probabilistic theory that apply to the same explanandum partition are such that the deterministic theory explains all the true contrastive propositions constructable from that partition, whereas the probabilistic theory often fails to do so. (shrink)

I examined the proposition that there are psychological limits on what scientific problems can be solved, and that these limits may be based on a failure to be able to produce imagable, observation-based models for any possible solution, a position suggested by philosopher Colin McGinn in an argument attempting to prove that the mind-body problem is unsolvable. I examined another likely candidate for an unsolvable problem -- the ultimate origin of the universe (i.e., what might have preceded the Big Bang (...) or any other starting point; why there should be something rather than nothing) -- by exploring the reasoning of physicists about this problem and measuring visual imagery frequency and vividness, with the expectation that those who most believed the problem unsolvable would be more frequent/vivid imagers and therefore more affected by the apparent impossibility of producing an imagable solution. Eight physicists were interviewed and imagery frequency and vividness measurements performed using Cohen & Saslona's IDQ-IHS and Marks's VVIQ, respectively. All subjects considered the problem unsolvable within today's physics and all but one thought the problem still meaningful, though none were optimistic about a solution. The one subject who dismissed the problem had the lowest imagery frequency score, and there was also a significant rank order correlation (r = 0.83, p < .02) between degree of belief in problem unsolvability (extended to include viewing the problem as meaningful and not already solved) and a composite imagery frequency/vividness score, though the sample was too small to control for some possible confounding factors. (shrink)

Many epistemologists hold that an agent can come to justifiably believe that p is true by seeing that it appears that p is true, without having any antecedent reason to believe that visual impressions are generally reliable. Certain reliabilists think this, at least if the agent’s vision is generally reliable. And it is a central tenet of dogmatism (as described by Pryor (2000) and Pryor (2004)) that this is possible. Against these positions it has been argued (e.g. by Cohen (...) (2005) and White (2006)) that this violates some principles from probabilistic learning theory. To see the problem, let’s note what the dogmatist thinks we can learn by paying attention to how things appear. (The reliabilist says the same things, but we’ll focus on the dogmatist.) Suppose an agent receives an appearance that p, and comes to believe that p. Letting Ap be the proposition that it appears to the agent that p, and → be the material implication, we can say that the agent learns that p, and hence is in a position to infer Ap → p, once they receive the evidence Ap.1 This is surprising, because we can prove the following. (shrink)

We develop and apply a multi-dimensional conception of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial condition fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. In (...) the context of the latter issue, we argue that the recently formulated trans-Planckian censorship conjecture leads to a trade-off for inflationary models between dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy. We conclude with the suggestion that explanatory preference with regard to the different dimensions of depth is best understood in terms of differing attitudes towards heuristics for future model building. (shrink)

La Hipótesis del Continuo (HC) es la suposición de que dado el primer transfinito, ℵ0 , el cardinal de los naturales; el siguiente cardinal, ℵ1 , es el cardinal de los números reales. La Hipótesis Generalizada del Continuo es que dado un transfinito ℵn , el siguiente transfinito es el conjunto potencia de dicho transfinito ℵn+1 = P(ℵn). Desde la teoría intuitiva de conjuntos cantoriana se ha tratado conocer si en dicha teoría se sigue HC. Sin embargo Cantor no pudo (...) probar HC. Tiempo después Gödel y Cohen probarán que HC es independiente a la teoría de conjuntos ZF ó ZFC, si se acepta eleccíon. Después del trabajo de Cohen, Gödel planteo un programa para extender, axiomáticamente, ZFC con el cual se pudiera conocer sí en ZFC HC se sigue, o se sigue ¬HC. Hoy en día aun se desconoce una extensíon HC ó ¬HC en ZFC. Gutiérrez plantea que de hecho posiblemente hoy en día no hay extensíon axiomática filosóficamente adecuada que pueda determinar si en ZFC se sigue HC ó ¬HC. Desde la perspectiva de Gutiérrez, dado que no existe una extensíon adecuada en ZFC para determinar HC, se puede decir que HC es absolutamente indecidible. Esta conferencia se tratará de entender los conceptos de absoluta indecidibilidad planteada por Gutiérrez, el porqué considera que sucede esto con respecto a HC en ZFC y algunas posibles soluciones que podrían explorarse. (shrink)

Van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin problem asks how one ought to update one's credence in A upon receiving evidence of the sort ``A may or may not obtain, but B is k times likelier than C'', where {A,B,C} is a partition. Van Fraassen's solution, in the limiting case of increasing k, recommends a posterior converging to the probability of A conditional on A union B, where P is one's prior probability function. Grove and Halpern, and more recently Douven and Romeijn, have (...) argued that one ought to leave credence in A unchanged, i.e. fixed at P(A). We argue that while the former approach is superior, it brings about a Reflection violation due in part to neglect of a ``regression to the mean'' phenomenon, whereby when C is eliminated by random evidence that leaves A and B alive, the ratio P(A):P(B) ought to drift in the direction of 1:1. (shrink)

Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? *Fanaticism* says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I consider two related recent arguments for Fanaticism: Beckstead and Thomas's argument from *strange dependence on space and time*, and (...) Wilkinson's *Indology* argument. While both arguments are instructive, neither is persuasive. In fact, the general principles that underwrite the arguments (a *separability* principle in the first case, and a *reflection* principle in the second) are *inconsistent* with Fanaticism. In both cases, though, it is possible to rehabilitate arguments for Fanaticism based on restricted versions of those principles. The situation is unstable: plausible general principles tell *against* Fanaticism, but restrictions of those same principles (with strengthened auxiliary assumptions) *support* Fanaticism. All of the consistent views that emerge are very strange. (shrink)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a commonly occurring neuropsychiatric condition characterized by bothersome intrusive thoughts and urges that frequently lead to repetitive dysfunctional behaviours such as excessive handwashing. There are well-documented alterations in cerebral function which appear to be closely related to the manifestation of these symptoms. Controlled studies of cognitive-behavioural therapy techniques utilizing the active refocusing of attention away from the intrusive phenomena of OCD and onto adaptive alternative activities have demonstrated both significant improvements in clinical symptoms and systematic changes in (...) the pathological brain circuitry associated with them. Careful investigation of the relationships between the experiential and putative neurophysiological processes involved in these changes can offer useful insights into volitional aspects of cerebral function. (shrink)

Learner’s attitude towards modular distance learning catches uncertainties as a world crisis occurs up to this point. As self-learning modules (SLMs) become a supplemental means of learning in new normal education, this study investigated efficiency towards the learners’ attitude and performance. Specifically, the study described the learners’ profile and their attitude and performance towards SLMs. It also ascertained the relationship between the learner’s profile with their attitude and performance, as well as the relationship between attitude and performance relevant to SLMs. (...) A descriptive-correlational research design was employed in the study with 88 non-randomly chosen participants from secondary schools in West Philippines. The learners’ GWA (general weighted average) was used to determine their performance and a survey questionnaire for their profile and attitude. Frequency counts, percentage, and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient were used to analyze the data gathered with the aid of Jamovi software. Results revealed a strong correlation between attitude and performance, but there was no link between learner’s attitude and performance as to the learner’s profile. It was affirmed that attitude is a compelling factor that is related with performance. Hence, this research has broader ramifications that can direct the Bureau of Learning Delivery to orient the module writers to further contextualize the learning materials that can compound learner’s disposition and academic performance. (shrink)

A single mother is a person who is accountable for raising their children alone because they do not have a husband or live-in partner. Single mothers claim to have no co-parenting relationships at all, comparing single parents to those who are married, cohabiting, or without children, single parents experience the worst work-life balance. A single parent may feel overwhelmed by the demands of juggling child care, a career, paying bills, and maintaining household responsibilities. Single-parent households frequently deal with several extra (...) obligations and possible complications that other families would not. The study also emphasizes the difficulties and coping mechanisms faced by contractual single parents as well as their lived experiences. The study's findings, which were based on an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, were as follows: (1) Work-life balance can be difficult for single parents. They struggle to keep their jobs while taking care of their family because they are the only ones in charge of the children. (2) Single contractual mothers face particular difficulties due to a lack of resources for basic expenses. (3) Contractual single women lean on their kids, the good people in their lives, and their faith in God to get through problems. (shrink)

The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic (...) Objection applies to presentism as much as to theories like the growing block, the safety version does not overgeneralize this way. Second, the Epistemic Objection does generalize in a different, overlooked way. The safety objection is a serious problem for a widely held combination of views: “propositional temporalism” together with “metaphysical eternalism”. (shrink)

Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

The integration of Internet Protocol and Embedded Systems can enhance the communication platform. This paper describes the emerging smart technologies based on Internet of Things (IOT) and internet protocols along with embedded systems for monitoring and controlling smart devices with the help of WiFi technology and web applications. The internet protocol (IP) address has been assigned to the things to control and operate the devices via remote network that facilitates the interoperability and end-to-end communication among various devices c,onnected over a (...) network. The HTTP POST and HTTP GET command that supports the RESTful service have been used to ensure the transmission and reception of packets between the IOT Gateway and Cloud Database. The emerging smart technologies based on the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitated features like automation, controllability, interconnectivity, reliability which in turn turn paved the way for a wide range of acceptance amongst the masses. The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought in many new emerging technologies into varoius field like our daily lives, industry, agricultural sector, and many more. The world is experiencing the explosive growth with the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) these years. The potential growth of IoT is enoromous which is evidenced by all the human beings in our day to day life. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a partial rehabilitation of Cohen’s Kant interpretation. In particular, I will focus on the center of Cohen’s interpretation in KTE, reflected in the title itself: his interpretation of Kant’s concept of experience. “Kant hat einen neuen Begriff der Erfahrung entdeckt,”7 Cohen writes at the opening of the first edition of KTE (henceforth, KTE1), and while the exact nature of that new concept of experience is hard to pin down in the 1871 edition, (...) he states it succinctly in the second edition (henceforth KTE2): experience is Newtonian mathematical natural science.8 While this equation of experience with mathematical natural science has few contemporary defenders, I believe it is substantially correct, with one important qualification. Kant uses the term Erfahrung in a number of different senses in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (henceforth, KrV). I will argue that a central, and neglected, sense of that key technical term aligns with Cohen’s reading; what Kant sometimes refers to as ‘universal experience’ (sometimes, simply ‘experience’) is, in broad outlines, correctly interpreted by Cohen as mathematical natural science. (shrink)

“There are no gaps in logical space,” David Lewis writes, giving voice to sentiment shared by many philosophers. But different natural ways of trying to make this sentiment precise turn out to conflict with one another. One is a *pattern* idea: “Any pattern of instantiation is metaphysically possible.” Another is a *cut and paste* idea: “For any objects in any worlds, there exists a world that contains any number of duplicates of all of those objects.” We use resources from model (...) theory to show the inconsistency of certain packages of combinatorial principles and the consistency of others. (shrink)

Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...) to have semantic values relative to the context. Many philosophers and linguists think that there is a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language that goes well beyond the pure indexicals and supplementives like ‘he’. Constructions/expressions that are good candidates for being contextually sensitive include: quantifiers, gradable adjectives including “predicates of personal taste”, modals, conditionals, possessives and relational expressions taking implicit arguments. It would appear that in none of these cases does the expression/construction in question have a context independent meaning that when placed in context suffices to secure a semantic value for the expression/construction in the context. In each case, some sort of supplementation is required to do this. Hence, all these expressions are supplementives in my sense. For a given supplementive, the question arises as to what the mechanism is for supplementing its conventional meanings in context so as to secure a semantic value for it in context. That is, what form does the supplementation take? The question also arises as to whether different supplementives require different kinds of supplementation. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. So we can put our two questions thus: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? In the present work, I sketch the metasemantics I formulated for demonstratives in earlier work. Next, I briefly consider a number of other supplementives that I think the metasemantics I propose plausibly applies to and explain why I think that. Finally, I consider the prospects for extending the account to all supplementives. In so doing, I take up arguments due to Michael Glanzberg to the effect that supplementives are governed by two different metasemantics and attempt to respond to them. (shrink)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting (...) the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness. (shrink)

People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic---but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the *Countable Sure Thing Principle*, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call *Countable (...) Independence*. In violating these principles, they display foibles like those of people who deviate from standard expected utility theory in more mundane cases: they choose dominated strategies, pay to avoid information, and reject expert advice. We precisely characterize the preference relations that satisfy Countable Independence in several equivalent ways: a structural constraint on preferences, a representation theorem, and the principle we began with, that every prospect has a value that some outcome could have. (shrink)

We prove a representation theorem for preference relations over countably infinite lotteries that satisfy a generalized form of the Independence axiom, without assuming Continuity. The representing space consists of lexicographically ordered transfinite sequences of bounded real numbers. This result is generalized to preference orders on abstract superconvex spaces.

In the context of discovery-oriented hypothesis testing research, behavioral scientists widely accept a convention for false positive (α) and false negative error rates (β) proposed by Jacob Cohen, who deemed the general relative seriousness of the antecedently accepted α = 0.05 to be matched by β = 0.20. Cohen’s convention not only ignores contexts of hypothesis testing where the more serious error is the β-error. Cohen’s convention also implies for discovery-oriented hypothesis testing research that a statistically significant (...) observed effect is four times more probable to be a mistaken discovery than for a statistically significant true observed effect to be independently replicable. In the long run, Cohen’s convention thus is epistemically harmful to the development of a progressive science of human behavior, making its acceptance crucial in explaining the replication crisis in behavioral science. The balance between α- and β-errors generally ought to be struck using both epistemic and practical considerations. Yet epistemic considerations alone imply that making a genuine contribution to the body of knowledge in behavioral science requires error rates that are not only small but also symmetrical. (shrink)

Decision theorists widely accept a stochastic dominance principle: roughly, if a risky prospect A is at least as probable as another prospect B to result in something at least as good, then A is at least as good as B. Recently, philosophers have applied this principle even in contexts where the values of possible outcomes do not have the structure of the real numbers: this includes cases of incommensurable values and cases of infinite values. But in these contexts the usual (...) formulation of stochastic dominance is wrong. We show this with several counterexamples. Still, the motivating idea behind stochastic dominance is a good one: it is supposed to provide a way of applying dominance reasoning in the stochastic context of probability distributions. We give two new formulations of stochastic dominance that are more faithful to this guiding idea, and prove that they are equivalent. (shrink)

Mereological nihilism is the philosophical position that there are no items that have parts. If there are no items with parts then the only items that exist are partless fundamental particles, such as the true atoms (also called philosophical atoms) theorized to exist by some ancient philosophers, some contemporary physicists, and some contemporary philosophers. With several novel arguments I show that mereological nihilism is the correct theory of reality. I will also discuss strong similarities that mereological nihilism has with empirical (...) results in quantum physics. And I will discuss how mereological nihilism vindicates a few other theories, such as a very specific theory of philosophical atomism, which I will call quantum abstract atomism. I will show that mereological nihilism also is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids the problems of other interpretations, such as the widely known, metaphysically generated, quantum paradoxes of quantum physics, which ironically are typically accepted as facts about reality. I will also show why it is very surprising that mereological nihilism is not a widely held theory, and not the premier theory in philosophy. (shrink)

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...) object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory. (shrink)

The counterpart theorist has a problem: there is no obvious way to understand talk about actuality in terms of counterparts. Fara and Williamson have charged that this obstacle cannot be overcome. Here I defend the counterpart theorist by offering systematic interpretations of a quantified modal language that includes an actuality operator. Centrally, I disentangle the counterpart relation from a related notion, a ‘representation relation’. The relation of possible things to the actual things they represent is variable, and an adequate account (...) of modal language must keep track of the way it is systematically shifted by modal operators. I apply my account to resolve several puzzles about counterparts and actuality. In technical appendices, I prove some important logical results about this ‘representational’ counterpart system and its relationship to other modal systems. (shrink)

The existence of mereological sums can be derived from an abstraction principle in a way analogous to numbers. I draw lessons for the thesis that “composition is innocent” from neo-Fregeanism in the philosophy of mathematics.

In this paper, I defend what may seem a surprising view: that John Stuart Mill’s famous harm principle would, if taken to be what justifies government action, disallow the existence of corporations. My claim is not that harmful activities of currently existing corporations warrants their losing corporate status according to the harm principle. The claim, rather, is that taken strictly, the harm principle and the legal possibility of incorporation are mutually exclusive. This view may be surprising—and I do not at (...) all mean to attribute it to Mill—but if I am right, it should be obvious. It should also encourage us to think more about the nature of the markets within which business occurs. (shrink)

We consider how an epistemic network might self-assemble from the ritualization of the individual decisions of simple heterogeneous agents. In such evolved social networks, inquirers may be significantly more successful than they could be investigating nature on their own. The evolved network may also dramatically lower the epistemic risk faced by even the most talented inquirers. We consider networks that self-assemble in the context of both perfect and imperfect communication and compare the behaviour of inquirers in each. This provides a (...) step in bringing together two new and developing research programs, the theory of self-assembling games and the theory of network epistemology. (shrink)

The article reflects on where AI is headed and the world along with it, considering trust, ethics and safety. Implicit in artificial thinking and doomsday appraisals is the engineered divorce from reality of sublime human embodiment. Jeffrey White, Dietrich Brandt, Jan Soeffner, and Larry Stapleton, four scholars associated with AI & Society, address these issues, and more, in the following exchange.