Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations—i.e., causal generalizations that remain true in a wide range of background circumstances. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues are lumped together under the heading of `stability’. We call these two virtues breadth and guidance respectively. In our view, these two virtues are importantly distinct, but this fact is neglected or at least under-appreciated in the literature on stability. We argue that an adequate (...) theory of explanatory goodness should recognize breadth and guidance as distinct virtues, as breadth and guidance track different ideals of explanation, satisfy different cognitive and pragmatic ends, and play different theoretical roles in helping us understand the explanatory value of mechanisms. Thus keeping track of the distinction between these two forms of stability yields a more accurate and perspicuous picture of the role that stability considerations play in explanation. (shrink)

This paper examines the particular relevance of feminist critiques of epistemic authority in contexts of institutionalized violence. Reading feminist criticism of “experts” together with theorists of institutionalized violence, Stone-Mediatore argues that typical expert modes of thinking are incapable of rigorous knowledge of institutionalized violence because such knowledge requires a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained experts are ill-suited. The author demonstrates the limitations of “expert” modes of thinking with reference to writings on the Iraq war by Michael Ignatieff (...) and Fouad Ajami. Finally, the author turns to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers--to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in knowledge of war and other forms of structural violence. (shrink)

The ways in which we exercise intentional agency are varied. I take the domain of intentional agency to include all that we intentionally do versus what merely happens to us. So the scope of our intentional agency is not limited to intentional action. One can also exercise some intentional agency in omitting to act and, importantly, in producing the intentional outcome of an intentional action. So, for instance, when an agent is dieting, there is an exercise of agency both with (...) respect to the agent’s actions and omissions that constitute her dieting behavior and in achieving the intended outcome of losing weight. In our mental lives we exercise intentional agency both in performing mental actions and when we intentionally produce certain outcomes at which our mental actions are aimed. The nature and scope of our intentional agency in our mental lives with respect to controlling the acquisition of mental states such as belief, desire, and intention is a topic that is of interest in its own right. In this essay, I will focus solely on our control over coming to believe. Understanding what sort of control we have our beliefs has far-reaching implications. For instance, theorizing about self-deception and wishful thinking is aided by theorizing about what if any intentional agency we can exercise with respect to acquiring beliefs. Another often mentioned concern that motivates thinking about doxastic agency comes from religion (when conversion requires a change of belief). We also hold persons morally and epistemically responsible for beliefs they have or fail to have. Finally, some deontological theories of epistemic justification require that agents be able to exercise a robust form of doxastic control. Fruitful work on any of these problems requires that we have an account of our intentional agency in acquiring beliefs. There are at least three loci of doxastic control. The first is over acquiring beliefs. The second is over maintaining beliefs. The third is over how we use our beliefs. I am chiefly concerned with the first locus of doxastic control in this essay, but I will say something about the second locus along the way. Also, I will only consider one way we might exercise control over acquiring beliefs. Specifically, I will present an argument against direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV). By “DDV” I mean to refer to the thesis that it is conceptually possible for agents to consciously exercise the same sort of direct voluntary control over coming to acquire a doxastic attitude—such as belief, suspension of belief, and disbelief—that they exercise over uncontroversial basic actions. If DDV is correct, then coming to believe can be a basic action-type. DDV, or something very close to it, was Bernard Williams’ target in his 1973 paper, “Deciding to Believe.” Williams’s argument is widely regarded as having been a failure. But I think that Williams was on to something in his paper. Hence, in this paper, while I do not attempt to resurrect Williams’s argument, I develop and defend a revised argument for a thesis that is quite close to Williams’s. I will proceed as follows. First, I will discuss Bernard Williams’ (1973) failed attempt at showing that DDV is conceptually impossible. This will be followed by a discussion of some constraints on our belief-forming activities. I will then clarify my target a bit more than Williams does in his original paper. Finally, I will present my own argument against the conceptual possibility of DDV. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and (...) terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data. (shrink)

In his recent book, The Universe As We Find It, John Heil offers an updated account of his two-category ontology. One of his major goals is to avoid including relations in his basic ontology. While there can still be true claims positing relations, such as those of the form “x is taller than y” and “x causes y,” they will be true in virtue of substances and their monadic, non-relational properties. That is, Heil’s two-category ontology is deployed to provide non-relational (...) truthmakers for relational truths. This paper challenges the success of Heil’s project with respect to causation. The arguments here are not entirely negative, however. An option is made available to Heil’s ontology so that it might, at least to some extent, regain non-relational causings. (shrink)

We will explicate Cantor’s principle of set existence using the Gödelian intensional notion of absolute provability and John Burgess’ plural logical concept of set formation. From this Cantorian Comprehension principle we will derive a conditional result about the question whether there are any absolutely unprovable mathematical truths. Finally, we will discuss the philosophical significance of the conditional result.

This article discusses various dangers that accompany the supposedly benign methods in behavioral evoltutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that fall under the framework of "methodological adaptationism." A "Logic of Research Questions" is proposed that aids in clarifying the reasoning problems that arise due to the framework under critique. The live, and widely practiced, " evolutionary factors" framework is offered as the key comparison and alternative. The article goes beyond the traditional critique of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, to (...) present problems such as the disappearance of evidence, the mishandling of the null hypothesis, and failures in scientific reasoning, exemplified by a case from human behavioral ecology. In conclusion the paper shows that "methodological adaptationism" does not deserve its benign reputation. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines or software that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are designed for include, Speech, recognition, Learning, Planning and Problem solving. Deep learning is a collection of algorithms used in machine learning, It is part of a broad family of methods used for machine learning that are based on learning representations of data. Deep learning is a technique used (...) to produce Pneumonia detection and classification models using x-ray imaging for rapid and easy detection and identification of pneumonia. In this thesis, we review ways and mechanisms to use deep learning techniques to produce a model for Pneumonia detection. The goal is find a good and effective way to detect pneumonia based on X-rays to help the chest doctor in decision-making easily and accuracy and speed. The model will be designed and implemented, including both Dataset of image and Pneumonia detection through the use of Deep learning algorithms based on neural networks. The test and evaluation will be applied to a range of chest x-ray images and the results will be presented in detail and discussed. This thesis uses deep learning to detect pneumonia and its classification. (shrink)

I discuss two types of evidential problems with the most widely touted experiments in evolutionary psychology, those performed by Leda Cosmides and interpreted by Cosmides and John Tooby. First, and despite Cosmides and Tooby's claims to the contrary, these experiments don't fulfil the standards of evidence of evolutionary biology. Second Cosmides and Tooby claim to have performed a crucial experiment, and to have eliminated rival approaches. Though they claim that their results are consistent with their theory but contradictory to the (...) leading non-evolutionary alternative, Pragmatic Reasoning Schemas theory, I argue that this claim is unsupported. In addition, some of Cosmides and Tooby's interpretations arise from misguided and simplistic understandings of evolutionary biology. While I endorse the incorporation of evolutionary approaches into psychology, I reject the claims of Cosmides and Tooby that a modular approach is the only one supported by evolutionary biology. Lewontin's critical examinations of the applications of adaptationist thinking provide a background of evidentiary standards against which to view the currently fashionable claims of evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The emphasis on the limitations of objectivity, in specific guises and networks, has been a continuing theme of contemporary analytic philosophy for the past few decades. The popular sport of baiting feminist philosophers — into pointing to what's left out of objective knowledge, or into describing what methods, exactly, they would offer to replace the powerful objective methods grounding scientific knowledge — embodies a blatant double standard which has the effect of constantly putting feminist epistemologists on the defensive, on the (...) fringes, on the run.This strategy can only work if objectivity is transparent, simple, stable, and clear in its meaning. It most certainly is not. In fact, taking objectivity as a sort of beautiful primitive, self-evident in its value, and all-powerful in its revelatory power, requires careless philosophy, and the best workers in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science have made reworked definitions of objectivity absolutely central to their own projects. In fact, classic feminist concerns with exploring the impact of sex and gender on knowledge, understanding, and other relations between human beings and the rest of the world fall squarely within the sort of human and social settings thatare already considered central in most current analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. I argue that the burden of proof is clearly on those who wish toreject the centrality and relevance of sex and gender to our most fundamental philosophical work on knowledge and reality. (shrink)

Fragmentalism was first introduced by Kit Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’. According to fragmentalism, reality is an inherently perspectival place that exhibits a fragmented structure. The current paper defends the fragmentalist interpretation of the special theory of relativity, which Fine briefly considers in his paper. The fragmentalist interpretation makes room for genuine facts regarding absolute simultaneity, duration and length. One might worry that positing such variant properties is a turn for the worse in terms of theoretical virtues because such (...) properties are not involved in physical explanations and hence theoretically redundant. It will be argued that this is not right: if variant properties are indeed instantiated, they will also be involved in straightforward physical explanations and hence not explanatorily redundant. Hofweber and Lange, in their ‘Fine’s Fragmentalist Interpretation of Special Relativity’, object that the fragmentalist interpretation is in tension with the right explanation of the Lorentz transformations. It will be argued that their objection targets an inessential aspect of the fragmentalist framework and fails to raise any serious problem for the fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity. (shrink)

Academic institutions migrated to modular teaching-learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the quality of the pedagogical innovations employed, the study determined the students’ evaluation of the faculty prepared instructional modules for the courses they enrolled in during the first and second semesters of Academic Year 2020-2021. Employing a descriptive-correlational research design, the study was participated by 644 students from three colleges who were then available during the data gathering. Data gathered through online surveys were then analyzed using descriptive statistics (...) and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient utilizing jamovi software. Results revealed that the faculty-prepared instructional modules were acceptable and satisfactory to the students. Besides, the students' evaluation of the instructional modules was positively related to their level of satisfaction. Still, the students recommended that a review of the modules be done before sending the modules; a more extended time allotment is considered, and sufficient concrete examples are given in the modules. With this, the faculty concerned are encouraged to review the phases involved in the design, development, and distribution of the instructional modules to make them highly acceptable and very satisfactory to the students while maintaining the quality of both the content and aesthetics of the learning materials. Considering the study’s limitations, further endeavors may be carried out to validate this pedagogical innovation. (shrink)

I argue that four of the fundamental claims of those calling themselves `genic pluralists'Philip Kitcher, Kim Sterelny, and Ken Watersare defective. First, they claim that once genic selectionism is recognized, the units of selection problems will be dissolved. Second, Sterelny and Kitcher claim that there are no targets of selection. Third, Sterelny, Kitcher, and Waters claim that they have a concept of genic causation that allows them to give independent genic causal accounts of all selection processes. I argue that each (...) one of these claims is either false or misleading. Moreover, the challenge that arises from the availability of genic causal accounts, namely, the inability to choose on rational grounds among genic and higher-level accounts, is unsupported. (shrink)

Some propositions are more epistemically important than others. Further, how important a proposition is is often a contingent matter—some propositions count more in some worlds than in others. Epistemic Utility Theory cannot accommodate this fact, at least not in any standard way. For EUT to be successful, legitimate measures of epistemic utility must be proper, i.e., every probability function must assign itself maximum expected utility. Once we vary the importance of propositions across worlds, however, normal measures of epistemic utility become (...) improper. I argue there isn’t any good way out for EUT. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Grace A. de Laguna’s theory of universals in its historical context and in relation to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics. I explain the central features of her theory, arguing that her theory should be classified as a form of immanent realism and as a powers ontology. I then show in what ways her theory affords a theory of modality in terms of potentialities and discuss some of its consequences along the way.

In current discussions on the problem of the metaphysical nature of the word, four factions – eliminativism, nominalism, originalism, and the type-token theory – take an active part. For eliminativism, words as separate entities do not exist; they are only a useful cognitive illusion. In the process of communication, competent speakers make sounds and inscriptions through which they are able to infer certain intentional contents of each other’s cognitive states. However, these sounds and inscriptions cannot be regarded as instances of (...) words since they do not possess the phonological and orthographic properties constitutive of words. For nominalism, by contrast, the streams of sounds and ink patterns produced by competent speakers serve as relevant instances of a particular word, or its tokens. What we usually call “words” are collections of such tokens, composed on the basis of similarity relations (phono- logical, orthographic or semantic). For originalism, the streams of sounds and ink patterns created by competent speakers are stages of words, understood as continuants, concrete ob- jects preserving identity over time, individualized by the causal history of their origin. Words are created by competent speakers through the practice of naming and spread through chains of interpersonal contact. The phonological, orthographic and semantic properties possessed by different stages of the same word are generally useless for a proper description of objects such as words. At different times of their existence, words can change any of their properties (pronunciation, spelling, and even reference) while preserving their identity in time. For the type-token theory, words are types, or abstract objects encoding a particular phonographic pattern, which in the process of communication must be instantiated by a competent native speaker by uttering or writing the appropriate token. The type-token theory has several ad- vantages over the views of eliminativism, nominalism and originalism. Firstly, it offers a unified ontology of linguistic structures (since the division into tokens and types extends here to the whole range of linguistic units, including sentences and letters). Secondly, unlike most of its competitors, it is able to present a clear operational criterion for word identity, while being consistent with most of our intuitive notions of intra- and cross-linguistic phenomena (homonymy, synonymy, etc.). (shrink)

The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...) the doctrine that social alternatives are evaluated and socially ranked solely in terms of the well-beings of the relevant individuals. This scale-dependent form of welfarism is axiomatized using this framework. The implications of this approach for characterizing classes of social welfare orderings are also considered. (shrink)

This brief elucidation of two quotes from the Genealogy will be apt for more accessible interpretation following the completion of my next paper. Stay tuned for some hard-fought philosophy.

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

This paper defends the autonomy thesis, which holds that one can intend to do something even though one believes it to be impossible, against attacks by Fred Adams. Adams denies the autonomy thesis on the grounds that it cannot, but must, explain what makes a particular trying, a trying for the aim it has in view. If the autonomy thesis were true, it seems that I could try to fly across the Atlantic ocean merely by typing out this abstract, a (...) palpable absurdity. If we deny the autonomy thesis, we have an easy explanation: one simply cannot try to do something which one believes to be impossible. In response, I argue, first, by means of examples, that one clearly can try and intend to do what one believes to be impossible; and then l show how we can provide an answer to Adams’s challenge even so. (shrink)

Most models of generational succession in sexually reproducing populations necessarily move back and forth between genic and genotypic spaces. We show that transitions between and within these spaces are usually hidden by unstated assumptions about processes in these spaces. We also examine a widely endorsed claim regarding the mathematical equivalence of kin-, group-, individual-, and allelic-selection models made by Lee Dugatkin and Kern Reeve. We show that the claimed mathematical equivalence of the models does not hold. *Received January 2007; revised (...) April 2008. †To contact the authors, please write to: Elisabeth Lloyd, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 130 Goodbody Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; e-mail: [email protected]; Richard Lewontin, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; Marcus Feldman, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

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

How are we able to perceive the world veridically? If we ask this question as a part of the scientific investigation of perception, then we are not asking for a transcendental guarantee that our perceptions are by and large veridical; we presuppose that they are. Unless we assumed that we perceived the world for the most part veridically, we would not be in a position to investigate our perceptual abilities empirically. We are interested, then, not in how it is possible (...) in general for us to perceive the world veridically, but instead in what the relation is between our environment and its properties, of which we have knowledge, on the one hand, and our perceptual mechanisms, on the other, that results in very many, even most of our perceptions being veridical in everyday life. (shrink)

In sections 2.21.23-25 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke considers and rejects two ways in which we might be “free to will”, which correspond to the Thomistic distinction between freedom of exercise and freedom of specification. In this paper, I examine Locke’s arguments in detail. In the first part, I argue for a non-developmental reading of Locke’s argument against freedom of exercise. Locke’s view throughout all five editions of the Essay is that we do not possess freedom of (...) exercise (at least in most cases). In the second part, I argue that, when Locke asks whether we possess freedom of specification, his question is intentionally ambiguous between two readings, a first-order reading and a higher-order reading. Locke’s view is that, on either reading, we do not possess freedom of specification (at least in any interesting sense). (shrink)

Content disjunctivism is the view that veridical experience involves contents and objects that differ from those of corresponding hallucinations. On one formulation of this view, we are aware of ordinary material things in our surroundings when we experience veridically, and we are aware of mere appearances when we hallucinate. This paper proposes a way of developing this view and offers some considerations in support. Central to the proposed regimentation will be a distinction between different notions of appearance. We distinguish between (...) the notion of something merely appearing to have a property and the notion of mere appearances, which are types of objects that we can refer to and be aware of. Mere appearances are not sense data or Meinongian non-existent objects but existing objects that do not have the properties that they appear to have. These notions of appearance will be elucidated, in particular by characterizing how they are involved in hallucination and illusion. I argue that the resulting view is supported by how our mental life seems to us when we experience our environment. (shrink)

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

Sorensen (1992) has provided two modal-logical schemas to reconstruct the logical structure of two types of destructive thought experiments: the Necessity Refuter and the Possibility Refuter. The schemas consist of five propositions which Sorensen claims but does not prove to be inconsistent.We show that the five propositions, as presented by Sorensen, are not inconsistent, but by adding a premise (and a logical truth), we prove that the resulting sextet of premises is inconsistent. Häggqvist (2009) has provided a different modal-logical schema (...) (Counterfactual Refuter), which is equivalent to four premises, again claimed to be inconsistent. We show that this schema also is not inconsistent, for similar reasons. Again, we add another premise to achieve inconsistency. The conclusion is that all three modal-logical reconstructions of the arguments that accompany thought experiments, two by Sorensen and one by Häggqvist, have now been made rigorously correct. This may inaugurate new avenues to respond to destructive thought experiments. (shrink)

This paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that (...) passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage. (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)

This paper deals with the study of the nature of mind, its processes and its relations with the other filed known as logic, especially the contribution of most notable contemporary analytical philosophy Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein showed a critical relation between the mind and logic. He assumed that every mental process is logical. Mental field is field of space and time and logical field is a field of reasoning (inductive and deductive). It is only with the advancement in logic, we are (...) today in the era of scientific progress and technology. Logic played an important role in the cognitive part or we can say in the ‗philosophy of mind‘ that this branch is developed only because of three crucial theories i.e. rationalism, empiricism, and criticism. In this paper, it is argued that innate ideas or truth are equated with deduction and acquired truths are related with induction. This article also enhance the role of language in the makeup of the world of mind, although mind and the thought are the terms that are used by the philosophers synonymously but in this paper they are taken and interpreted differently. It shows the development in the analytical tradition subjected to the areas of mind and logic and their critical relation. (shrink)

The paper argues that the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is unified by a complex conception of reason that imposes consistency norms of both rationality and reasonableness. Hobbes’s conceptions of rightness as reciprocity, and moral goodness as sociability belong to an original and attractive moral theory that is neither teleological nor classically deontological, nor as interpreters have variously argued, subjectivist, contractarian, egoist, or dependent on divine command.

The present study aimed to understand how status-oriented individual differences such as narcissistic antagonism, narcissistic extraversion, and moral grandstanding motivations may have longitudinally predicted both behavioral and social media responses during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Via YouGov, a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults was recruited in August of 2019 (N = 2,519; Mage = 47.5, SD = 17.8; 51.4% women) and resampled in May of 2020, (N = 1,533). Results indicated that baseline levels of narcissistic antagonism (...) were associated with lower levels of social distancing and lower compliance with public health recommended behaviors. Similarly, dominance oriented moral grandstanding motivations predicted greater conflict with others over COVID-19, greater engagement in status-oriented social media behaviors about COVID-19, and lower levels of social distancing. (shrink)

Scholars have thoroughly discussed the visual aspects of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, as well as his own emphasis on how sight functions and what contexts and conditions shape how we see and what we can see. Yet while some of the images and visual devices he uses are frequently discussed, like Las Meninas and the panopticon, his diagrams in The Order of Things have received little attention. Why does Foucault diagram historical ways of thinking? What are we supposed to (...) see and understand through these diagrams? To examine the role of the diagram in Foucault’s archaeological method, this paper provides a close reading of how the classical quadrilateral visualizes the structure, function, content, principles, and underlying assumptions of language and thought. In analyzing the diagram as a way for visualizing history, this paper demonstrates how Foucault enacts a new visual language that emphasizes the contingency of thought. (shrink)

The Formalist tradition in late-scholastic philosophy has gone unnoticed in standard historiography. This article’s overall objective is to add the Formalist tradition to what we know about Renaissance philosophy. I first show how the Formalist tradition was born out of some innovative considerations of hierarchies of distinctions in the wake of the Franciscan John Duns Scotus’s teaching on the formal distinction in the beginning of the fourteenth century (especially Francis of Meyronnes’s model of four distinctions and Petrus Thomae’s more elaborate (...) doctrine of seven kinds of distinctions). I then trace how Formalist literature developed from being an exclusively Franciscan affair to becoming a much more widespread phenomenon. Thus, from the decades up to 1500 and onwards, authors from various late-scholastic schools (Thomism, Lullism, Averroism, and others) produced Formalist literature, i.e., treatises on multiple kinds of distinctions. I highlight particularly how one Franciscan philosopher of the sixteenth century, Jean Du Douet, proposed to view the Formalist preoccupation with distinctions as a discipline in its own right, a proper scientia formalitatum. I finally argue that while this proposal met with dismissive reactions, Du Douet’s idea does in fact reflect the role Formalism played in the scholastic curriculum in the late sixteenth century, at least in Franciscan milieus. (shrink)

We intend to demonstrate that Jesus was a kind of social scientist, not only a prophet, the Cristianity is a way of conceiving and perceiving the world, a cosmology and a state of mind, like many others. To be part of is not to deny other forms os religious experience and manifestation.

Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is credited with the first instance of the English word “consciousness” used in a distinctively philosophical sense. While Cudworth says little in the System about the nature of consciousness, he has more to say in his (largely unpublished) freewill manuscripts. I argue that, in these manuscripts, Cudworth distinguishes two kinds of consciousness, which I call “bare consciousness” and “reflective consciousness”. What both have in common is that each is a kind (...) of reflection or reflexive perception that therefore involves a “duplication” of the soul as both subject and object. While it is less clear how Cudworth takes these two kinds of consciousness to differ, I argue that the central difference for Cudworth is that, whereas bare consciousness is always directed towards individual cogitations, reflective consciousness is the kind of consciousness that the soul achieves through reflection upon itself as a whole. As a result, reflective consciousness introduces a unity into our experience that is not present at the level of bare consciousness. (shrink)

Many of the commentators—let’s ignore their sex for the moment—suggested including women in the Feyerabend conference. Then the question was raised, “but are they of the right quality, status, rank?” That is, do they bring down the average quality of the conference in virtue of their being of inferior status, or, in Vincenzo Politi’s words, not “someone whose work is both relevant to the topic of the conference and also as widely recognized as the work of the invited speakers” (HOPOS-L (...) archive, “CFP: Feyerabend Conference,” Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 14:57:20)? It is extremely important that such a discussion of quality, status, and rank recognize the scourge of evaluation bias and its long-term and pervasive consequences. One well-designed study this past year, published by the National Academy of Sciences, established prominent evaluation bias among both male and female science faculty in their evaluations of a student applying for a managerial job, who was randomly assigned either a male or a female name (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012). These professors examined the qualifications of the students and decided whether to hire them, what salary to give them, and whether to mentor themand howmuch to do so.The resultswere that both male and female scientists hired more men, gave them higher salaries, and offered more mentoring to them, even though themale applications were identical to the female applications. When probed about their reasons for not hiring or mentoring the female applicants, the professors explained that they based their decisions on the inferior competence of the applicant: the female applicants were perceived as less competent by all professors (with identical applications between males and females). This is what “evaluation bias” looks like, and it has been established in many, many contexts since the 1970s—this is only the most recent. (shrink)

In this article, I outline a strategy for challenging J.L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument, and specifically the premise within the argument that asserts the existence of what Schellenberg calls nonresistant nonbelief. Drawing on some of the philosophical resources of skeptical theism, I show how this premise is based on a particular “noseeum assumption”—what I call Schellenberg’s Noseeum Assumption—that underwrites a particular “noseeum argument.” This assumption is that, regarding putative nonresistant nonbelievers, more likely than not we’d detect these nonbelievers’ resistance toward God (...) if there were any. I give reasons for thinking that it is not more reasonable to affirm than to refrain from affirming Schellenberg’s Noseeum Assumption, and so reason to think that the hiddenness argument is not a good argument for atheism. I also defend the strategy I outline against several objections. (shrink)

The article contains a critical analysis of the skeptical solution to the rule- following problem. The skeptical solution denies the existence of “superlative” R-facts that would make statements of the form “P means R by ‘+’ ” true. The role of the sources for the meaning of ‘+’ here is played by the patterns of solidarity behavior of members of some community to which P belongs. The correct use of ‘+’ would be one that is approved by the competent majority (...) of this community, and there can be no other sense in which it would be correct or wrong. Boyd’s hypothesis denies the communal character of the ‘+’ meaning. While there are no “superlative” R-facts, there should be C-facts not about the R as the standard that P or its community follows in their practice of using ‘+’, but about whether they do it correctly. The proof of the Boyd hypothesis is based on the example of an imaginary Ω-community, whose agents use a finite set of simple symbols for the needs of their arithmetic: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘J’. Each symbol denotes a subset of identical, from the Ω-community point of view, numerical values. The symbol ‘A’ is used, for ex- ample, for a subset of the natural numbers 1, 10, 19, 28, 37, 46, etc.; ‘B’ for 2, 11, 20, 29, 38, 47, etc.; ‘C’ for 3, 12, 21, 30, 39, 48, etc. The Ω-community’s arithmetic uses the only local function ⊕ whose range of values forms a finite set of mathematical propositions {α} that are true. The Ω-community’s arithmetic, like our own, is open to many skeptical challenges. Is there a fact that determines the meaning of ‘⊕’? What do agents do when they calculate with ‘⊕’ (say, solve examples ‘A⊕B = ?’, ‘C⊕E=?’, etc.)? Do they Add, Badd or Dadd? To answer them would require a “superlative” R-fact. For the calculation practice with ‘⊕’, it could be a certain R-fact that determines the only possible order for the sequence of numerals ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘J’ such that {α} is true. An analysis of the calculation practice using the local arithmetic function ⊕ shows that for it there are no such R-facts that would determine the only correct standard R – even if the agents in the Ω-community were trained in such calculations on a full set of cases for the application of that function. However, for such practice there are C-facts (independent in their existence from R-facts) that make it possible to distinguish between what seems to be right and what is right. The solitary agent P and the Ω-community are in the same position regarding the knowledge of C-facts. The Ω-community’s point of view has no advantage in matters of C-facts knowledge over the solitary agent P’s point of view. The Ω-community arithmetic shows that if a solitary agent P had the suitable knowledge of C-facts about the practice of calculations with ‘⊕’, it would allow him/her to disagree with the not correct answers of other members of the community even when they would constitute an absolute majority. (shrink)

Belief-state ascription — determining what someone “knew,” “believed,” was “aware of,” etc. — is central to many areas of law. In criminal law, the distinction between knowledge and recklessness, and the use of broad jury instructions concerning other belief states, presupposes a common and stable understanding of what those belief-state terms mean. But a wealth of empirical work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology — falling under the banner of “Experimental Epistemology” — reveals how laypeople’s understandings of mens rea (...) concepts differ systematically from what scholars, courts, and perhaps legislators, have assumed. -/- As implemented, mens rea concepts are much more context-dependent and normatively evaluative than the conventional wisdom suggests, even assuming that jurors are following jury instructions to the letter. As a result, there is less difference between knowledge and recklessness than is typically assumed; jurors consistently “over”-ascribe knowledge to criminal defendants; and concepts like “belief,” “awareness,” and “conscious disregard” mean different things in different contexts, resulting in mens rea findings systematically responsive to aspects of the case traditionally considered irrelevant to the meaning of those terms. -/- This Article provides the first systematic account of the factors driving jurors’ ascriptions of the specific belief states criminal law invokes. After surveying mens rea jury instructions, introducing the Experimental Epistemology literature to the legal literature on mens rea, and examining the implications of that literature for criminal law, this Article considers ways to begin bridging the surprisingly large gap between mens rea theory and practice. (shrink)

I begin by distinguishing between what I will call a pure Fregean theory of reference and a theory of direct reference. A pure Fregean theory of reference holds that all reference to objects is determined by a sense or content. The kind of theory I have in mind is obviously inspired by Frege, but I will not be concerned with whether it is the theory that Frege himself held.1 A theory of direct reference, as I will understand it, denies that (...) all reference to objects is determined by sense or content. We will also distinguish between a theory of reference for thought, and for language. This gives us a fourfold classification of theories. What is puzzling about direct reference theories is not that the semantics of an expression in a public language should assign as its semantic value just a referent, but how such facts could be understood to reflect an underlying feature of thought. There are two interconnected aspects to this.. (shrink)

This paper addresses two interpretive puzzles in Plato’s Philebus. The first concerns the claim, endorsed by both interlocutors, that the most godlike of lives is a pleasureless life of pure thinking. This appears to run afoul of the verdict of the earlier so-called ‘Choice of Lives’ argument that a mixed life is superior to either of its ‘pure’ rivals. A second concerns Socrates’ discussion of false pleasure, in which he appears to be guilty of rank equivocation. I argue that we (...) can solve both puzzles by attributing to Plato an account of pleasure as a species of intentional attitude. (shrink)

This volume includes nineteen articles by scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe on Chinese thinkers from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. Included here are intellectual biographies of literati such as Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, Zhu Xi, Zhang Shi, Hu Hong, Wang Yangming, and Dai Zhen. Essays are arranged chronologically, and most begin with a biographical sketch of their subject. They provide variety rather than uniformity of approach, but all in all these essays are remarkably rich and offer (...) much new material on both familiar and lesser-known thinkers. (shrink)

Modern philosophy can often appear to be mere cryptomnesia, redressed and resuited to fit the particular mouth from which it is espoused. This notion is but a sorrowful chimera binding the 21st-century mind to the confines of an eternal shadow, an eternal prison of doubt in the face of limitless potential. As a species, we are rapidly approaching the precipice of Yahweh's original position as instantiators of consciousness, as the I AM in relation to our artificial progeny. Could one fabricate (...) a candidate more fitting for a contra-analysis of our current situation than Hegel? One could not. (shrink)

A brief dissertation on what knowledge is.

Today marks the 7th anniversary of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research (ISR), at Phenikaa University. ISR has for seven years now the place where the co-founders of this portal have been working and producing publications. A special event occurs now as the Current Conservation magazine publishes a new writing piece by our member, Dr Minh-Hoang Nguyen.

In the quantum-Bayesian approach to quantum foundations, a quantum state is viewed as an expression of an agent’s personalist Bayesian degrees of belief, or probabilities, concerning the results of measurements. These probabilities obey the usual probability rules as required by Dutch-book coherence, but quantum mechanics imposes additional constraints upon them. In this paper, we explore the question of deriving the structure of quantum-state space from a set of assumptions in the spirit of quantum Bayesianism. The starting point is the representation (...) of quantum states induced by a symmetric informationally complete measurement or SIC. In this representation, the Born rule takes the form of a particularly simple modification of the law of total probability. We show how to derive key features of quantum-state space from (i) the requirement that the Born rule arises as a simple modification of the law of total probability and (ii) a limited number of additional assumptions of a strong Bayesian flavor. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to study algebraic properties of neutrosophic matrices, where a necessary and sufficient condition for the invertibility of a square neutrosophic matrix is presented by defining the neutrosophic determinant. On the other hand, this work introduces the concept of neutrosophic Eigen values and vectors with an easy algorithm to compute them. Also, this article finds a necessary and sufficient condition for the diagonalization of a neutrosophic matrix.