Results for 'William Irons'

977 found
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  1. 'Access to Justice' as Access to a Lawyer's Language.William Conklin - 1990 - Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 10:454-467.
    This essay claims that ‘access to justice’ has erroneously been assumed to be synonymous with invisible concepts instead of access to a lawyer’s language. The Paper outlines how a language concerns the relation between signifiers, better known as word-images, on the one hand, with signfieds, better known as concepts, on the other. The signifieds are universal, artificial and empty in content. Taking the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an example, officials have assumed that Charter knowledge has involved signifieds (...)
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  2. Moderating Racism: The Attempt to Restrain Anti-Japanese Racism in World War II Propaganda Films.Gary James Jason - 2024 - Reason Papers 44 (1):92-106.
    In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...)
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  3. Irony in Kant's 'Zum ewigen Frieden'.Karel Mom - manuscript
    In an introduction to a French edition of Kant´s Zum ewigen Frieden, Charles Lemonnier, who was involved in the international peace movement, wonders why Kant had not touched the ´social question´ in this essay. In this paper, I take Lemonnier´s explanation of Kant´s silence concerning that issue, combined with his appreciation of the ironic format of the text as a starting point to analyse the irony in the essay. This analysis, in which, for heuristic purposes, Kant is compared with Plato, (...)
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  4. The Real Nature of Pragmatism and Chicago Sociology. [REVIEW]Eugene Halton - 1983 - Symbolic Interaction 6:139-153.
    J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith provide a history of pragmatism and Chicago sociology based on the positions of realism and nominalism. This issue is indeed the key to understanding pragmatism’s foundations in Charles Peirce’s original formulation. Lewis and Smith claim that there are two pragmatisms, a realistic one characterized by Peirce and Mead and a nominalistic one (which Lewis and Smith claim has no value) illustrated by James and Dewey. They argue that Chicago sociology, including Herbert Blumer, was (...)
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  5. Explanatory Depth in Primordial Cosmology: A Comparative Study of Inflationary and Bouncing Paradigms.William J. Wolf & Karim Pierre Yves Thébault - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    We develop and apply a multi-dimensional account 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 conditions 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 (...)
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  6. Respecting boundaries: theoretical equivalence and structure beyond dynamics.William J. Wolf & James Read - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (4):1-28.
    A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of motion of those theories. In this article, we question whether it is indeed the case that the empirical content of a theory is exhausted by its equations of motion, showing that (for example) considerations of boundary conditions play a key role in the empirical (...)
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  7. Aesthetic Worlds: Rimbaud, Williams and Baroque Form.William Melaney - 2000 - Analecta Husserliana 69:149-158.
    The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary (...)
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  8. (1 other version)IAndrew Williams.Andrew Williams - 2004 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1):131-150.
    [Andrew Williams] It is difficult for prioritarians to explain the degree to which justice requires redress for misfortune in a way that avoids imposing unreasonably high costs on more advantaged individuals whilst also economising on intuitionist appeals to judgment. An appeal to hypothetical insurance may be able to solve the problems of cost and judgment more successfully, and can also be defended from critics who claim that resource egalitarianism is best understood to favour the ex post elimination of envy over (...)
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  9. A Uniform Theory of Conditionals.William B. Starr - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (6):1019-1064.
    A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...)
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  10. Précis of William S. Robinson's Epiphenomenal Mind: An Integrated Outlook on Sensations, Beliefs and Pleasure.William Robinson - manuscript
    This précis summarizes the main topics, arguments and conclusions of the book. Many interesting arguments and critiques have, of course, been omitted in order to make this summary appropriately brief.
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  11. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography.William Ray Woodward - 2015 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite (...)
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  12. An introduction to cybernetics.William Ross Ashby - 1956 - New York,: J. Wiley.
    We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, ...
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  13. Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology.William Bechtel & Leonardo Bich - 2021 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376 (1820).
    We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable—controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control mechanisms (...)
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  14. Confirmation, increase in probability, and partial discrimination: A reply to Zalabardo.William Roche - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 6 (1):1-7.
    There is a plethora of confirmation measures in the literature. Zalabardo considers four such measures: PD, PR, LD, and LR. He argues for LR and against each of PD, PR, and LD. First, he argues that PR is the better of the two probability measures. Next, he argues that LR is the better of the two likelihood measures. Finally, he argues that LR is superior to PR. I set aside LD and focus on the trio of PD, PR, and LR. (...)
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  15. Mechanisms and psychological explanation.William Bechtel & Cory Wright - 2006 - In Paul Thagard (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science. Elsevier.
    As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than (...)
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  16. Situating homeostasis in organisms: maintaining organization through time.William Bechtel & Leonardo Bich - 2024 - Journal of Physiology (x):1-18.
    Since it was inspired by Bernard and developed and named by Cannon, the conceptof homeostasis has been invoked by many as the central theoretical framework for physiology. Ithas also been the target of numerous criticisms that have elicited the introduction of a plethoraof alternative concepts. We argue that many of the criticisms actually target the more restrictiveaccount of homeostasis advanced by the cyberneticists. What was crucial to Bernard and Cannonwas a focus on the maintenance of the organism as the goal (...)
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  17. The Politics of Relevant Alternatives.William Tuckwell - 2022 - Hypatia 37 (4):743-764.
    The main aim of this article is to use the resources of relevant-alternatives contextualism to provide an account of an unrecognized form of epistemic injustice that I call irrelevance-injustice. Irrelevance-injustice occurs either when a speaker raises an alternative that is not taken seriously when it should be, or when a speaker raises an alternative that is taken seriously when it should not be. Irrelevance-injustice influences what alternatives are perceived to be relevant and patterns of knowledge ascriptions in ways that are (...)
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  18. Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):129-149.
    All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that many such measures (...)
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  19. الدولة والاستيلاء والعنف في فلسفة جيل دولوز وفليكس غواتاري.William Outa - manuscript
    مدخل عن فلسفة جيل دولوز وفليكس غواتاري في الدولة والعنف.
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  20. An interpretation of political argument.William Bosworth - 2020 - European Journal of Political Theory 19 (3):293-313.
    How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...)
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  21. “L'ètica de la creença” (W. K. Clifford) & “La voluntat de creure” (William James).Alberto Oya, William James & W. K. Clifford - 2016 - Quaderns de Filosofia 3 (2):123-172.
    Catalan translation, introductory study and notes on W. K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”. Published in Clifford, W.K. “L’ètica de la creença”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 129–150. // Catalan translation, introductory study and notes on William James’s “The Will to Believe”. Published in James, William. “La voluntat de creure”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 151–172. [Introductory study published in Oya, Alberto. “Introducció. El debat entre W. K. Clifford i (...) James”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 123–127]. (shrink)
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  22. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation.William Hirstein - 2005 - MIT Press.
    [This download contains the Table of Contents and Chapter 1.] This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.
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  23. Religion, race, multiculturalism, and everyday life: a philosophical, conceptual examination.Christopher A. Williams - 2022 - [Cambridge, UK]: Ethics International Press Ltd, UK.
    Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life takes a spirited conceptualist look back into the history of our development. The book sets out to explore the ways in which a punditry of human equality continues to lock in unassailably assured logical postures, enabled by the historically intertwined roles played by power and the passage of time, towards the invention and sustenance of social truth. Religion, race, and multiculturalism have been written about many times, and from a variety of academic, discipline-specific perspectives. (...)
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  24. Attention and the Free Play of the Faculties.Jessica J. Williams - 2022 - Kantian Review 27 (1):43-59.
    The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in (...)
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  25. Panpsychism, aggregation and combinatorial infusion.William Seager - 2010 - Mind and Matter 8 (2):167-184.
    Deferential Monadic Panpsychism is a view that accepts that physical science is capable of discovering the basic structure of reality. However, it denies that reality is fully and exhaustively de- scribed purely in terms of physical science. Consciousness is missing from the physical description and cannot be reduced to it. DMP explores the idea that the physically fundamental features of the world possess some intrinsic mental aspect. It thereby faces a se- vere problem of understanding how more complex mental states (...)
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  26. Is Artificial General Intelligence Impossible?William J. Rapaport - 2024 - Cosmos+Taxis 12 (5+6):5-22.
    In their Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, Landgrebe and Smith (2023) argue that it is impossible for artificial general intelligence (AGI) to succeed, on the grounds that it is impossible to perfectly model or emulate the “complex” “human neurocognitive system”. However, they do not show that it is logically impossible; they only show that it is practically impossible using current mathematical techniques. Nor do they prove that there could not be any other kinds of theories than those in (...)
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  27. Michael DePaul and William Ramsey, eds., Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. [REVIEW]William A. Martin - 2000 - Philosophy in Review 20 (2):96-98.
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  28. (1 other version)Representationalism about consciousness.William E. Seager & David Bourget - 2007 - In Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 261-276.
    A representationalist-friendly introduction to representationalism which covers a number of central problems and objections.
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  29. Eating and Cognition in Two Animals without Neurons: Sponges and Trichoplax.William Bechtel & Leonardo Bich - 2024 - Biological Theory:1-14.
    Eating is a fundamental behavior in which all organisms must engage in order to procure the material and energy from their environment that they need to maintain themselves. Since controlling eating requires procuring, processing, and assessing information, it constitutes a cognitive activity that provides a productive domain for pursuing cognitive biology as proposed by Ladislav Kováč. In agreement with Kováč, we argue that cognition is fundamentally grounded in chemical signaling and processing. To support this thesis, we adopt Cisek’s strategy of (...)
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  30. Syntactic semantics: Foundations of computational natural language understanding.William J. Rapaport - 1988 - In James H. Fetzer (ed.), Aspects of AI. D.
    This essay considers what it means to understand natural language and whether a computer running an artificial-intelligence program designed to understand natural language does in fact do so. It is argued that a certain kind of semantics is needed to understand natural language, that this kind of semantics is mere symbol manipulation (i.e., syntax), and that, hence, it is available to AI systems. Recent arguments by Searle and Dretske to the effect that computers cannot understand natural language are discussed, and (...)
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  31. Rights reclamation.William L. Bell - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (4):835-858.
    According to a rights forfeiture theory of punishment, liability to punishment hinges upon the notion that criminals forfeit their rights against hard treatment. In this paper, I assume the success of rights forfeiture theory in establishing the permissibility of punishment but aim to develop the view by considering how forfeited rights might be reclaimed. Built into the very notion of proportionate punishment is the idea that forfeited rights can be recovered. The interesting question is whether punishment is the sole means (...)
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  32. Edge Modes and Dressing Fields for the Newton–Cartan Quantum Hall Effect.William J. Wolf, James Read & Nicholas J. Teh - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 53 (1):1-24.
    It is now well-known that Newton–Cartan theory is the correct geometrical setting for modelling the quantum Hall effect. In addition, in recent years edge modes for the Newton–Cartan quantum Hall effect have been derived. However, the existence of these edge modes has, as of yet, been derived using only orthodox methodologies involving the breaking of gauge-invariance; it would be preferable to derive the existence of such edge modes in a gauge-invariant manner. In this article, we employ recent work by Donnelly (...)
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  33. Hylomorphism and the Construct of Consciousness.William Jaworski - 2020 - Topoi 39 (5):1125-1139.
    The hard problem of consciousness has held center stage in the philosophy of mind for the past two decades. It claims that the phenomenal character of conscious experiences—what it’s like to be in them—cannot be explained by appeal to the operation of physiological subsystems. The hard problem arises, however, only given the assumption that hylomorphism is false. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. A human is not a random collection of physical materials, but an individual (...)
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  34. Expressing Permission.William B. Starr - 2016 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26:325-349.
    This paper proposes a semantics for free choice permission that explains both the non-classical behavior of modals and disjunction in sentences used to grant permission, and their classical behavior under negation. It also explains why permissions can expire when new information comes in and why free choice arises even when modals scope under disjunction. On the proposed approach, deontic modals update preference orderings, and connectives operate on these updates rather than propositions. The success of this approach stems from its capacity (...)
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  35. What is psychological explanation?William Bechtel & Cory Wright - 2009 - In Sarah Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 113--130.
    Due to the wide array of phenomena that are of interest to them, psychologists offer highly diverse and heterogeneous types of explanations. Initially, this suggests that the question "What is psychological explanation?" has no single answer. To provide appreciation of this diversity, we begin by noting some of the more common types of explanations that psychologists provide, with particular focus on classical examples of explanations advanced in three different areas of psychology: psychophysics, physiological psychology, and information-processing psychology. To analyze what (...)
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  36. Dynamic Expressivism about Deontic Modality.William B. Starr - 2016 - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 355-394.
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  37. Husserl’s Theory of Scientific Explanation: A Bolzanian Inspired Unificationist Account.Heath Williams & Thomas Byrne - 2022 - Husserl Studies 38 (2):171-196.
    Husserl’s early picture of explanation in the sciences has never been completely provided. This lack represents an oversight, which we here redress. In contrast to currently accepted interpretations, we demonstrate that Husserl does not adhere to the much maligned deductive-nomological (DN) model of scientific explanation. Instead, via a close reading of early Husserlian texts, we reveal that he presents a unificationist account of scientific explanation. By doing so, we disclose that Husserl’s philosophy of scientific explanation is no mere anachronism. It (...)
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  38. (1 other version)Confirmation, transitivity, and Moore: the Screening-Off Approach.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2013 - Philosophical Studies (3):1-21.
    It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that (...)
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  39. Capgras Syndrome: A Novel Probe for Understanding the Neural Representation of the Identity and Familiarity of Persons.William Hirstein & V. S. Ramachandran - 1997 - Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 264:437-444.
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  40. The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety.John N. Williams & Neil Sinhababu - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (1):46-55.
    We present Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge, which works differently from other putative counterexamples and avoids objections to which they are vulnerable. We then argue that four ways of analysing knowledge in terms of safety, including Duncan Pritchard’s, cannot withstand Backward Clock either.
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  41. The Social Trackways Theory of the Evolution of Human Cognition.Kim Shaw-Williams - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (1):16-26.
    Only our lineage has ever used trackways reading to find unseen and unheard targets. All other terrestrial animals, including our great ape cousins, use scent trails and airborne odors. Because trackways as natural signs have very different properties, they possess an information-rich narrative structure. There is good evidence we began to exploit conspecific trackways in our deep past, at first purely associatively, for safety and orienteering when foraging in vast featureless wetlands. Since our own old trackways were recognizable they were (...)
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  42. Putting a new spin on galaxies: Horace W. Babcock, the Andromeda Nebula, and the dark matter revolution.William L. Vanderburgh - 2014 - Journal for the History of Astronomy 45:141-159.
    When a scientist is the first to perform a difficult type of observation and correctly interprets the result as a significant challenge to then-widely accepted core theories, and the result is later recognized as seminal work in a field of major importance, it is a surprise to find that that work was essentially ignored by the scientific community for thirty years. Such was the fate of the doctoral research on the rotations of the Andromeda Nebula (M31) conducted by Horace Welcome (...)
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  43. Evidence of evidence is evidence under screening-off.William Roche - 2014 - Episteme 11 (1):119-124.
    An important question in the current debate on the epistemic significance of peer disagreement is whether evidence of evidence is evidence. Fitelson argues that, at least on some renderings of the thesis that evidence of evidence is evidence, there are cases where evidence of evidence is not evidence. I introduce a condition and show that under this condition evidence of evidence is evidence.
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  44. A weaker condition for transitivity in probabilistic support.William A. Roche - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (1):111-118.
    Probabilistic support is not transitive. There are cases in which x probabilistically supports y , i.e., Pr( y | x ) > Pr( y ), y , in turn, probabilistically supports z , and yet it is not the case that x probabilistically supports z . Tomoji Shogenji, though, establishes a condition for transitivity in probabilistic support, that is, a condition such that, for any x , y , and z , if Pr( y | x ) > Pr( y (...)
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  45. The Aims and Structures of Ecological Research Programs.William Bausman - 2019 - Philosophical Topics 47 (1):1-20.
    Neutral Theory is controversial in ecology. Ecologists and philosophers have diagnosed the source of the controversy as: its false assumption that individuals in different species within the same trophic level are ecologically equivalent, its conflict with Competition Theory and the adaptation of species, its role as a null hypothesis, and as a Lakatosian research programme. In this paper, I show why we should instead understand the conflict at the level of research programs which involve more than theory. The Neutralist and (...)
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  46. The Evidentialist's Wager.William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder, Caspar Oesterheld, Carl Shulman & Johannes Treutlein - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (6):320-342.
    Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of (...)
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  47. Active biological mechanisms: transforming energy into motion in molecular motors.William Bechtel & Andrew Bollhagen - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12705-12729.
    Unless one embraces activities as foundational, understanding activities in mechanisms requires an account of the means by which entities in biological mechanisms engage in their activities—an account that does not merely explain activities in terms of more basic entities and activities. Recent biological research on molecular motors exemplifies such an account, one that explains activities in terms of free energy and constraints. After describing the characteristic “stepping” activities of these molecules and mapping the stages of those steps onto the stages (...)
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  48. Dwindling Confirmation.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (1):114-137.
    We show that as a chain of confirmation becomes longer, confirmation dwindles under screening-off. For example, if E confirms H1, H1 confirms H2, and H1 screens off E from H2, then the degree to which E confirms H2 is less than the degree to which E confirms H1. Although there are many measures of confirmation, our result holds on any measure that satisfies the Weak Law of Likelihood. We apply our result to testimony cases, relate it to the Data-Processing Inequality (...)
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  49. Philosophy of Computer Science.William J. Rapaport - 2005 - Teaching Philosophy 28 (4):319-341.
    There are many branches of philosophy called “the philosophy of X,” where X = disciplines ranging from history to physics. The philosophy of artificial intelligence has a long history, and there are many courses and texts with that title. Surprisingly, the philosophy of computer science is not nearly as well-developed. This article proposes topics that might constitute the philosophy of computer science and describes a course covering those topics, along with suggested readings and assignments.
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  50. Mechanisms and psychological explanation.Cory Wright & William Bechtel - 2006 - In Paul Thagard (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science. Elsevier.
    As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than (...)
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