Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and ( (...) class='Hi'>bottom-up) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

With their “bottom-up” approach, Holk Cruse and Malte Schilling present a highly intriguing perspective on those mental phenomena that have fascinated humankind since ancient times. Among them are those aspects of our inner lives that are at the same time most salient and yet most elusive: we are conscious beings with complex emotions, thinking and acting in pursuit of various goals. Starting with, from a biological point of view, very basic abilities, such as the ability to move and navigate (...) in an unpredictable environment, Cruse & Schilling have developed, step-by-step, a robotic system with the ability to plan future actions and, to a limited extent, to verbally report on its own internal states. The authors then offer a compelling argument that their system exhibits aspects of various higher-level mental phenomena such as emotion, attention, intention, volition, and even consciousness. The scientific investigation of the mind is faced with intricate problems at a very fundamental, methodological level. Not only is there a good deal of conceptual vagueness and uncertainty as to what the explananda precisely are, but it is also unclear what the best strategy might be for addressing the phenomena of interest. Cruse & Schilling’s bio-robotic “bottom-up” approach is designed to provide answers to such questions. In this commentary, I begin, in the first section, by presenting the main ideas behind this approach as I understand them. In the second section, I turn to an examination of its scope and limits. Specifically, I will suggest a set of constraints on good explanations based on the bottom-up approach. What criteria do such explanations have to meet in order to be of real scientific value? I maintain that there are essentially three such criteria: biological plausibility, adequate matching criteria, and transparency. Finally, in the third section, I offer directions for future research, as Cruse & Schilling’s bottom-up approach is well suited to provide new insights in the domain of social cognition and to explain its relation to phenomena such as language, emotion, and self. (shrink)

After motivating a framework for evaluating top-down, middle-out, middle-in, and bottom-up ontology development strategies, we apply our framework to investigate whether infectious disease ontologies - specifically, the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO) and the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO) - effectively promote semantic interoperability.

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 (...) respondents in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 (...) respondents in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

Mechanisms play a crucial role in scientific research across various disciplines, and philosophers of science have devoted significant effort into understanding their ontology and epistemology. This paper examines the relationship between mechanisms and phenomena, highlighting the inherent dependence of mechanistic delineation on the characterization of phenomena. By acknowledging that characterizing phenomena is influenced by pragmatic considerations and research interests, the paper argues that mechanistic inquiry is inherently shaped by researchers’ perspectives. This dependence raises concerns about the possibility of a realist (...) view of mechanisms. To address these concerns, the paper explores how top-down constraints, rooted in researchers’ interests and pragmatic concerns, can be balanced by bottom-up constraints derived from empirical considerations. In conclusion, I argue that the interplay between these constraints forms an empirical and realist counterweight to the perspectival nature of top-down constraints. (shrink)

We propose a ‘Moral Imagination’ methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams from across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy (...) review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular. (shrink)

A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment – the agent’s physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators – is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence, models of cognition need to be embodied. In contrast to methods from empirical sciences to study cognition, robots can be freely manipulated and virtually all key variables of their embodiment and control programs can be systematically varied. As such, they provide an extremely powerful tool (...) of investigation. We present a robotic bottom-up or developmental approach, focusing on three stages: (a) low-level behaviors like walking and reflexes, (b) learning regularities in sensorimotor spaces, and (c) human-like cognition. We also show that robotic based research is not only a productive path to deepening our understanding of cognition, but that robots can strongly benefit from human-like cognition in order to become more autonomous, robust, resilient, and safe. (shrink)

Philosophy of science and history of science have been unable to integrate in a meaningful fashion. The major difficulty has been the question of how the history of science can inform the philosophy of science. By making several distinctions to characterize the type of philosophy of science relevant for integrated HPS, I show how traditional approaches to integration failed. These include a top-down and a bottom-up philosophical approach to integrated HPS. I then present a more fruitful way of integrating (...) the disciplines, that of iterations. (shrink)

Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviours ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In this paper, we explore the role played by technological design decisions in online self-radicalization in its myriad (...) guises, encompassing extreme as well as more mundane forms. We begin by characterizing the phenomenon of technological seduction. Next, we distinguish between top-down seduction and bottom-up seduction. We then situate both forms of technological seduction within the theoretical model of dynamical systems theory. We conclude by articulating strategies for combatting online self-radicalization. (shrink)

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

I present a case for a rapprochement between aspects of rationalism and scientific realism, by way of a general framework employing modal epistemology and elements of 2-dimensional semantics (2DS). My overall argument strategy is meta-inductive: The bulk of this paper establishes a “base case,” i.e., a concretely constructive example by which I demonstrate this linkage. The base case or constructive example acts as the exemplar for generating, in a constructively ‘bottom-up’ fashion, a more generally rigorous case for rationalism-realism (...) qua modal epistemology. The exemple I choose in D. Chalmers’ (2002) modal rationalism and R. Giere’s (1985, 1988) constructive realism. I show by way of a thorough analysis how Giere’s claims concerning modal scope are characterized as instances of Chalmers’ modal rationalism, both weak and strong. In essence, as I demonstrate via Chalmers’ notions, ceteris paribus the constructive realist ultimately opts for a comparatively wider gate, characterized by modal reasoning, to lead from the rooms of conceivability qua thought experiments and models, to the pastures of metaphysical possibility. Chalmers likewise tries to erect such a wider gate, in his general conceivability-possibility theses. Anti-realists, on the other hand, see a narrower passage and my contention herein is that they suffer from modal myopia, which hopefully the ‘corrective vision’ of Chalmers’ modal rationalism can restore. In the introduction and concluding sections I sketch out suggestions of constructing ‘inductive steps’ from my base case, to generate more extensively general claims regarding realism qua rationalism. -/- . (shrink)

The article reports on some societal observations conducted in 2019 on New York subways. With comparison to the subway management cases observed in Milan and mainland China, the article contends that the phenomenon in the New York public-funded transportation system reflects the spirit of equality in human with efficacy on the utility of the public-funded infrastructure. The message in the letter concludes that public & private fundings need to be drawn for the human development of the homeless population in the (...) New York City subways. Considering the realpolitik issues arose from revisionist powers in economy, bottom-up state-building is the secure strategy with on-going regional conflicts & post-pandemic situations. The letter argues that putting human rights in the high values of politics is a positive sum game for the status quo. (shrink)

Justin Garson introduces the distinction between two views on Madness we encounter again and again throughout history: Madness as dysfunction, and Madness as strategy. On the latter view, Madness serves some purpose for the person experiencing it, even if it’s simultaneously harmful. The strategy view makes intelligible why Madness often holds a certain allure – even when it’s prima facie terrifying. Moreover, if Madness is a strategy in Garson’s metaphorical sense – if it serves a purpose – (...) it makes sense to use consciously chosen strategies for living with Madness that doesn’t necessarily aim to annihilate or repress it as far as possible. In this paper, we use our own respective stories as case studies. We have both struggled to resist the allure of Madness, and both ended up embracing a kind of Pyrrhonian scepticism about reality instead of clinging to sane reality. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the topic of reproducibility (and irreproducibility) of aesthetic experience and effects, distinguishing it from the traditional subject of artifact reproducibility. The main aim is to outline a typology of the various kind of irreproducibility of aesthetic experience and to draw some implications for the aesthetic discussion concerning contemporary art. Depending on the type of artwork, we can define the difference (or the “ratio”) between aesthetic experience in the presence of the artwork and aesthetic experience (...) in its absence, that is, in the presence of its reproductions or documentations. For instance, in an easily reproducible painting the difference between experiencing the real artwork or its reproduction could be considered relatively small, while the difference between real experience and reproduction would be high in a complex roomfilling installation. This ratio could depend on ontological, material, or practical reasons and could also depend on the technological means of reproduction and documentation. In conclusion, following Groys (2017), I will suggest that the application of different "strategies of irreproducibility” testifies the urge to escape the replicability of aesthetic experience and the desire to generate forms of uniqueness and exclusivity in the fruition of art, and could therefore be seen as one of the reasons why art today is strongly based on documentations, installations or performative events. You really need to make the real effort to queue up and attend them, no substitute would be otherwise possible. (shrink)

In the following paragraphs, I will describe ten strategies through which we can show the weaknesses of every form of theism based on the "One God", while postulating that the Trinity is a good solution. This approach follows up on Swinburne’s claims about the existence of a priori and a posteriori proofs for the existence of the Trinity (his proofs are part of the sixth strategy). Clearly, these strategies are not “new”: they have been advocated by many thinkers in (...) the past and in the present. I merely revived them, and brought them together in a kind of cumulative reasoning: the strength of them arises when these strategies are considered together, showing that the Trinity is a reasonable hypothesis even though it is contradictory. The proposed strategies lead to the conclusion that there must exist in God something similar to what we call ‘real relations’ and ‘multiplicity’; and in order for God to be relational, there must exist in Him some “distincts” that relate to one another. This is postulated by philosophical reasoning, not just by Revelation, and regardless of the choice to support a process metaphysics. As Trinitarian theology contains the mystery of eternal generation, the strategies do account for the fact that in philosophy we contemplate the mystery of eternal self-distinction and of all the other ‘self-actions’ of the One. The eternal generation remains mysterious, but it is the idea that best helps us describe how God is (One and Triune) and how he creates the world. God must be Triune in every theistic system. The One God is, as One, also Triune. The Unity-Trinity of the Principle is the only apophatic point that we can reach from many quarters. Once autonomous paths of reason have established that God is a Person and Persons, One-Multiple, Creator (communicated), Free, Relational and Infinite possibility, it therefore emerges that our most reliable hypothesis is that of the Trinitarian God. (shrink)

Martin and Deutscher’s causal theory of remembering holds that a memory trace serves as a necessary causal link between any genuine episode of remembering and the event it enables one to recall. In recent years, the causal theory has come under fire from researchers across philosophy and cognitive science, who argue that results from the scientific study of memory are incompatible with the kinds of memory traces that Martin and Deutscher hold essential to remembering. Of special note, these critics observe, (...) is that a single memory trace can be shaped by multiple past experiences. This appears to prevent traces from underwriting Martin and Deutscher’s distinction between remembering an event and merely forming an accurate representation of it. This paper accepts such criticisms of the standard causal theory and, through considering the phenomenon forgetting through repetition, raises several others. A substantially revised causal theory is then developed, compatible with the thesis that individual memory traces are shaped by multiple past experiences. The key strategy is to conceive of episodic remembering not as the simple retrieval and projection of a static memory trace, but as a complex quasi-inferential process that makes use of multiple forms of information and cues—“prop-like” memory traces included—in generating the experience known as episodic remembering. When remembering is understood as a multi-componential process, there are a variety of ways in which a representation of the past may be appropriately causally dependent upon a prior experience of the event remembered. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify E- Learning strategies and their relation to the efficiency of research performance in foreign and Palestinian universities (University of Ottawa, Munster, Suez Canal, Al-Azhar, Islamic, Al-Aqsa). The analytical descriptive approach was used for this purpose, and relying on the questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The study society is from the senior management, where the number of senior management in the universities in question is 206. The random stratified sample was selected and (SPSS) (...) was used for statistical data analysis. The study found a significant relationship between E- Learning strategies and the efficiency of research performance in universities. It also reached the participation of senior management in the research that develops the university performance in the Palestinian universities. The senior management indicated that they do not care to follow the policies of implementing the development of scientific research. While the senior management in foreign universities indicated that they are interested in following up the policies of implementing the development of scientific research. The study also showed that senior management in Palestinian universities does not care about providing the appropriate budget for E- Learning. The study recommended that the senior management of Palestinian universities should provide an E- Learning budget and encourage employees to continue using E- Learning strategies. The administration in the Palestinian universities should adopt and support outstanding research, and the need to encourage interest in the implementation of policies for the development of scientific research. (shrink)

This paper challenges the assumption that youth and youth agencies are in a condition of equa- lity when entering a participatory action research (PAR). By asserting that it is not a state of equality that practitioners nor youth should assume nor be immediately striving for, but a consis- tently equitable process, this article draws from and reflects on the relationship between young people and researchers who have used a PAR methodology in action oriented projects. Using the UNESCO Growing up in (...) Cities Canada project as a case example, this review extrapolates from and reflects on challenges faced by the project as a whole. Using semi-structured interviews to explore the roles of adults and youth, a number of strategies are highlighted as the techniques used to overcome these challenges. The discussion concludes with further reflection on the com- plexities of equality and equity, recommending a number of actions that have the potential to create an equitable environment in PAR projects similar to the one examined. (shrink)

One of the disadvantages of the point estimate in survey sampling is that it fluctuates from sample to sample due to sampling error, as the estimator only provides a point value for the parameter under discussion. The neutrosophic approach, pioneered by Florentin Smarandache, is an excellent tool for estimating the parameters under consideration in sampling theory since it yields interval estimates in which the parameter lies with a very high probability. As a result, the neutrosophic technique, which is a generalization (...) of classical approach, is used to deal with ambiguous, indeterminate, and uncertain data. In this investigation, we suggest a new general family of ratio and exponential ratio type estimators for the elevated estimation of neutrosophic population mean of the primary variable utilizing known neutrosophic auxiliary parameters. For the first degree approximation, the bias and Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the suggested estimators are computed. The neutrosophic optimum values of the characterizing constants are determined, as well as the minimum value of the neutrosophic MSE of the suggested estimator is obtained for these optimum values of the characterizing scalars. Because the minimum MSE of the classical estimators of population mean lies inside the estimated interval of the neutrosophic estimators, the neutrosophic estimators are better than the equivalent classical estimators. The empirical investigation, which used both real and simulated data sets, backs up the theoretical findings. For practical utility in various areas of applications, the estimator with the lowest MSE or highest Percentage Relative Efficiency (PRE) is recommended. (shrink)

Grounding chains are usually taken to be top-ist, grounded in the largest entity (the cosmos), or bottom-ist, grounded in the smallest entity(ies) (mereological atoms). Between these two, middle-ism, the view that grounding chains terminate in middle-sized entities (like iPhones, toasters, amoebae), is almost never considered. Sarah Bernstein in her paper Could a middle level be the most fundamental? argues for the plausibility for middle-ism. In this paper I argue against Bernstein in that middle-ism is a view much more problematic (...) than top-ism or bottom-ism. This is shown in three ways. The paper first shows how the middle level itself is problematic. The second problem is that middle-ism leads to a contradiction with respect to the notion of relative fundamentality, and third, middle-ism creates fatal problems for the parthood relation. Through these three issues, the paper shows how middle-ism is problematic in lieu of having fatal problems which refrain it from serving as the theory to explain fundamentalia and subsequently grounding structures. (shrink)

The objective of Working Group 4 of the COST Action NET4Age-Friendly is to examine existing policies, advocacy, and funding opportunities and to build up relations with policy makers and funding organisations. Also, to synthesize and improve existing knowledge and models to develop from effective business and evaluation models, as well as to guarantee quality and education, proper dissemination and ensure the future of the Action. The Working Group further aims to enable capacity building to improve interdisciplinary participation, to promote knowledge (...) exchange and to foster a cross-European interdisciplinary research capacity, to improve cooperation and co-creation with cross-sectors stakeholders and to introduce and educate students SHAFE implementation and sustainability. To enable the achievement of the objectives of Working Group 4, the Leader of the Working Group, the Chair and Vice-Chair, in close cooperation with the Science Communication Coordinator, developed a template to map the current state of SHAFE policies, funding opportunities and networking in the COST member countries of the Action. On invitation, the Working Group lead received contributions from 37 countries, in a total of 85 Action members. The contributions provide an overview of the diversity of SHAFE policies and opportunities in Europe and beyond. These were not edited or revised and are a result of the main areas of expertise and knowledge of the contributors; thus, gaps in areas or content are possible and these shall be further explored in the following works and reports of this WG. But this preliminary mapping is of huge importance to proceed with the WG activities. In the following chapters, an introduction on the need of SHAFE policies is presented, followed by a summary of the main approaches to be pursued for the next period of work. The deliverable finishes with the opportunities of capacity building, networking and funding that will be relevant to undertake within the frame of Working Group 4 and the total COST Action. The total of country contributions is presented in the annex of this deliverable. (shrink)

This paper questions the efficacy of social adverts in promoting Nigeria’s democracy and proposes creative planning as a key strategy for designing effective media messages for effective democratic principles. Social advertising pleads a course through advocacy, social mobilization or behavior change communication. The business of democracy is to get the people involved in the business of leadership. Many media messages created to inform and educate the citizenry under democratic set-ups in Nigeria have been ineffective with regards to changing behavior (...) of the citizens towards a particular course. The creative planning strategy under consideration in this paper involves the steps in the creation of media messages with focus on variables such as discourse, dramatic logic or arguments, signs and significations and the audience. Basic questions in this paper include: Why are social adverts used as tools in promoting democratic values? Are the social adverts used in Nigeria predicated on the creative planning strategy? To what extent have the social adverts contributed to the promotion of democratic principles in Nigeria? The paper examines some advertising theories as applied to message development and questions the basis for creating or designing most media messages in promoting democratic values in Nigeria. The methodology adopted in this paper is analysis and recommendations will be based on the findings. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify creative behavior and its impact on achieving Lean strategy in Palestinian civil organizations. The study used the descriptive analytical approach and the questionnaire as a main tool for collecting data from employees of associations operating in the governorates of Gaza Strip. The cluster sample method was used and the sample size was (343) individuals. Retrieving (298) questionnaires, and the following results were reached: The relative weight of the measure of Lean strategy was 79.04 (...) (%), and the relative weight of the measure of creative behavior was 78.99 (%), and there was a statistically significant relationship between creative behavior and Lean strategy, and the presence of an effect of creative behavior on Achieving Lean strategy, the absence of statistically significant differences in creative behavior according to the gender variable, age group, educational qualification, specialization, and the presence of statistically significant differences in Lean strategy attributable to the gender variable in dimensions (strategic sensitivity, clarity of vision, choice of strategic goals, Response speed, action) and differences were in favor of females. While there were no statistically significant differences in my dimension (shared responsibility, core capabilities) due to the gender variable, there were no statistically significant differences between the mean dimensions of Lean strategy due to the age group variable, the educational qualification, and the study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: the necessity of seeking civil organizations In Gaza Strip, by obtaining funding from external countries to provide self-income for associations to face crises and give them independence in order to preserve them to carry out their role in society, the need to work to follow up on the strategic plan for NGOs using electronic messages as they pave the way to reach excellence and creativity in the field of work, The necessity of holding meetings and workshops with the local community, and this helps them to define the community's needs. (shrink)

Within the context of the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, one discussion about the status of mathematics is concerned with the ‘Enhanced Indispensability Argument’, which makes explicit in what way mathematics is supposed to be indispensable in science, namely explanatory. If there are genuine mathematical explanations of empirical phenomena, an argument for mathematical platonism could be extracted by using inference to the best explanation. The best explanation of the primeness of the life cycles of Periodical Cicadas is genuinely mathematical, according to Baker (...) :223–238, 2005; Br J Philos Sci 60:611–633, 2009). Furthermore, the result is then also used to strengthen the platonist position :779–793, 2017a). We pick up the circularity problem brought up by Leng Mathematical reasoning, heuristics and the development of mathematics, King’s College Publications, London, pp 167–189, 2005) and Bangu :13–20, 2008). We will argue that Baker’s attempt to solve this problem fails, if Hume’s Principle is analytic. We will also provide the opponent of the Enhanced Indispensability Argument with the so-called ‘interpretability strategy’, which can be used to come up with alternative explanations in case Hume’s Principle is non-analytic. (shrink)

Tightened border controls, agile health departments, tech platforms, and a hand-washing song that went viral have added up to a frugal but highly effective response to the threat of COVID-19. The country's success provides a model that other developing and emerging economies should follow.

This article opens with the consequentialist–deontologist debate, with the former concerned about the relevance of punitive measures against their crime reducing potentials, while the latter highlights punishment as censure of wrongful acts and the proportion of the punishment to the degree of crime. The article briefly discusses the empirical research on the impact of penal sanctions and focuses on three main kinds of empirical research into possible general deterrent effects—namely, association studies, quasi-experimental studies, and contextual and perceptual studies. It addresses (...) the methodological issues involved in deterrence research and summarizes the results precisely. This article also discusses reductivism in the view of the possibility that penal sanctions could influence the offender's will. The results suggest that crime preventive aims can justify sentencing policies only to a limited degree, at least for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Individuals come across extreme Uncertainty situations, feeling rounded–up 360 degrees, as if trapped inside Chakra Vyuha (wheel form strategy). For uncertainty is often related to future, the concept of Future Time perspective (FTP) is relied upon for attaining positive states. But FTP is a critical factor which works both positively and negatively depending on other factors intervening. For politicians and businessmen such states of being trapped in Chakra Vyuha, can mean end of their political life or business life. In (...) the current paper, the author describes the introspection of a Subject while he attempted to alter his Future Time perspective. This introspective report further gave clue for Merged Time Perspective or Seamless Time Horizon instead of FTP and also that Regulatory Focus and Resistance To Change need to be combined, coalesced and treated on a single continuum. Current author also has proposed a therapy outline to help businessmen and politicians to come out of devastating situations in which they feel rounded – up by opponents 360 degrees. (shrink)

Semantic contextualism is often used in order to offer solutions for problems in other branches of philosophy, including epistemology. One of such attempts is epistemic contextualism, according to which the semantic value of the word “knows” changes with the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to critically investigate Keith DeRose’s contextualism to see up to what extent does it provide a valid anti-sceptical strategy. I argue that while it can be seen as a good rival (...) for global and Ungerian scepticism, it does not lead to the refutation of other variants of classical scepticism. (shrink)

Various changes and advances have taken place in the ways of teaching and learning. With the encountered global pandemic crisis, flexible learning has been practiced particularly in state universities and colleges. This study sought to determine the level of procedural fluency in College Algebra as well as the difficulties and interventions applied by tertiary students of Cotabato State University (CSU) in the flexible learning set-up. The period covered by the study was during the first semester of the school year 2021-2022. (...) The respondents were a sample of 30 first-year mathematics major students of CSU. It used mixed methods; the quantitative approach was utilized to know the students’ knowledge of procedures in solving mathematical problems while the qualitative approach was utilized to explore the difficulties of the students in learning mathematics as well as the coping strategies that can serve as basis for mathematics intervention program. The findings revealed that most of the respondents have a low level of procedural fluency in College Algebra, particularly emerging in the understanding the problem, devising a strategy, and solving steps while inept in the problem-solving checking process. On the part of new normal learning, difficulties were experienced such as poor knowledge of the prerequisite skills and unstable internet connection. As part of their interventions, facing the encountered problems, practicing repeatedly, and watching online video tutorials were applied. Based on the findings of the study, it is concluded that the first-year students have low level of procedural fluency in College Algebra problem-solving particularly in the Polya’s principles of understanding the problem, devising a plan, carrying out the plan, and checking the answer. Because of the learning challenges encountered by the students, it is recommended to develop step-by-step video tutorials that can address their problem-solving difficulties and supplement their learning in the flexible mode of delivery. (shrink)

You may remember that a document circulated amongst University of Manchester staff asks, “Can top down management make our university great?” I suspect there is a difficulty with solving this problem by increasing the admission requirements, in terms of the grades you need to get in. At a certain level, one encounters a widespread and strong preference not to be the bottom level.

Advances in the empirical sectors of biology are beginning to reveal evolvability as a major evolutionary process. Yet evolvability’s theoretical role is still intensely debated. Since its inception nearly thirty years ago, the evolvability research front has put a strong emphasis on the non-genetic mechanisms that influence the short-term evolvability of individuals within populations by causing phenotypic heterogeneity, such as developmental trait plasticity, phenotypic plasticity, modularity, the G-P map, robustness, and/or epigenetic variation. However, genetic evolvability mechanisms such as mutation or (...) recombination have a deeper history in evolutionary thought that is often overlooked by those in the evolvability research front, with recent evidence suggesting that species switch to genetic evolvability mechanisms when short-term evolvability strategies fail to relieve selective pressures. For this reason, a causal distinction must be made between genetic evolvability and the more recently emphasized non-genetic (or evo-devo) evolvability to allow for its maturation as a central explanatory concept. I conclude by arguing that the anachronisms of the scientific process are the main culprit behind recent divisions in biology and likely beyond. To streamline theoretical progress, we need to build a new science with new underlying philosophies like restricted pluralism. (shrink)

The recent news of a 13-year-old Singaporean prodigy graduating from an Australian university has sparked discussion about Singapore’s approach to nurturing exceptional young talents, especially after it was revealed that the boy had been previously rejected by a local university because of his young age. Some have called for an increased flexibility to allow such young people to skip levels in Singapore - parents of intellectually advanced children often cite concerns that their children are disengaged and bored at school. The (...) fear is real - keeping these students at the same level as their peers could potentially squander their potential and impede their growth. Yet, on the flip side, accelerating their academic journey could potentially jeopardise their social and emotional development, which could negatively impact their ability to connect and work well with their peers in their adulthood. Nonetheless, this debate brings to light the need for more effective strategies to meaningfully engage students with diverse abilities and learning paces. (shrink)

Predictive processing models of perception take issue with standard models of perception as hierarchical bottom-up processing modulated by memory and attention. The predictive framework posits that the brain generates predictions about stimuli, which are matched to the incoming signal. Mismatches between predictions and the incoming signal – so-called prediction errors – are then used to generate new and better predictions until the prediction errors have been minimized, at which point a perception arises. Predictive models hold that all bottom-up (...) processes are signals conveying prediction errors to higher areas, which respond by updating their predictions. We take issue with this claim and argue that object recognition requires bottom-up processing that cannot be understood in terms of prediction errors. Along the way, we expand on previous work casting doubt on the framework's ability to account for attention. Specifically, we argue that the type of attention that allows us to rapidly extract the gist of an object or scene presents an additional challenge to the predictive approach. We conclude by considering how the framework may be augmented to avoid these problems. (shrink)

Abstract: The article presents and critically discusses Walton's (and Reed's and Macagno's) argument scheme approach to a theory of good argumentation. In particular, four characteristics of Walton's approach are presented: 1. It presents normative requirements for argumentation in the form of argument schemes, i.e. relatively concrete type descriptions. 2. These schemata are enthymematic, i.e. they omit some of the premises required by other approaches. 3. The actual argument schemes are usually supplemented by critical questions. 4. The method is inductive, (...) class='Hi'>bottom-up, gaining the normative schemata by abstraction from empirically collected groups of similar arguments. These characteristics, among others, are then discussed on the basis of four adequacy conditions: AC1: effectiveness in achieving the epistemic goal of obtaining and communicating justified acceptable opinions; AC2: completeness in capturing the good argument types; AC3: efficiency in achieving the goals; AC4: justification of the argument schemes. The discussion then reveals a number of weaknesses in Walton's argument schemes; among other things, they are neither effective (in the defined sense) nor truly justified. Contributing factors to these problems include the schema approach, i.e. not looking at the form of arguments, and the lack of epistemological foundations in the development of good types of arguments. However, the critical analyses reveal a better alternative: an epistemological approach based on epistemological principles. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of the scheme Practical Inference, which confirms the general criticism in detail. (shrink)

An audiovisual correspondence (AVC) refers to an observer’s seemingly arbitrary yet consistent matching of sensory features across the two modalities; for example, between an auditory pitch and visual size. Research on AVCs has frequently used a speeded classification procedure in which participants are asked to rapidly classify an image when it is either accompanied by a congruent or an incongruent sound (or vice versa). When, as is typically the case, classification is faster in the presence of a congruent stimulus, researchers (...) have inferred that the AVC is automatic and bottom-up. Such an inference is incomplete because the procedure does not show that the AVC is not subject to top-down influences. To remedy this problem, we devised a procedure that allows us to assess the degree of “bottom-up-ness” and “top-down-ness” in the processing of an AVC. We did this in studies of AVCs between pitch and five visual features: size, height, spatial frequency, brightness, and angularity. We find that all the AVCs we studied involve both bottom-up and top-down processing, thus undermining the prevalent generalization that AVCs are automatic. (shrink)

In this paper we want to analyze some philosophical and epistemological connections between a new kind of technology recently developed within robotics, and the previous mechanical approach. A new paradigm about machine-design in robotics, currently defined as ‘Embodied Intelligence’, has recently been developed. Here we consider the debate on the relationship between the hand and the intellect, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, aiming at providing a more suitable understanding of this paradigm. The new bottom-up approach to (...) design is deeply rooted in a new kind of empiricism, which tries to overcome issues connected with the previous approach strongly committed with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate and its origin. Since Turing’s time, the AI debate showed a rationalistic bias which remained undisputed until now. The paradigm shift we are witnessing nowadays is a reply to that bias in order to achieve not only a better way to design robots, but also to understand some underlying epistemological remarks. (shrink)

An important topic in the ethics of technology is the extent to which recent digital technologies undermine user autonomy. Supporting evidence includes the fact that recent digital technologies are known to have an impact on attention, which balances "bottom-up" and "top-down" influences on cognition. As described in numerous papers, these technologies manipulate bottom-up influences through cognitive fluency, intermittent variable rewards, and other techniques, making them more attractive to the user. We further reason that recent digital technologies reduce the (...) user’s ability to exert top-down attention due to the scale of the content—they provide far more content at a much faster pace than other technologies, which over time reweights the balance of attention in favor of bottom-up influences. After reviewing evidence for these effects, including their temporal duration, we consider their downstream effects on both autonomy and creativity. We find that while the impact of recent digital technologies on top-down attention may allow for more idea generation, that creativity also depends on control, which is undermined by these technologies. We are more circumspect with autonomy, reasoning that in certain cases it might not make sense to see user autonomy as harmed through these effects. We conclude with other ways that recent digital technologies may improve creativity, which may act as an offset to the detrimental impacts of these technologies. (shrink)

This article adopts a bottom-up approach to theory interpretation, following the slogan “meaning is use”, and applies it to quantum mechanics. I argue that it fits very well with the Consistent Histories formulation of quantum mechanics, interpreted in a particular way that is not the interpretation favoured by original proponents of the formulation. I examine the difficulties and advantages of this interpretation.

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

Coastal protection is crucial to human development since the ocean has many values associated with the economy, ecosystem, and culture. However, most ocean protecting efforts are currently ineffective due to the burdens of finance, lack of appropriate management, and international cooperation regimes. For aiding bottom-up initiatives for ocean protection support, this study employed the Mindsponge Theory to examine how the public’s perceived economic and cultural values influence their willingness to support actions to protect the ocean. Analyzing the European-Union-Horizon-2020-funded dataset (...) of 709 respondents from 42 countries, we discovered that perceived economic values have negative effects on the tendency of ocean protection supports (i.e., food, transportation, renewable energy, oil and gas, and recreation). In contrast, certain perceived cultural values can help increase the willingness to do so (i.e., mental well-being and sense of identity). However, the effects of perceived cultural values are only moderately reliable. These findings suggest that designing cultural information delivery campaigns can help promote coastal reserve supports, such as fundraisings and preserving the oceans from the community. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce and defend the recurrent model for understanding bodily spatial phenomenology. While Longo, Azañón and Haggard (2010) propose a bottom-up model, Bermúdez (2017) emphasizes the top-down aspect of the information processing loop. We argue that both are only half of the story. Section 1 intro- duces what the issues are. Section 2 starts by explaining why the top- down, descending direction is necessary with the illustration from the ‘body-based tactile rescaling’ paradigm (de Vignemont, Ehrsson and (...) Haggard, 2005). It then argues that the bottom-up, ascending direction is also necessary, and substantiates this view with recent research on skin space and tactile field (Haggard et al., 2017). Section 3 discusses the model’s application to body ownership and bodily self-representation. Implications also extend to topics such as sense modality individuation (Macpherson, 2011), the constancy- based view of perception (Burge, 2010), and the perception/cognition divide (Firestone and Scholl, 2016). (shrink)

Throughout most of the 20th century, analytical and reductionist approaches have dominated in biological, social, and humanistic sciences, including linguistics and communication. We generally believed we could account for fundamental phenomena in invoking basic elemental units. Although the amount of knowledge generated was certainly impressive, we have also seen limitations of this approach. Discovering the sound formants of human languages, for example, has allowed us to know vital aspects of the ‘material’ plane of verbal codes, but it tells us little (...) about significant aspects of their social functions. I firmly believe, therefore, that alongside a linguistics that looks ‘inward’ there should also be a linguistics that looks ‘outward’, or one even that is constructed ‘from the outside’, a linguistics that I refer to elsewhere as ‘holistic’ though it could be identified by a different name. My current vision is to promote simultaneously the perspective that goes from the part to the whole and that which goes from the whole to the parts, i.e., both from the top down and from the bottom up. This goal is shared with other disciplines which recognize that many phenomena related to life are interwoven, self-organising, emergent and processual. Thus, we need to re-examine how we have conceived of reality, both the way we have looked at it and the images we have used to talk about it. Several approaches now grouped under the label of complexity have been elaborated towards this objective of finding new concepts and ways of thinking that better fit the complex organisation of facts and events. (shrink)

Human beings have the ability to ‘augment’ reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visually perceived scene. For example, when deciding how to arrange furniture in a new home, one might project the image of an armchair into an empty corner or the image of a painting onto a wall. The experience of noticing a constellation in the sky at night is also perceptual-imaginative amalgam: it involves both seeing the stars in the constellation and imagining the lines that connect them (...) at the same time. I here refer to such hybrid experiences – involving both a bottom-up, externally generated component and a top-down, internally generated component – as make-perceive (Briscoe 2008, 2011). My discussion in this paper has two parts. In the first part, I show that make-perceive enables human beings to solve certain problems and pursue certain projects more effectively than bottom-up perceiving or top-down visualization alone. To this end, the skillful use of projected mental imagery is surveyed in a variety of contexts, including action planning, the interpretation of static mechanical diagrams, and non-instrumental navigation. In the second part, I address the question of whether make-perceive may help to account for the “phenomenal presence” of occluded or otherwise hidden features of perceived objects. I argue that phenomenal presence is not well explained by the hypothesis that hidden features are represented using projected mental images. In defending this position, I point to important phenomenological and functional differences between the way hidden object features are represented respectively in mental imagery and amodal completion. (shrink)

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts as (...) a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

Humean accounts of laws are often contrasted with governing accounts, and recent developments have added pragmatic versions of Humeanism. This paper offers Mitchell's pragmatist, perspectival account of laws as a third option. The differences between these accounts come down to the role of modality. Mitchell's bottom-up account allows for subtle gradations of modal content to be conveyed by laws. The perspectival character of laws is not an accident or something to be eventually eliminated - it is part of how (...) this modal content is conveyed. I conclude with a discussion of the metaphysical commitments in Humeanism as requiring a perspectiveless view of the manifold from outside, and how Mitchell's situated account is better able to account for the substantive notion of possibility involved in scientific laws. (shrink)

It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis , according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious . In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, (...) selecting targets for action, and determining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform” . Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention. (shrink)

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c ) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal consciousness by drawing on the resources of state-based behavioral life history theory. (...) By comparing the different life histories of gastropods and arthropods, we will be able to make better sense of the possible origins of consciousness and its function for organisms in their natural environments. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a (...) science of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)