We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement (...) to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that arguments from the history of science against scientific realism, like the arguments advanced by P. Kyle Stanford and Peter Vickers, are fallacious. The so-called Old Induction, like Vickers's, and New Induction, like Stanford's, are both guilty of confirmation bias—specifically, of cherry-picking evidence that allegedly challenges scientific realism while ignoring evidence to the contrary. I also show that the historical episodes that Stanford adduces in support of his New Induction are indeterminate between (...) a pessimistic and an optimistic interpretation. For these reasons, these arguments are fallacious, and thus do not pose a serious challenge to scientific realism. (shrink)

Ormerod and Chronicle reported that optimal solutions to traveling salesperson problems were judged to be aesthetically more pleasing than poorer solutions and that solutions with more convex hull nodes were rated as better figures. To test these conclusions, solution regularity and the number of potential intersections were held constant, whereas solution optimality, the number of internal nodes, and the number of nearest neighbors in each solution were varied factorially. The results did not support the view that the convex hull is (...) an important determinant of figural attractiveness. Also, in contrast to the findings of Ormerod and Chronicle, there were consistent individual differences. Participants appeared to be divided as to whether the most attractive figure enclosed a given area within a perimeter of minimum or maximum length. It is concluded that future research in this area cannot afford to focus exclusively on group performance measures. (shrink)

Recent years have seen little pushback on the pictorialist thesis that mental imagery occurs in an analog or iconic format. This paper challenges the status quo in developing new arguments to show how the phenomena most commonly cited in pictorialism’s favor—viz., participant response times during “mental rotation” and “mental scanning” tasks, and the retinotopic organization of cortical areas underlying visual imagery—fail to provide positive evidence for the thesis that mental imagery is analog or iconic in format. In addition, alternative explanations (...) are provided for why we might see retinotopic activation in cortical areas underlying imagery, and why we would observe the relevant response times in rotation and scanning tasks, even if mental imagery did not occur in an analog format. (shrink)

Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish are remarkable creatures, famed for their intelligence. They are invertebrates—animals without a backbone—and are much more distant from us in evolutionary terms than our fellow mammals, far more distant even than birds, reptiles, and fishes. The last common ancestor of humans and octopuses lived over 560 million years ago. These animals have evolved intelligence by a different path, and their ways of perceiving and interacting with the world are very different from our own. This resource aims (...) to take you inside the minds of octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and their lesser-known relatives, the nautiluses, using the latest scientific evidence to present an accurate, up-to-date picture of what we know about their capabilities. (shrink)

Generic statements play a crucial role in concept learning, communication and education. Despite many efforts, the semantics of generics remain a controversial issue, as they do not seem to fit our standard theories of meaning. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this problem by focusing on how these sentences function in reasoning. Drawing on a distinction between property and diagnostic generics, we defend three theses: First, property generics are not about facts but express relations between concepts. Second, (...) generics play an important role in everyday reasoning by interacting with our expectations about the world. Third, diagnostic generics emphasise properties that separate the category in the generics from other categories in the same contrast class. We use the theory of conceptual spaces to advance measures of typicality and diagnosticity capable of modelling different aspects of generics and apply them to the modifier effect and the inverse conjunction fallacy. Finally, we discuss the pragmatics of generics. (shrink)

Epistemic terms of various syntactic categories can uniformly be used to do the same thing—to hedge. This essay clarifies hedging as a phenomenon and explains how hedging happens by advancing the positional theory. The guiding idea is that, in uttering declaratives, speakers signal what their epistemic position is towards the content put into play by the declarative. The default signal is that the speaker knows. But when an epistemic term hedges, the term overrides the default. The non-default signal sent is (...) that the speaker or someone else occupies the position indicated by the term. To make that idea precise, the positional theory treats hedging as a discourse function. Terms hedge because of how a declarative containing an epistemic term is situated within a discourse. (shrink)

Given their large number of adherents, and the land and property they own, religious communities have been identified as groups that could have an influence on achieving carbon net-zero. The theological views held by religious communities relating to ecological matters – their “ecotheological values” – play an important role in motivating their environmental concern and action. But which ecotheological ideas are most, and which are least, efficacious in this respect? This paper presents findings salient to this question from a recent (...) survey (n = 319) conducted amongst Christian activists and advocates concerned with climate change. It reports on which ecotheological ideas are most widely and firmly held amongst samples from six Christian environmental activist and advocacy groups in the UK, and discusses the extent to which these ideas are either continuous with mainstream Christian theology, or indicate innovative theological thinking. We find examples of both: some mainstream views are popular, and some are unpopular, amongst our sample, whilst some innovative and newer ideas are becoming more popular, whilst others are resisted. These results will be useful in seeking to promote a greater pro-environmental stance within Christian communities more widely. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A popular idea in ethics is that subjective normative concepts play an important role in moral deliberation: They are taken to be action‐guiding. It is generally assumed that in order for these concepts to be able to guide an agent's actions, they need to be “informationally accessible” to the agent in a substantive sense. That is, access holds: access: Subjective normative notions are accessible to agents. access has been spelled out in various ways, for example, via knowledge, justified belief, (...) and evidence. We present a novel argument against access on any precisification. Our argument is distinctive for at least two reasons. First, most discussion in the literature on action‐guidance concerns obligation. But we draw attention to subjective permission. We show that on virtually any substantive construal of “accessible,” subjective permissions are not always accessible to agents. Second, existing criticisms of access are motivated by general epistemological considerations, for example, the anti‐luminosity argument. By contrast, our argument against access is motivated by properties that are particular to normative concepts, and is neutral on more general epistemological debates. (shrink)

Across numerous languages, the attitude verb _think_ is learned later than other attitude verbs like _want_. But why? This essays advances a new hypothesis: children initially treat _think_ as a veridical yet non-factive verb akin to a class of verbs I call confirmatives. This hypothesis is argued to better explain existing data that troubles other hypotheses, and to find support from the ease with which children represent knowledge but not belief.

Manifold learning and effective model building are generally viewed as fundamentally different types of procedure. After all, in one we build a simplified model of the data, in the other, we construct a simplified model of the another model. Nonetheless, I argue that certain kinds of high-dimensional effective model building, and effective field theory construction in quantum field theory, can be viewed as special cases of manifold learning. I argue that this helps to shed light on all of these techniques. (...) First, it suggests that the effective model building procedure depends upon a certain kind of algorithmic compressibility requirement. All three approaches assume that real-world systems exhibit certain redundancies, due to regularities. The use of these regularities to build simplified models is essential for scientific progress in many different domains. (shrink)

When is it (epistemically) rational to suspend judgment on a proposition? Before addressing this question, one has to clarify what suspension of judgment (in short: suspension) is and establish rationality standards for the attitudes that constitute suspension. Ideally, suspending can be reduced to attitudes for which one already has established rationality standards. This paper distinguishes two kinds of suspension, weak and strong, and offers a reductionist account of suspension based on credence. However, it does not reduce suspension to credence alone (...) but takes a higher-order perspective on credence into account. Other doxastic attitudes such as belief and doubtful belief are also reexamined and defined in the light of this higher-order perspective. (shrink)

This chapter considers the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to exhibit creativity and imagination, in light of recent advances in generative AI and the use of deep neural networks (DNNs). Reasons for doubting that AI exhibits genuine creativity or imagination are considered, including the claim that the creativity of an algorithm lies in its developer, that generative AI merely reproduces patterns in its training data, and that AI is lacking in a necessary feature for creativity or imagination, such as consciousness, (...) agency, metacognitive awareness, or the use of mental imagery. In each case, a counterargument is provided that AI already has or soon will overcome the apparent barrier. In some instances, this is because the critical features deemed lacking in AI may not be necessary for human creativity and imagination either. In others, it is because important developmental and structural similarities between humans and generative AI have been insufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

This is a (preprint) Commentary on: Borkel, Lucas F., et al. "Altered Rationality? Integrating Psychedelic Experiences Into Rational Thinking Through the Critical Anchor Approach." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2025. Project MUSE. -/- Introduction: In the developing field of psychedelic-assisted therapy and wellness, there loom large philosophical questions pertaining to the significance of the psychedelic experience – questions touching the three traditional pillars of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics and aesthetics). This paper from Borkel et al. asks for the application (...) of an epistemology against metaphysical postulations in psychedelic-assisted therapy to prevent ‘epistemic harm’ and thus retain what the authors consider to be metaphysical neutrality. More specifically, the authors advocate that a method of rationality – which they formalize as the ‘Critical Anchor Approach’ (CAA) – be applied to psychedelic experiences that encompasses (i) critical thinking, (ii) meta- (self-) consciousness, (iii) epistemic humility, (iv) an empirical epistemology, and (v) the ‘adoption of phenomenal rather than metaphysical interpretations’ of such experiences. This is all to avoid the hazards, or the ‘epistemic risks’, of interpreting ‘psychedelic experiences and other irrational-belief-inducing states’ as that which William James calls ‘genuine metaphysical revelation’ (James, 1902, XVI), experiences the authors consider to be potential delusions. -/- There is certainly material to commend in this paper, but I shall here, as this is a brief commentary, seek to show that this approach implodes under the weight of its own conditions – and moreover could itself be harmful to psychedelic-assisted therapy and wellness. As an alternative I suggest an open, rational, critical, and undogmatic approach to integrating metaphysical experiences into such therapy, as recommended by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. ... (shrink)

Pantheism – All is God – is the hidden doctrine behind many reported psychedelic-occasioned experiences, both in the literature and in clinical trials, yet its meaning is little understood in the clinical and therapeutic spheres. This essay therefore seeks to remedy this deficit by offering a fresh outline of Pantheism via the exploration of its etymology and history, the meanings of pan/all and theos/God, before traveling into a Pantheism typology that covers the two veritable varieties, Monist and Idealist Pantheism, as (...) well as related doctrines that include Physicalist Pantheism, Partial Pantheism, Panentheism, and Panpsychism. (shrink)

To explain intentional bodily action, we must address the Interface Problem: how propositional intentions and non-propositional motor representations integrate non-accidentally. Two requirements arise: matching, ensuring a motor representation corresponds to an intention despite format differences, and selection, choosing one motor representation among multiple matches. We combine Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces with Bayesian inference to meet both requirements.

The philosopher G.E. Moore first observed that making a statement and then denying that one knows or believes that statement is unacceptable. For example, "It is raining, but I don’t think that" is defective. Across six experiments (n = 600), this study investigates the nature and extent of this unacceptability as a way to adjudicate between alternative theoretical explanations of this defectiveness. Results confirm that Moorean conjunctions are judged more acceptable than semantic contradictions (e.g., "It is raining, but it isn’t") (...) but less so than felicitous conjunctions (e.g., "It is raining, but it’s okay"), and this is so regardless of whether Moorean conjunctions are produced by a person or by an artificial agent such as ChatGPT. However, if the first conjunct is anchored on a perspective other than the speaker’s, Moorean conjunctions increase in acceptability (e.g., "The train arrives at noon, but I think it won’t"). Several features can drive this perspective-shift, yet the acceptability of Moorean conjunctions did not match that of felicitous sentences in our sample. Our findings support the view that the unacceptability is a byproduct of mindreading, a key part of the social cognition that is crucial to using and understanding language. (shrink)

Economists and antitrust scholars have recently warned that the AI industry may be a natural monopoly. In support of this claim, they have argued that the AI industry shares key features with natural monopolies of the past: First, like railroads, AI has high fixed and low marginal costs. That is, training a frontier AI is expensive, but asking it a question is cheap. Next, like social media, AI companies will benefit from network effects. The more users a company has, the (...) more training data they can collect. This leads to better models, then more users, and so on. Finally, some antitrust scholars say, the AI industry is already too concentrated. Today, the market for frontier AI systems contains only three–maybe three and a half–players. -/- Appearances here are, however, deceiving. This essay argues that the AI industry is not a natural monopoly. Nor is it plagued by the problems of market concentration today. -/- To show why, the essay identifies three structural features of AI essential for understanding the industry’s competitive dynamics in the long run. First, power-law capabilities scaling and fast-following dynamics mean that training costs are not a barrier to competition. Although training the world’s best AI model is enormously expensive, training one that is just as good–but six months later–is cheap. This is the story of OpenAI 4o and DeepSeek v3. Second, recent breakthroughs in reinforcement learning mean that user data–and thus network effects–are no longer central to improving AI systems. Today’s AI companies are not competing to amass the largest mountain of training data, but to engineer the best virtual environments in which their models can “learn by doing.” Finally, and most subtly, we argue that a bit of market power in the AI industry might be a good thing. Today’s AI industry is highly innovative, despite having only a few players. Monopoly power can be bad if it raises prices or degrades quality too much. But as Howitt and Aghion’s 2025 Nobel Prize winning work argued–and as every patent lawyer knows–monopoly power can also be essential for incentivizing innovation. Thus, antimonopoly interventions for the AI industry could, paradoxically, increase prices and reduce quality in the long run. (shrink)

A summary of Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020) for the author/critics symposium in Analysis.

Sentences like ⌜δ is indescribable⌝ appear to state that the speaker is unable to do what the speaker just did. This is known as the "paradox of ineffability." An explanation for how such sentences can be true is widely thought to be a pre-requisite for showing the coherence of ineffability. This paper offers a dissolution of the paradox. I argue that the relevant sentences are always false. However, I show that the falsity of such sentences does not entail that ineffability (...) is incoherent. That ⌜δ is indescribable⌝ can never be truthfully said does not entail that ineffability cannot be coherently explicated. (shrink)

Girard has argued that in the opposition between “Dionysus” and “the crucified,” Nietzsche contrasts Christian martyrdom that resolves violence through pacifism with pagan festivals that affirm violence by ritualizing it. In agreement with Girard, this article shows how Heidegger’s discussion of nihilism fails to ethically confront the violence of Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, a criticism that applies equally to Deleuze. However, I argue that Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche confronts the violence in a manner that Girard fails to appreciate. Bataille interprets ritual sacrifice (...) as a drama communicating the loss of identity experienced by those who contemplate the spectacle. Bataille demonstrates the complicity between Dionysian and Judeo-Christian martyrdom insofar as both implicate human beings in the violence of evil that the death of God consummates. (shrink)

Batı’da teorik felsefe; Analitik Felsefe (AF), Kıta Felsefesi (KF) ve Felsefe Tarihi (FT) olmak üzere üçe ayrılır. Fakat üçünde de işler yolunda değildir. AF, felsefenin bir bilim olabileceği iddiasından kuşku duyduğu için gerçek dünyayla ilgilenmiyorken başından beri uygun bir teorik yöntem izlemeyen Kıta Felsefesinin uygulanışı, belirli politik ve etik yargılara hizmet edecek şekilde özelleştirilmiştir. FT çalışmalarının gidişatı ise eldeki eserin nesnel değerinden daha çok ilgili filozofun ait olduğu ulus veya kültüre göre bölgesel bir temelde gelişmiştir. Felsefede ilerleme sağlanacaksa bu ancak (...) bahsi geçen tuzaklardan kaçınılarak gerçekleşebilir. (shrink)

Receivers in standard signaling game models struggle with learning compositional information. Even when the signalers send compositional messages, the receivers do not interpret them compositionally. When information from one message component is lost or forgotten, the information from other components is also erased. In this paper I construct signaling game models in which genuine compositional understanding evolves. I present two new models: a minimalist receiver who only learns from the atomic messages of a signal, and a generalist receiver who learns (...) from all of the available information. These models are in many ways simpler than previous alternatives, and allow the receivers to learn from the atomic components of messages. (shrink)

This entry provides an opinionated overview of central debates surrounding doxastic disagreement, focusing on doxastic states or attitudes such as beliefs and credences. It differentiates between various types of epistemologically significant disagreement based on the agents involved and the source of the disagreement. It also examines and evaluates current accounts of how peers should (rationally) address disagreement and highlights the fundamental principles that support these accounts.

Aldous Huxley employed, in his 1954 book on the mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, both explicitly and implicitly the metaphysics of French philosopher Henri Bergson, notably through two concepts that Huxley named the ‘reducing valve’ and ‘Mind-at-Large’. The former concept claims that our perception of the external world and of our past is significantly filtered for the purpose of practicality. The latter idea is that the wider world, the cosmos, and the total past, exist as consciousness. It is this (...) ‘Mind-at-Large’ that we as humans reduce into a useful fragment that comprises our finite minds. In other words, Huxley offers via Bergson a view somewhat (but not quite) in line with pantheism and extended-mind theories, one that sees the brain and body as receiving rather than generating consciousness – a top-down and exogenous approach to the mind. Huxley severely simplifies (and slightly misunderstands) Bergson’s metaphysics, so the aim of this text is to rectify and fortify Bergson’s thought in the relevant aspects, thereby offering a more coherent, correct, and comprehensive framework into which we may understand psychedelic experience through a Bergsonian, or Bergsonesque, lens. (shrink)

We do not normally speak of seeing experiences. Yet it is common to say that we have imagined an experience. Why the difference here? The deep affinities between sense perception and sensory imagination might have led one to expect that the limits of what we can sensorily imagine, using visual imagery, would align with what we can, in the right circumstances, see. We face a decision: either abandon this alignment of sensory imagination with perception, or conclude that we cannot, literally, (...) imagine experiences. This chapter pursues the second path: experiences are no more imaginable than they are visible. There are three components to the argument. First, it is argued that the implicit dilemma is not a false dilemma: we have strong reason to preserve an alignment between the objects of vision and the objects of visual-imagery-involving imagination. Second, the arguments of some—including Peacocke (1985) and Martin (2002)—that all sensory imagination in fact requires the imagining of an experience are challenged. Third, a framework for understanding the contents of visual imagination is provided and defended. This framework preserves an alignment between the contents of perception and the contents of imagination, while allowing us to appreciate the merely derivative, non-literal sense in which we can imagine experiences. Implications for perennial puzzles about consciousness are explored. (shrink)

Consciousness is said to be ‘something it is like for an organism to have experiences of subjective character.’ Current theories of consciousness tend to dwell on an internalist third-person perspective of mental perceptions and neuronal structures detached from the unfolding character of life. By contrast, the first-person astrological perspective considers subjective character in relation to lived experiences. This perspective, which is grounded in large environmentally deterministic structures as a local cosmology, seeks descriptive (biographical) correlations rather than causal explanations. It regards (...) consciousness as transitions rather than as mental states. We argue that the astrological model infers foundational concepts of consciousness: 1) experience as analogical reason; 2) subjectivity as environmental structure; 3) character as natural adaptation; and 4) a structural realism theory of conscious processes. Thus, the truth values of the applied language model are both cognitively and physically grounded. Our companion study (published separately), which uses a fully autonomous LLM inference engine framework, corroborates our model without any human interventions and independently replicates earlier automated successes of the randomized blind matching-test challenge. (shrink)

In recent times, the concept of ecocentrism has, to a large extent, influenced environmental ethics and conservation discourse by attributing intrinsic value to nature at the expense of human interests. However, while this framework has empowered several ecological approaches and enriched various forms of ecological consciousness, it has, by implication, produced what we identify as an ecocentric bias. By ecocentric bias, we refer to a conceptual imbalance that tends to isolate the human being from the environment, or rather, attempts to (...) subordinate human welfare to environmental preservation, which we consider a problem. From this perspective, this paper critically engages with the imbalance in ecocentricism by arguing that the human person is not an external entity to the ecosystem, but an integral part of it. By extension, highlighting various lived realities of the people, including poverty, inequality, and survival-based environmental degradation, our paper contends that any environmental philosophy or conservation policy that does not consider or disregard human socio-economic conditions risks becoming ethically and practically biased. Through the methods of conceptual clarification and critical analysis, this paper interrogates the prevailing ecocentric paradigm, focusing on how it has marginalized human needs in conservation science. In doing so, our paper advocates for a mediatory framework that focuses on harmonizing environmental integrity with human flourishing, rather than placing them against each other. This paper concludes by arguing that sustainable environmental stewardship is only possible when both the human and ecological dimensions are held in balanced ethical regard, thereby providing a just and inclusive model for global conservation efforts. (shrink)

Youth unemployment continues to pose a major challenge in Nigeria despite sustained government initiatives promoting entrepreneurship and empowerment. The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) established the Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) programme to provide graduates with practical skills that can stimulate job creation. Earlier studies have often examined entrepreneurial intentions rather than actual job creation after participation in SAED or the joint influence of demographic attributes and graduate attitudes on such outcomes. This study examined how age, gender, marital status, (...) educational qualification, and graduate attitude relate to job creation among Nigerian corps members. A survey research design was used to gather data from more than nineteen thousand NYSC members who served between 2012 and 2021. Data were obtained electronically through social media platforms and analysed with descriptive statistics and logistic regression, while a machine learning model was used to assess the strength of predictive accuracy. The results showed that graduate attitude, educational qualification, and marital status were significant predictors of job creation, whereas age and gender were not. The model performed effectively, confirming the reliability of the findings. This study contributes to current understanding of graduate employment outcomes in Nigeria and provides useful evidence for improving entrepreneurship education and policy measures aimed at addressing youth unemployment. Keywords. (shrink)

The development of sustainable composite materials for impact-critical applications is increasingly important in aerospace, automotive, and defense sectors. This study employed a quantitative experimental approach using a Multiple Input–Single Output (MISO) framework to examine how hybridization ratio, mass fraction, and fiber orientation affect the low-velocity impact response of Gongronema latifolium/S-glass fiber-reinforced epoxy composites. Processed Gongronema fibers and S-glass were combined with ER-F292 epoxy resin and fabricated into test samples following ASTM standards. Charpy impact tests assessed energy absorption. A 60-run optimal (...) design captured combinations of the three input variables. Data were analyzed using a Multiple Linear Regression model via SPSS to determine statistically significant predictors of impact behavior, using p-values and confidence intervals for validation. Results showed that the mean values for hybridization ratio, mass fraction, fiber orientation, and low velocity impact were (2.50), (27.79%), (67.90°), and (3.82 J), respectively. It was found that the mass fraction had a significant negative correlation with low velocity impact (r = -0.455; p = 0.000), as did the fiber orientation (r = -0.853; p = 0.000). The results for R = (0.994), R² = (0.989), F = (1607.390) and Durbin-Watson = (2.213) show that the regression model is highly predictive. Regression coefficients indicated negative effects from hybridization ratio (-0.357), mass fraction (-0.032), and fiber orientation (-0.017), all statistically significant (p = 0.000). Residual plots confirmed model validity. The TEM images of confirmation test sample 1 reveal fiber-matrix interfaces with particle sizes between (10.02–26.40 nm). Variations in scale (100 nm and 50 nm) show microstructural differences, suggesting strong adhesion, dispersion aggregation, and anisotropic behavior due to 90-degree fiber orientation within the epoxy matrix. The study concludes that strategic optimization of input parameters significantly enhances the impact resistance of hybrid biocomposites. The MISO framework proves effective for analyzing and predicting impact behavior, contributing to the design of durable, lightweight, and eco-efficient composite materials. (shrink)

Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible (...) with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck. (shrink)

This study explored the integration of play-based learning strategies within teaching practices, examining the types of activities, their frequency, and alignment with the curriculum. A single public primary school in Gasabo District was purposefully selected for its unique approach to implementing play-based learning, which had not been examined in previous research. The participants included all 26 teachers at the school, consisting of 18 women and 8 men. Employing a qualitative approach, the study utilized semi-structured interviews to investigate into the dynamics (...) of play-based learning. Data analysis involved thematic coding to identify core themes, with participant responses triangulated across various sources and validated through member checking. The findings have shown a different array of play-based activities, with role-playing and storytelling standing out as the most frequently utilized. While some teachers readily incorporated these strategies into their daily lessons, others struggled due to time limitations and curriculum weights. Despite these challenges, the teachers acknowledged the significant benefits of play-based learning in enhancing student engagement, motivation, and socio-emotional development. These insights highlighted the potential of such strategies to transform classroom practices and raise a more interactive and supportive learning environment. To address the identified challenges, the study recommends sustained professional development programs and increased support for teachers to integrate play-based learning effectively. It emphasizes the need for collaborative efforts between policymakers and teachers to reduce barriers such as rigid curricula and time constraints. By aligning policy and practice, the study advises for the optimization of play-based approaches, ensuring their positive impact on Rwandan classrooms is maximized. (shrink)

Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of cognitive enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. To address this gap in our knowledge, four experiments were carried out with contrastive vignettes in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement. The data collected suggest that the public is sensitive to and capable of understanding the four cardinal concerns identified by neuroethicists, and tend to cautiously accept cognitive enhancement even as they (...) recognize its potential perils. The public is biopolitically moderate, endorses both meritocratic principles and the intrinsic value of hard work, and appears to be sensitive to the salient moral issues raised in the debate. Taken together, these data suggest that public attitudes toward enhancement are sufficiently sophisticated to merit inclusion in policy deliberations, especially if we seek to align public sentiment and policy. (shrink)

Concerns about the risks of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions are growing. At the same time, confidence that international policy agreements will succeed in considerably lowering anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is declining. Perhaps as a result, various geoengineering solutions are gaining attention and credibility as a way to manage climate change. Serious consideration is currently being given to proposals to cool the planet through solar-radiation management. Here we analyze how the unique and nontrivial risks of geoengineering strategies pose fundamental questions at (...) the interface between science and ethics. To illustrate the importance of integrated ethical and scientific analysis, we define key open questions and outline a coupled scientific-ethical research agenda to analyze solar-radiation management geoengineering proposals. We identify nine key fields of coupled research including whether solar-radiation management can be tested, how quickly learning could occur, normative decisions embedded in how different climate trajectories are valued, and justice issues regarding distribution of the harms and benefits of geoengineering. To ensure that ethical analyses are coupled with scientific analyses of this form of geoengineering, we advocate that funding agencies recognize the essential nature of this coupled research by establishing an Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program for solar-radiation management. (shrink)

This paper argues that the structure of agency itself generates categorical moral norms. From the formal conditions of purposive action, it derives the Agency Preservation Principle (APP): agents must not act in ways that destroy the conditions that make valuation and choice possible. Coercion, on this view, is not merely evaluatively objectionable but conceptually incoherent, because it cancels the authorship through which action has meaning. The paper develops a praxeological form of constitutivism that grounds normativity in what it is to (...) act, rather than in intuition, psychology, or social convention. Unlike Kantian or Korsgaardian self-constitution views, this account derives obligation from the conditions of intelligibility of purposeful action itself, not from reflective endorsement. Moral norms are objective because they follow from agency’s structure, authoritative because no agent can coherently deny them while acting, and reciprocal because all agents share that structure. The argument resolves the shmagency objection, reframes the is–ought divide, and establishes non-coercion as the constitutive condition of moral intelligibility. (shrink)

We shall focus on moral theories that are solely concerned with promoting the benefits (e.g., wellbeing) of individuals and explore the possibility of such theories ascribing some priority to benefits to those who are worse off—without this priority being absolute. Utilitarianism (which evaluates alternatives on the basis of total or average benefits) ascribes no priority to the worse off, and leximin (which evaluates alternatives by giving lexical priority to the worst off, and then the second worst off, and so on) (...) ascribes absolute priority to the worse off (i.e., favors even a very small benefit to a worse off person over very large benefits to large numbers of better off people). Neither extreme view, we assume, is plausible. (shrink)

Recent research has begun to investigate sensory processing in relation to nonclinical variation in traits associated with the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We propose that existing accounts of autistic perception can be augmented by considering a role for individual differences in top-down expectations for the precision of sensory input, related to the processing of state-dependent levels of uncertainty. We therefore examined ASD-like traits in relation to the rubber-hand illusion: an experimental paradigm that typically elicits crossmodal integration of visual, tactile, and (...) proprioceptive information in an unusual illusory context. Individuals with higher ASD-like traits showed reduced effects of the rubber-hand illusion on perceived arm position and reach-to-grasp movements, compared to individuals with lower ASD-like traits. These differences occurred despite both groups reporting the typical subjective experience of the illusion concerning visuotactile integration and ownership for the rubber hand. Together these results suggest that the integration of proprioceptive information with cues for arm position derived from the illusory context differs between individuals partly in relation to traits associated with ASD. We suggest that the observed differences in sensory integration can be best explained in terms of differing expectations regarding the precision of sensory estimates in contexts that suggest uncertainty. (shrink)

We describe on-going work on IAO-Intel, an information artifact ontology developed as part of a suite of ontologies designed to support the needs of the US Army intelligence community within the framework of the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A). IAO-Intel provides a controlled, structured vocabulary for the consistent formulation of metadata about documents, images, emails and other carriers of information. It will provide a resource for uniform explication of the terms used in multiple existing military dictionaries, thesauri and metadata registries, (...) thereby enhancing the degree to which the content formulated with their aid will be available to computational reasoning. (shrink)

On March 14–15, 2006, at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD, there took place the first Upper Ontology Summit (UOS). This was a convening of custodians of several prominent upper ontologies, key technology participants, and interested other parties, with the purpose of finding a means to relate the different ontologies to each other. The result is reflected in a joint communiqué, directed to the larger ontology community and the general public, and expressing a joint (...) intent to build bridges among the existing upper ontologies in ways designed to increase and rationalize their utilization and to enhance their semantic interoperability. The Upper Ontology Summit was sponsored by NIST, Ontolog, the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), MITRE, and many other organizations. The UOS was organized by a committee consisting of Pat Cassidy, Peter Yim, Steve Ray, Dagobert Soergel, and Leo Obrst. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder is characterised by differences in unimodal and multimodal sensory and proprioceptive processing, with complex biases towards local over global processing. Many of these elements are implicated in versions of the rubber hand illusion, which were therefore studied in high-functioning individuals with ASD and a typically developing control group. Both groups experienced the illusion. A number of differences were found, related to proprioception and sensorimotor processes. The ASD group showed reduced sensitivity to visuotactile-proprioceptive discrepancy but more accurate proprioception. (...) This group also differed on acceleration in subsequent reach trials. Results are discussed in terms of weak top-down integration and precision-accuracy trade-offs. The RHI appears to be a useful tool for investigating multisensory processing in ASD. (shrink)

The goal of the 2010 Ontology Summit was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the training of ontologists in the future. We developed recommendations for the body of knowledge that should be taught and the skills that should be developed by future ontologists; these (...) recommendations are intended as guidelines for institutions and organizations that may consider establishing a program for training ontologists. Further, we recommend a number of specific actions for the community to pursue. (shrink)

This paper is about teaching philosophy to high school students through Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate. LD, also known as “values debate,” includes topics from ethics and political philosophy. Thousands of high school students across the U.S. debate these topics in class, after school, and at weekend tournaments. We argue that LD is a particularly effective tool for teaching philosophy, but also that LD today falls short of its potential. We argue that the problems with LD are not inevitable, and we offer (...) strategic recommendations for improving LD as a tool for teaching philosophy. Ultimately, our aim is to create a dialogue between LD and academic philosophy, with the hope that such dialogue will improve LD’s capacity to teach students how to do philosophy. (shrink)

This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first published attempt at a rigorous logical formalization of a passage in Leibniz's Monadology. The method we followed was suggested by Johannes Czermak.

Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Not only the direct physical experiences of deployment can severely harm soldiers’ mental health. Witnessing violations of their moral principles by the enemy, or by their fellow soldiers and superiors, can also have a devastating impact. It can cause soldiers’ moral disorientation, increasing feelings of shame, guilt, or hate, and the need for general answers on questions of right and wrong. Various attempts have been made to keep soldiers mentally sane. One is to provide convincing causes for their deployment, which (...) risks an “end justifies the means” way of thinking. The good cause can provide a moral justification for horrible atrocities. Another method, introduced in the USA, Canada, and Australia, aims to strengthen military personnel’s resistance by promoting and maintaining a happy, optimistic state of mind through the use of positive psychology. Alongside making soldiers “morally fit” for all kinds of situations, the focus could also be on moral recovery and forgiveness. Such a care-based military ethics approach, aimed at mutual understanding and interdependence, could help soldiers handle the emotional impact of moral conflicts. This demands that military units reflect on their organizational culture and rethink oaths and codes of conduct that focus mainly on efficiency and readiness, as well as the soldierly self-image with its seemingly still deeply rooted warrior ethos. Today, resilience and positive psychology in the military is apparently mainly geared to assuring its soldiers’ readiness. An appropriate set of virtues and understanding of virtue ethics that are less centered on self-perfection and autonomy could point to a different form of character-building and lead to a better understanding of others. (shrink)

You don't say much about who you are teaching, or what subject you teach, but you do seem to see a need to justify what you are doing. Perhaps you're teaching underprivileged children, opening their minds to possibilities that might otherwise never have occurred to them. Or maybe you're teaching the children of affluent families and opening their eyes to the big moral issues they will face in life — like global poverty, and climate change. If you're doing something like (...) this, then stick with it. Giving money isn't the only way to make a difference. (shrink)