How to live with a neurotic man

If women are to live in a mated relationship with a male they have little choice but to live with a fairly neurotic one. This article shows them why and how men are usually neurotic, how to deal with their own neurotic demands about mating, how to help a man be less neurotic than he usually is, and how to live fairly happily with a neurotic man.     

How does anybody live in this strange place? A reply to Samantha Vice

Abstract

Samantha Vice has argued that ‘white’ South Africans are so tainted by the history of racial oppression in their country that they are incapable of attaining a great degree of moral virtue. She recommends that they should live in humility and political silence. There are a number of flaws in her argument. First, none of the characteristics of ‘white’ South Africans that she says provides the basis for these conclusions can distinguish (almost) all ‘white’ South Africans from (almost) all ‘black’ South Africans. Second, because it is not only ‘white’ South Africans but everybody in the world who either perpetrates serious injustice or is tainted by others’ perpetration of it, her argument, if sound, would imply that nobody is capable of great virtue and that everybody ought to be politically silent. Finally, her recommendation that ‘white’ South Africans should be politically silent is a very dangerous one.     

How to operationalize a person

The notion of operationally defining a person is absurd, but no more so than other uses of “operationalization”. ‘Persons’ make that absurdity particularly clear because there is no sense in which persons can be directly observed, nor defined in terms of what might be observable, and thereby exposes the emptiness of the idea of operationalization more broadly.On the other hand, persons can be modeled, and their ontology investigated, within frameworks that can address the processes and organizations that actually constitute persons.     

How to be a deontic buck-passer

Philosophical Studies - Deontic, as opposed to evaluative buck-passing theories seem to be easier to accept, since there appears to be an intimate connection between deontic properties, such as...     

如何书写好内科病历

病历是医疗活动的原始记录或历史记载,是最准确,可信的记录.在现代医院管理中,病历作为医疗活动信息的主要载体,不仅是医疗、教学、科研的第一手资料,而且也是综合评价医院医疗质量、技术水平、管理水平的依据.即病历质量好坏体现医生的学术和品德,体现医院的管理水平和医疗质量.病志书写的水平,是一位医生理论基础、技术水平、临床经验、表达能力、逻辑思维的综合检验.然而现在有些病历,特别是大医院的病历质量不高的原因是工作太忙,病人太多.下级医师对疾病特点了解不够,概念不清楚.上级医师要养成习惯把您心里想的思路说出来,以提问的方式讲更好,这样对下级医生的印象会更深,同时也可以掌握他们是否理解正确了,督促下级医生平时的学习,始终要抓"三基三严",强调临床基本功.本文把内科病历书写中的常见问题一一列出,并具体指导如何改进.     

How to be a type-C physicalist

This paper advances a version of physicalism which reconciles the “a priori entailment thesis” (APET) with the analytic independence of our phenomenal and physical vocabularies. The APET is the claim that, if physicalism is true, the complete truths of physics imply every other truth a priori. If so, “cosmic hermeneutics” is possible: a demon having only complete knowledge of physics could deduce every truth about the world. Analytic independence is a popular physicalist explanation for the apparent “epistemic gaps” between phenomenal and physical truths. The two are generally seen as incompatible, since the demon’s deductions seem to presuppose analytic connections between physical and phenomenal terms. I begin by arguing, in support of the APET, that implications from the complete truths of physics to phenomenal truths cannot be a posteriori. Such implications are (according to the physicalist) necessarily true. But they cannot be Kripke-style a posteriori necessities, since (according to the physicalist) the complete truths of physics fix any relevant a posteriori facts about the reference of terms. I then show how the physicalist can turn the tables: the demon can exploit the physical fixing of reference to bridge the gap between the vocabularies, by deducing when phenomenal and physical terms co-refer. This opens the way for a “type-C” physicalism, which accepts in-principle deducibility while still appealing to analytic independence to explain why we (who are not demons) find it impossible to see phenomenal-physical connections a priori.     

How to Revise a Total Preorder

Most approaches to iterated belief revision are accompanied by some motivation for the use of the proposed revision operator (or family of operators), and typically encode enough information in the epistemic state of an agent for uniquely determining one-step revision. But in those approaches describing a family of operators there is usually little indication of how to proceed uniquely after the first revision step. In this paper we contribute towards addressing that deficiency by providing a formal framework which goes beyond the first revision step in two ways. First, the framework is obtained by enriching the epistemic state of an agent starting from the following intuitive idea: we associate to each world x two abstract objects x ⁺ and x ⁻, and we assume that, in addition to preferences over the set of worlds, we are given preferences over this set of objects as well. The latter can be considered as meta-information encoded in the epistemic state which enables us to go beyond the first revision step of the revision operator being applied, and to obtain a unique set of preferences over worlds. We then extend this framework to consider, not only the revision of preferences over worlds, but also the revision of this extended structure itself. We look at some desirable properties for revising the structure and prove the consistency of these properties by giving a concrete operator satisfying all of them. Perhaps more importantly, we show that this framework has strong connections with two other types of constructions in related areas. Firstly, it can be seen as a special case of preference aggregation which opens up the possibility of extending the framework presented here into a full-fledged framework for preference aggregation and social choice theory. Secondly, it is related to existing work on the use of interval orderings in a number of different contexts.     

How to check a computer program

The usual ways of checking computer programs have important flaws. A better way to check a program you have written is to have someone else write a program that does the same thing and then compare the output of the two programs over a wide range of input. Two examples are described.     

如何书写好内科病历

病历是医疗活动的原始记录或历史记载,是最准确,可信的记录。在现代医院管理中,病历作为医疗活动信息的主要载体,不仅是医疗、教学、科研的第一手资料,而且也是综合评价医院医疗质量、技术水平、管理水平的依据。即病历质量好坏体现医生的学术和品德,体现医院的管理水平和医疗质量。病志书写的水平,是一位医生理论基础、技术水平、临床经验、表达能力、逻辑思维的综合检验。然而现在有些病历,特别是大医院的病历质量不高的原因是工作太忙,病人太多。下级医师对疾病特点了解不够,概念不清楚。上级医师要养成习惯把您心里想的思路说出来,以提问的方式讲更好,这样对下级医生的印象会更深,同时也可以掌握他们是否理解正确了,督促下级医生平时的学习,始终要抓"三基三严",强调临床基本功。本文把内科病历书写中的常见问题一一列出,并具体指导如何改进。     

How to Be a Bayesian Dogmatist

Rational agents have (more or less) consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, and so in the remainder of the essay I offer an alternative account of how perceptual justification, as the Dogmatist understands it, can be incorporated into the Bayesian formalism.