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1.
Forms of emergent interaction in General Process Theory 总被引:2,自引:0,他引:2
Johanna Seibt 《Synthese》2009,166(3):479-512
General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry
and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete,
dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism
that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense
concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General
processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic
relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional
mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies
of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining,
and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term. 相似文献
2.
It is unfortunate that Francis Y. Lin, in ‘Chomsky on the “ordinary language” view of language’ pays little attention to his
own remark, ‘Chomsky’s criticisms make us realize that we should not be content with general and vague formulations of convention,
ability, and so on. We must make such notions precise and provide details’ Lin speaks so imprecisely and provides so few details
of notions on which he relies heavily, such as ‘general learning mechanism’ and ‘sentence frame’, that readers must employ
large amounts of guesswork to place even a halfway specific interpretation on his proposals and claims.
This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. 相似文献
3.
M. J. Cresswell 《Journal of Philosophical Logic》2010,39(2):173-200
The paper introduces a first-order theory in the language of predicate tense logic which contains a single simple axiom. It
is shewn that this theory enables times to be referred to and sentences involving ‘now’ and ‘then’ to be formalised. The paper
then compares this way of increasing the expressive capacity of predicate tense logic with other mechanisms, and indicates
how to generalise the results to other modal and tense systems. 相似文献
4.
Mark Moyer 《Synthese》2006,148(2):401-423
Puzzles about persistence and change through time, i.e., about identity across time, have foundered on confusion about what it is for ‘two things’ to be have ‘the same thing’ at a time. This is most directly seen in the dispute over whether material objects can occupy exactly the same place at the
same time. This paper defends the possibility of such coincidence against several arguments to the contrary. Distinguishing
a temporally relative from an absolute sense of ‘the same’, we see that the intuition, ‘this is only one thing’, and the dictum,
‘two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time’, are individuating things at a time rather than absolutely and are therefore compatible with coincidence. Several other objections philosophers have raised ride
on this same ambiguity. Burke, originating what has become the most popular objection to coincidence, argues that if coincidence
is possible there would be no explanation of how objects that are qualitatively the same at a time could belong to different
sorts. But we can explain an object’s sort by appealing to its properties at other times. Burke’s argument to the contrary
equivocates on different notions of ‘cross-time identity’ and ‘the statue’. From a largely negative series of arguments emerges
a positive picture of what it means to say multiple things coincide and of why an object’s historical properties explain its
sort rather than vice versa – in short, of how coincidence is possible. 相似文献
5.
Theo A. F. Kuipers 《Erkenntnis》1997,47(2):145-179
The main formal notion involved in qualitative truth approximation by the HD-method, viz. ‘more truthlike’, is shown to not
only have, by its definition, an intuitively appealing ‘model foundation’, but also, at least partially, a conceptually plausible
‘consequence foundation’. Moreover, combining the relevant parts of both leads to a very appealing ‘dual foundation’, the
more so since the relevant methodological notions, viz. ‘more successful’ and its ingredients provided by the HD-method, can
be given a similar dual foundation.
According to the resulting dual foundation of ‘naive truth approximation’, the HD-method provides successes (established true
consequences) and counterexamples (established wrongly missing models) of theories. Such HD-results may support the tentative
conclusion that one theory seems to remain more successful than another in the naive sense of having more successes and fewer
counterexamples. If so, this provides good reasons for believing that the more successful theory is also more truthlike in
the naive sense of having more correct models and more true consequences.
In the dual foundation of ‘refined truth approximation’, HD-results remain of the same two kinds, but ‘more successful’ is
taken in the refined sense of accommodating counterexamples while saving relevant successes, in which case ‘more truthlike’
can be taken in the refined sense of improving relevant models while saving relevant consequences. In this way one gets a
realistic dual account of qualitative truth approximation by the HD-method.
The model foundation can also be extended to the methodological notions, but not in a very plausible way. The consequence
foundation only seems specifiable for naive truth approximation, in which case it is plausible. In sum, the dual foundation
is superior to both.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. 相似文献
6.
Joshua Gert 《Synthese》2006,150(2):171-183
Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called
the ‘new wave’ moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers.
The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons’s criticism of these ‘new wave’ theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include
the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of an analogy between moral properties and
secondary qualities. This paper argues that Holland’s extension depends crucially on the fact that his target is a direct response-dependent account of moral value. His argument does not work against such accounts of more basic normative notions such as ‘harm’ or ‘benefit’. And
these more basic notions may then serve as the basic normative building blocks for an indirectly response-dependent moral
theory.
* Thanks to Mark Timmons for helpful and friendly comments on an earlier version of this paper, and also to an audience at
the 2003 Pacific APA, and to the reviewers
for this journal. 相似文献
7.
8.
Maria van der Schaar 《Synthese》2011,180(3):391-417
The notion of cognitive act is of importance for an epistemology that is apt for constructive type theory, and for epistemology
in general. Instead of taking knowledge attributions as the primary use of the verb ‘to know’ that needs to be given an account
of, and understanding a first-person knowledge claim as a special case of knowledge attribution, the account of knowledge
that is given here understands first-person knowledge claims as the primary use of the verb ‘to know’. This means that a cognitive
act is an act that counts as cognitive from a first-person point of view. The method of linguistic phenomenology is used to
explain or elucidate our epistemic notions. One of the advantages of the theory is that an answer can be given to some of
the problems in modern epistemology, such as the Gettier problem. 相似文献
9.
E. M. Swiderski 《Studies in East European Thought》2011,63(4):329-343
Brzozowski’s ‘philosophy of labour’—to which he devoted a number of writings starting in 1902—presents problems of interpretation.
A conceptual approach to his conception shows it to be a sometimes uneasy mix of realist and anti-realist notions. Brzozowski
appears to have thought that labour is not first of all about the things it supposedly transforms, but rather about itself.
I suggest that Brzozowski can be read in the spirit of Nelson Goodman’s nominalist constructionalism (“worldmaking”). On this
account, labour in Brzozowski’s idiom turns out to be the constitution of forms of symbolizing sufficient unto themselves
and the needs they satisfy. However, that Brzozowski was not entirely consistent in the views I impute to him—he forever sought
for some ‘external’ measure of the rightness of labour/symbolizing—can be explained at least in part by his ‘humanism’, that
is, his commitment to the task he assigns humankind, that of creating the one meaningful world attesting to virtually unrestricted
human power. 相似文献
10.
The Universal Right to Education: Freedom,Equality and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fraternity</Emphasis>
Ylva Bergström 《Studies in Philosophy and Education》2010,29(2):167-182
The overall aim of the article is to analyse how the universal right to education have been built, legitimized and used. And
more specifically ask who is addressed by the universal right to education, and who is given access to rights and to education.
The first part of the article focus on the history of declarations, the notion of the universal right to education, emphasizing
differences in matters of detail—for example, the meaning of ‘compulsory’, ‘children’s rights’ or ‘parents’ rights’—and critically
examining the right of the child and the right of the parent in terms of tensions between ‘social rights’ and ‘private autonomy
rights’. Despite differences in detail, the iterations of the universal right to education do share to the full in the idea
of education as such. In the second part the attempt to scrutinize the underlying assumptions legitimizing the consensus on
education, focusing again on the notion of the child. In conclusion I argue that a certain notion of what it is to be a human
being is inscribed within the circle of access to rights and education. These notions of what it means to be a child, a parent,
a citizen or a member of the ‘human family’ are notions of enlightenment and humanity and, to my understanding, aspects of
how democracy is configured around freedom, equality and fraternity. 相似文献
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13.
Non-human primates possess species-specific repertoires of acoustically distinct call types that can be found in adults in
predictable ways. Evidence for vocal flexibility is generally rare and typically restricted to acoustic variants within the
main call types or sequential production of multiple calls. So far, evidence for context-specific call sequences has been
mainly in relation to external disturbances, particularly predation. In this study, we investigated extensively the vocal
behaviour of free-ranging and individually identified Diana monkeys in non-predatory contexts. We found that adult females
produced four vocal structures alone (‘H’, ‘L’, ‘R’ and ‘A’ calls, the latter consisting of two subtypes) or combined in non-random
ways (‘HA’, ‘LA’ and ‘RA’ call combinations) in relation to ongoing behaviour or external events. Specifically, the concatenation
of an introductory call with the most frequently emitted and contextually neutral ‘A’ call seems to function as a contextual
refiner of this potential individual identifier. Our results demonstrate that some non-human primates are able to increase
the effective size of their small vocal repertoire not only by varying the acoustic structure of basic call types but also
by combining them into more complex structures. We have demonstrated this phenomenon for a category of vocalisations with
a purely social function and discuss the implications of these findings for evolutionary theories of primate vocal communication. 相似文献
14.
We investigate the philosophical significance of the existence of different semantic systems with respect to which a given
deductive system is sound and complete. Our case study will be Corcoran’s deductive system D for Aristotelian syllogistic
and some of the different semantic systems for syllogistic that have been proposed in the literature. We shall prove that
they are not equivalent, in spite of D being sound and complete with respect to each of them. Beyond the specific case of
syllogistic, the goal is to offer a general discussion of the relations between informal notions—in this case, an informal
notion of deductive validity—and logical apparatuses such as deductive systems and (model-theoretic or other) semantic systems
that aim at offering technical, formal accounts of informal notions. Specifically, we will be interested in Kreisel’s famous
‘squeezing argument’; we shall ask ourselves what a plurality of semantic systems (understood as classes of mathematical structures)
may entail for the cogency of specific applications of the squeezing argument. More generally, the analysis brings to the
fore the need for criteria of adequacy for semantic systems based on mathematical structures. Without such criteria, the idea
that the gap between informal and technical accounts of validity can be bridged is put under pressure. 相似文献
15.
John Sutton 《Philosophical Studies》2010,148(1):27-37
Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene. This paper
analyses the distinction in personal memory between such external observer visuospatial perspectives and ‘field’ perspectives,
in which I experience the remembered actions and events as from my original point of view. It argues that Richard Wollheim’s
related distinction between centred and acentred memory fails to capture the key phenomena, and criticizes Wollheim’s reasons
for doubting that observer ‘memories’ are genuine personal memories. Since field perspectives in personal memory are also
likely to be the product of constructive processes, we should reject the common assumption that such constructive processes
inevitably bring distortion and error. Yet field perspectives tend to be treated as privileged also in the domains of memory
for skilled movement, and memory for trauma. In each case, it is argued that visuospatial perspective in personal memory should
be distinguished from other kinds of perspective such as kinesthetic perspective and emotional perspective. 相似文献
16.
Per Algander 《Res Publica》2012,18(2):145-157
A common intuition is that there is a moral difference between ‘making people happy’ and ‘making happy people.’ This intuition,
often referred to as ‘the Asymmetry,’ has, however, been criticized on the grounds that it is incoherent. Why is there, for
instance, not a corresponding difference between ‘making people unhappy’ and ‘making unhappy people’? I argue that the intuition
faces several difficulties but that these can be met by introducing a certain kind of reason that is favouring but non-requiring.
It is argued that there are structural similarities between the asymmetry and moral options and that the asymmetry can be
defended as an instance of a moral option. 相似文献
17.
Dan López de Sa 《Synthese》2008,163(2):263-272
According to the simple proposal, a predicate is rigid iff it signifies the same property across the different possible worlds. The simple proposal has been
claimed to suffer from an over-generalization problem. Assume that one can make sense of predicates signifying properties, and assume that trivialization concerns, to the effect
that the notion would cover any predicate whatsoever, can be overcome. Still, the proposal would over-generalize, the worry
has it, by covering predicates for artifactual, social, or evaluative properties, such as ‘is a knife,’ ‘is a bachelor,’ or
‘is funny.’ In defense, it is argued that rigidity for predicates as characterized plays the appropriate theoretical role,
and that the contention that “unnatural” properties are not to be rigidly signified is ungrounded. 相似文献
18.
Michael Bonnett 《Studies in Philosophy and Education》2009,28(1):39-49
Considerations arising in the context of burgeoning concerns about the environment can provoke an exploration of issues that
have significance both for environmental education in particular and education more generally. Notions of the ‘greater whole’
and ‘systemic wisdom’ that feature in some strands of environmental discourse are a case in point. It is argued that interpretations
of these notions arising in currently influential scientific and systems thinking understandings of nature that attempt to
overcome a corrosive separation of humankind and nature through a dilution or dismissal of the distinction between the human
and non-human, self and other, require critical evaluation if they are not to bring their own dangers. Merleau-Pontian understandings
of object constitution in a subjectively informed life-world and ideas of the ‘selving’ of natural things are drawn upon in
developing a non-discursively grounded interpretation of systemic wisdom. The latter is taken to raise questions that have
considerable transformative potential for conventional views of knowledge and its curriculum organisation. 相似文献
19.
Tobias Rosefeldt 《Philosophical Studies》2008,137(3):301-333
This paper argues that ‘that’-clauses are not singular terms (without denying that their semantical values are propositions).
In its first part, three arguments are presented to support the thesis, two of which are defended against recent criticism.
The two good arguments are based on the observation that substitution of ‘the proposition that p’ for ‘that p’ may result
in ungrammaticality. The second part of the paper is devoted to a refutation of the main argument for the claim that ‘that’-clauses
are singular terms, namely that this claim is needed in order to account for the possibility of quantification into ‘that’-clause
position. It is shown that not all quantification in natural languages is quantification into the position of singular terms,
but that there is also so-called ‘non-nominal quantification’. A formal analysis of non-nominal quantification is given, and
it is argued that quantification into ‘that’-clause position can be treated as another kind non-nominal quantification. 相似文献
20.
Summary The purpose of this paper is to lay bare the major problems underlying the concept of downward causation as discussed within the perspective of the present interest for phenomena that are characterized by self-organization.In our discussion of the literature, we have focussed on two questions: (1) What sorts of things are said to be, respectively, causing and caused within the context of downward causation? And (2) What is the meaning of ‘causing’ in downward causation? We have concluded that the concept of ‘downward causation’ is muddled with regard to the meaning of causation and fuzzy with regard to the nature of the causes and the effects. Moreover, we have concluded that ‘causation’ in respect of ‘downward causation’ is usually understood in terms of explanation and determination rather than in terms of causation in the sense of ‘bringing about’. Thus, the term ‘downward causation’ is badly chosen. 相似文献