相对概念之调适

相对之原理见于大易“一阴一阳之谓道”。阴阳,宇宙相对之二大动能也。此两种相对不同之势用,互为消长、依存,推动宇宙、人生,乃有今日之大千世界。凡事物皆有正反两面,故有利则有害,有是则有非;利害同一体也,是非同一体也。于生死、寿夭、成败、得失莫不皆然,宇宙万有无不在相对原理之中,人则茫然而不知,此易学之妙用也。本文特举相对概念之大者：一曰善恶,二曰是非,三曰祸福,四曰生死,五曰寿夭,六曰得失,七曰贵贱,八曰黑白,九曰荣辱,十曰利害,十一曰忧乐,十二曰正反。此十二曰,争议之大者,而论其所以自处之道,欲人不堕入相对之迷雾中而无以自拔也。综上十二项皆物论争议之大者,执相对之两端而纷纷不息,则世界永无宁日,不如泯绝相对之概念以归于中和。孔子所谓“执其两端,用其中于民”,不仅人类和平共存,则天人亦和谐无间矣。     

Privileged, Typical, or not even that? – Our Place in the World According to the Copernican and the Cosmological Principles

Summary  If we are to constrain our place in the world, two principles are often appealed to in science. According to the Copernican Principle, we do not occupy a privileged position within the Universe. The Cosmological Principle, on the other hand, says that our observations would roughly be the same, if we were located at any other place in the Universe. In our paper we analyze these principles from a logical and philosophical point of view. We show how they are related, how they can be supported and what use is made of them. Our main results are: 1. There is a logical gap between both principles insofar as the Cosmological Principle is significantly stronger than the Copernican Principle. 2. A step that is often taken for establishing the Cosmological Principle on the base of the Copernican Principle and observations is not incontestable as it stands, but can be supplemented with a different argument. 3. The Cosmological Principle might be crucial for cosmology to the extent it is not supported by empirical evidence.     

内群偏私：自我锚定还是社会认同？

以往关于内群偏私的研究大多采用社会认同理论（social identityt heory）做解释。近期,自我锚定（self-anchoring principle）原理被证实可用于解释内群偏私的原因。基于中国人及美国人在内群偏私的目的、方法上的不同,我们采用最小群体范式,验证这两种理论在中国大学生上的适用性。410名大学生（其中前测94名）在互联网上完成以认知能力评估为名的实验,实验控制反馈类型,要求参与者对自身、内群及外群在不同维度上评分。实验证明内群偏私存在;分化理论成立;采用演绎策略时,个体评价与内群评价的差异显著小于个体采用归纳策略时两者的差异,符合社会认同理论的假设。     

生命是什么:一个基于新物理学原理的回答

生命本质问题是生物学、哲学、物理学等各领域科学工作者共同关心的问题。回顾人们对生命本质问题的认识历程,依据一个新的物理学原理(最大流原理),尝试给出生命的新定义。     

Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent's determining or controlling her action (if it's not the action's being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O'Connor's agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O'Connor's objections to it and offers objections to O'Connor's view.     

Damned If You Do; Damned If You Don’t!

This paper discusses the Principle of Normative Invariance: ‘An action’s moral status does not depend on whether or not it is performed.’ I show the importance of this principle for arguments regarding actualism and other variations on the person-affecting restriction, discuss and rebut arguments in favor of the principle, and then discuss five counterexamples to it. I conclude that the principle as it stands is false; and that if it is modified to avoid the counterexamples, it is gutted of any interest or power.

The absolutism problem in On Liberty

Mill argues that, apart from the principle of utility, his utilitarianism is incompatible with absolutes. Yet in On Liberty he introduces an exceptionless anti-paternalism principle—his liberty principle. In this paper I address ‘the absolutism problem,’ that is, whether Mill's utilitarianism can accommodate an exceptionless principle. Mill's absolute claim is not a mere bit of rhetoric. But the four main solutions to the absolutism problem are also not supported by the relevant texts. I defend a fifth solution—the competence view—that turns on his attention to decision-making structures and, in particular, on the role of expertise considerations in his account.     

Descartes' Causal Principle and the Case of Body-to-Mind Causation1

It is a common view that Descartes' causal principle is to be understood in light of a similarity condition that accounts for how finite causes (as opposed, or in addition, to God) contribute to an explanation of their effects. This paper challenges this common view and offers a sui generis reading of Descartes' views on causation that has also the advantage of solving the two exegetical issues of whether Descartes thought of the body-to-mind relation in occasionalist or causal terms and of whether Descartes regarded sensory ideas innate or caused by bodies.     

Differential effects of constraints in the processing of Russian cataphora

Anaphoric relations between pronouns and their antecedents are subject to a number of different linguistic constraints, which exclude the possibility of coreference in specific syntactic or discourse contexts. Constraints on anaphora may, in principle, impact online sentence processing in a couple of different ways. They may act as constraints on the generation of interpretations, preventing illicit anaphoric relations from ever being considered. Alternatively, they may act as later filters on interpretations, rejecting candidate interpretations after initial consideration. A number of previous studies have sought to determine which of these mechanisms accurately describes the online impact of constraints on anaphora. The current studies present evidence that there is no uniform answer to this question, and that the two mechanisms are both used, for different constraints. Evidence for this is drawn from studies on the processing of two constraints on backwards anaphora or cataphora in Russian that apply in superficially similar contexts but that differ in a number of respects. One self-paced reading study and two judgement studies are reported. The self-paced reading study manipulates the gender congruency between a pronoun and a following name in three pairs of conditions. In conditions where the pronoun–name configuration violates no constraints on anaphora a gender mismatch effect was observed following the name, as in previous studies, suggesting that comprehenders actively search for an antecedent following a cataphoric pronoun. In conditions where the pronoun–name configuration violates Principle C of the classical binding theory no effect of the gender manipulation was observed, suggesting that comprehenders do not even consider the possibility of interpretations that violate this constraint. In conditions where the pronoun–name configuration violates a Russian-specific constraint on cataphora a gender match effect was observed following the name, the reverse of the finding in the no-constraint conditions, suggesting that the constraint applies as a filter on candidate interpretations.