Quantum objects are vague objects

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] Is vagueness a feature of the world or merely of our representations of the world? Of course, one might respond to this question by asserting that insofar as our knowledge of the world is mediated by our representations of it, any attribution of vagueness must attach to the latter. However, this is to trivialize the issue: even granted the point that all knowledge is representational, the question can be re-posed by asking whether vague features of our representations are ultimately eliminable or not. It is the answer to this question which distinguishes those who believe that vagueness is essentially epistemic from those who believe that it is, equally essentially, ontic. The eliminability of vague features according to the epistemic view can be expressed in terms of the supervenience of ‘vaguely described facts’ on ‘precisely describable facts’: If two possible situations are alike as precisely described in terms of physical measurements, for example, then they are alike as vaguely described with words like ‘thin’. It may therefore be concluded that the facts themselves are not vague, for all the facts supervene on precisely describable facts. (Williamson 1994, p. 248; see also pp. 201- 204) It is the putative vagueness of certain identity statements in particular that has been the central focus of claims that there is vagueness ‘in’ the world (Parfit 1984, pp. 238-241; Kripke 1972, p. 345 n. 18). Thus, it may be vague as to who is identical to whom after a brain-swap, to give a much discussed example. Such claims have been dealt a forceful blow by the famous Evans-Salmon argument which runs as follows: suppose for reductio that it is indeterminate whether a = b. Then b definitely possesses the property that it is indeterminate whether it is identical with a, but a definitely does not possess this property since it is surely not indeterminate whether a=a. Therefore, by Leibniz’s Law, it cannot be the case that a=b and so the identity cannot be indeterminate (Evans 1978; Salmon 1982)

Intentional Objects

An intentional object is, by definition, the object of an intentional state: what it is that is thought about, wished for, feared etc. This short paper explains why a theory of intentionality should not dispense with the concept of an intentional object, and why the category of intentional object is not an ontological category.Articl

Speculative Objects

Speculative Objects is an ongoing series of art works that incorporate text and object. The unfinished nature of this series is integral to O’Riley’s ideas of the open-ended as being a key element of Fine Art research. These works feature associative inscriptions determined by an object’s function or purpose. For example, here is a bench that was used to seat viewers of a 2-hour animation of an orbit around the moon. This was inspired by Michael Collins’ Apollo 11 mission during which he orbited the moon alone, while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface for the first time. An animation was made using data of the moon’s surface collected in 1994 by a spacecraft called Clementine, so named after the folk song, Oh My Darling Clementine! O’Riley’s bench features the first words of the song engraved onto its surface. As an ongoing project made up of a number of elements or instances, the works question the form an artwork can take. The language of art is speculated on, scrutinised and extended by being projected through and inscribed into, particular objects. A work from this series was included, together with a text by O’Riley, in a book dedicated to Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University of Oxford: Assimina Kaniari & Marina Wallace (eds.), Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual, London: Zidane Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-9554850-8-4. A selection from Speculative Objects was exhibited in Spring 2011 at the library of Chelsea College of Art & Design

Fiat objects

Human cognitive acts are directed towards entities of a wide range of different types. What follows is a new proposal for bringing order into this typological clutter. A categorial scheme for the objects of human cognition should be (1) critical and realistic. Cognitive subjects are liable to error, even to systematic error of the sort that is manifested by believers in the Pantheon of Olympian gods. Thus not all putative object-directed acts should be recognized as having objects of their own. Broadly, the objects towards which human cognition is directed should be parts of reality in a sense that is at least consistent with the truths of natural science. But such a scheme should also be (2) comprehensive: it should do justice to each sort of object on its own terms, and not attempt to eliminate objects of one sort in favour of objects of other, more favoured sorts. Linguistic and other forms of idealism, as well as Meinongian theories, which assign to each and every referring expression or intentional act an object tailored to fit, yield categorial schemes which fail to satisfy (1). Physicalistic and other forms of reductionism yield categorial schemes which fail to satisfy (2). What follows is a categorial scheme that is both critically realistic and comprehensive. Thus it enjoys some of the benefits of linguistic idealism and physicalism, without (or so it is hoped) the corresponding disadvantages of each

Social Objects

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (This is the English original of the French translation.

Composing concurrent objects

Adopting the object-oriented paradigm for the development of large and complex software systems offers several advantages, of which increased extensibility and reusability are the most prominent ones. The object-oriented model is also quite suitable for modelling concurrent systems. However, it appears that extensibility and reusability of concurrent applications is far from trivial. In addition, very little attention has been paid by the conventional object-oriented development methodologies to the analysis and design of\ud synchronisation constraints for concurrent objects.\ud To address these problems, in this thesis the framework of composition-filters, an extension to the object-oriented model, is adopted. An analysis is presented of the problems involved in reusing and extending concurrent objects, in particular the so-called inheritance anomalies. Based on this analysis, a set of criteria for effective extensible concurrent objectoriented\ud programming languages is formulated.\ud The thesis introduces techniques for the creation of concurrency and the synchronisation of concurrent activities, fully integrated within the (object-oriented) composition-filters model. Important properties of the proposed object model are: all objects are -potentially- active, intra-object concurrency is supported and synchronisation specifications are fully separated\ud from method implementations. The applicability and expressive power of the proposed technique are demonstrated, and it is shown how reusability and extensibility of concurrent objects are achieved

Objects that Sound

In this paper our objectives are, first, networks that can embed audio and visual inputs into a common space that is suitable for cross-modal retrieval; and second, a network that can localize the object that sounds in an image, given the audio signal. We achieve both these objectives by training from unlabelled video using only audio-visual correspondence (AVC) as the objective function. This is a form of cross-modal self-supervision from video. To this end, we design new network architectures that can be trained for cross-modal retrieval and localizing the sound source in an image, by using the AVC task. We make the following contributions: (i) show that audio and visual embeddings can be learnt that enable both within-mode (e.g. audio-to-audio) and between-mode retrieval; (ii) explore various architectures for the AVC task, including those for the visual stream that ingest a single image, or multiple images, or a single image and multi-frame optical flow; (iii) show that the semantic object that sounds within an image can be localized (using only the sound, no motion or flow information); and (iv) give a cautionary tale on how to avoid undesirable shortcuts in the data preparation.Comment: Appears in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 201