In Defence of Anthropomorphic Theism

I reply to seven objections to anthropomorphic theism: (1) That anthropomorphic theism is idolatrous. In reply I rely on the concept/conception distinction. (2) That faith requires certainty. In reply I argue that full belief may be based on probable inference. (3) That the truly infinite is incomprehensible. In reply I distinguish two senses of knowing what you mean. (4) "You Kant say that!" In reply I distinguish shallow from deep Kantianism. (5) "Shall Old Aquinas be forgot?" In reply I discuss the simplicity of God. (6) What those garrulous mystics say about the ineffable. In reply I argue that mystics should be anthropomorphites. (7) Antitheodicy. In reply I distinguish the community of all agents from the community of finite frail agent

Transformative experience and the knowledge norms for action: Moss on Paul’s challenge to decision theory

to appear in Lambert, E. and J. Schwenkler (eds.) Transformative Experience (OUP) L. A. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that the possibility of epistemically transformative experiences poses serious and novel problems for the orthodox theory of rational choice, namely, expected utility theory — I call her argument the Utility Ignorance Objection. In a pair of earlier papers, I responded to Paul’s challenge (Pettigrew 2015, 2016), and a number of other philosophers have responded in similar ways (Dougherty, et al. 2015, Harman 2015) — I call our argument the Fine-Graining Response. Paul has her own reply to this response, which we might call the Authenticity Reply. But Sarah Moss has recently offered an alternative reply to the Fine-Graining Response on Paul’s behalf (Moss 2017) — we’ll call it the No Knowledge Reply. This appeals to the knowledge norm of action, together with Moss’ novel and intriguing account of probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, I consider Moss’ reply and argue that it fails. I argue first that it fails as a reply made on Paul’s behalf, since it forces us to abandon many of the features of Paul’s challenge that make it distinctive and with which Paul herself is particularly concerned. Then I argue that it fails as a reply independent of its fidelity to Paul’s intentions

Reply to 'Comment on: 'Non-perturbative finite T broadening of the rho meson and dilepton emission in heavy ion-collisions''

Nota bene: the numerical calculation underlying Version 1 of this reply and the original work Phys.Rev. C71:064903,2005 contains a basic numerical error (wrong factor in the self-energy formulas of Phys. Rev.C71:064903,2005). This renders the numerical results presented there and in Version 1 of the reply invalid and enforces a careful reinvestigation of Phys. Rev.C71:064903,2005 and the reply. Calculations for an erratum of Phys. Rev. C71:064903,2005 are in progress.Comment: The numerical calculation underlying Version 1 of this reply and the original work Phys.Rev. C71:064903,2005 contains a basic numerical error (wrong factor in the self-energy formulas of Phys. Rev.C71:064903,2005). This renders the numerical results presented there and in Version 1 of the reply invalid and enforces a careful reinvestigation of Phys. Rev.C71:064903,2005 and the reply. Calculations for an erratum of Phys. Rev. C71:064903,2005 are in progres

Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload

Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within organizations. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale study of more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months. We quantitatively characterize the replying behavior in conversations within pairs of users. In particular, we study the time it takes the user to reply to a received message and the length of the reply sent. We consider a variety of factors that affect the reply time and length, such as the stage of the conversation, user demographics, and use of portable devices. In addition, we study how increasing load affects emailing behavior. We find that as users receive more email messages in a day, they reply to a smaller fraction of them, using shorter replies. However, their responsiveness remains intact, and they may even reply to emails faster. Finally, we predict the time to reply, length of reply, and whether the reply ends a conversation. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the baseline in all three prediction tasks, showing the significant role that the factors that we uncover play, in determining replying behavior. We rank these factors based on their predictive power. Our findings have important implications for understanding human behavior and designing better email management applications for tasks like ranking unread emails.Comment: 11 page, 24th International World Wide Web Conferenc

Postscript: Reply to McLeod

This is my reply to McLeod’s reply (2015a) to my (2015) paper commenting on his (2011) interpretation of Wang Chong 王充 as an alethic pluralist