5,338 research outputs found
A New Perceptual Adverbialism
In this paper, I develop and defend a new adverbial theory of perception. I first present a semantics for direct-object perceptual reports that treats their object positions as supplying adverbial modifiers, and I show how this semantics definitively solves the many-property problem for adverbialism. My solution is distinctive in that it articulates adverbialism from within a well-established formal semantic framework and ties adverbialism to a plausible semantics for perceptual reports in English. I then go on to present adverbialism as a theory of the metaphysics of perception. The metaphysics I develop treats adverbial perception as a directed activity: it is an activity with success conditions. When perception is successful, the agent bears a relation to a concrete particular, but perception need not be successful; this allows perception to be fundamentally non-relational. The result is a novel formulation of adverbialism that eliminates the need for representational contents, but also treats successful and unsuccessful perceptual events as having a fundamental common factor
Misgendering and its Moral Contestability
In this article, I consider the harms inflicted upon transgender persons through âmisgendering,â
that is, such deployments of gender terms that diminish transgender personsâ selfrespect,
limit the discursive resources at their disposal to define their own gender, and cause
them microaggressive psychological harms. Such deployments are morally contestable, that is,
they can be challenged on ethical or political grounds. Two characterizations of âwomanâ
proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. When we consider what
would happen to transgender women upon the broad implementation of these characterizations
within transgender womenâs social context, we discover that they suffer from two
defects: they either exclude at least some transgender women, or else they implicitly foster
hierarchies among women, marginalizing transgender women in particular. In conclusion, I
claim that the moral contestability of gender-term deployments acts as a stimulus to regularly
consider the provisionality and revisability of our deployments of the term âwoman.
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A general theory of action languages
We present a general theory of action-based languages as a paradigm, for the description, of those computational
systems which include elements of concurrency and networking, and extend this approach
to describe dist.ributed systems and also t,o describe the interaction of a system, with an environment.
As part of this approach we introduce the Action Language as a common model for the class of nondeterministic
concurrent programming languages and define its intensional and interaction semantics
in terrors of continuous transformation of environment behavior. This semantics i.s specialized for
programs with stores, and extended to describe distributed computations
Reichenbach, Russell and the Metaphysics of Induction
Hans Reichenbachâs pragmatic treatment of the problem of induction in his later works on inductive inference was, and still is, of great interest. However, it has been dismissed as a pseudo-solution and it has been regarded as problematically obscure. This is, in large part, due to the difficulty in understanding exactly what Reichenbachâs solution is supposed to amount to, especially as it appears to offer no response to the inductive skeptic. For entirely different reasons, the significance of Bertrand Russellâs classic attempt to solve Humeâs problem is also both obscure and controversial. Russell accepted that Humeâs reasoning about induction was basically correct, but he argued that given the centrality of induction in our cognitive endeavors something must be wrong with Humeâs basic assumptions. What Russell effectively identified as Humeâs (and Reichenbachâs) failure was the commitment to a purely extensional empiricism. So, Russellâs solution to the problem of induction was to concede extensional empiricism and to accept that induction is grounded by accepting both a robust essentialism and a form of rationalism that allowed for a priori knowledge of universals.
So, neither of those doctrines is without its critics. On the one hand, Reichenbachâs solution faces the charges of obscurity and of offering no response to the inductive skeptic. On the other hand, Russellâs solution looks to be objectionably ad hoc absent some non-controversial and independent argument that the universals that are necessary to ground the uniformity of nature actually exist and are knowable. This particular charge is especially likely to arise from those inclined towards purely extensional forms of empiricism. In this paper the significance of Reichenbachâs solution to the problem of induction will be made clearer via the comparison of these two historically important views about the problem of induction. The modest but important contention that will be made here is that the comparison of Reichenbachâs and Russellâs solutions calls attention to the opposition between extensional and intensional metaphysical presuppositions in the context of attempts to solve the problem of induction. It will be show that, in effect, what Reichenbach does is to establish an important epistemic limitation of extensional empiricism. So, it will be argued here that there is nothing really obscure about Reichenbachâs thoughts on induction at all. He was simply working out the limits of extensional empiricism with respect to inductive inference in opposition to the sort of metaphysics favored by Russell and like-minded thinkers
Reasoning About a Simulated Printer Case Investigation with Forensic Lucid
In this work we model the ACME (a fictitious company name) "printer case
incident" and make its specification in Forensic Lucid, a Lucid- and
intensional-logic-based programming language for cyberforensic analysis and
event reconstruction specification. The printer case involves a dispute between
two parties that was previously solved using the finite-state automata (FSA)
approach, and is now re-done in a more usable way in Forensic Lucid. Our
simulation is based on the said case modeling by encoding concepts like
evidence and the related witness accounts as an evidential statement context in
a Forensic Lucid program, which is an input to the transition function that
models the possible deductions in the case. We then invoke the transition
function (actually its reverse) with the evidential statement context to see if
the evidence we encoded agrees with one's claims and then attempt to
reconstruct the sequence of events that may explain the claim or disprove it.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 7 listings, TOC, index; this article closely
relates to arXiv:0906.0049 and arXiv:0904.3789 but to remain stand-alone
repeats some of the background and introductory content; abstract presented
at HSC'09 and the full updated paper at ICDF2C'11. This is an updated/edited
version after ICDF2C proceedings with more references and correction
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