A social solution to the puzzle of doxastic responsibility: a two-dimensional account of responsibility for belief

In virtue of what are we responsible for our beliefs? I argue that doxastic responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. I suggest that this responsibility is a form of answerability with two distinct dimensions: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. While most views hold that the individual dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I contend that we are answerable for our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. I next argue that answerability has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension, which is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways, but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of cooperating in the shared project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations of doxastic dependence

Doxastic responsibility, guidance control, and ownership of belief

ABSTRACTThe contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist form of control. In this paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick's account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick's notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control

Comments on ''Wave damping computation for a viscous liquid of finite depth'' by F. Biesel, La Houille Blanche, no. 5, 630-634 /1949/

Validity of wave damping computation for viscous liquid of finite dept

The taxonomic distribution of asteroids from multi-filter all-sky photometric surveys

The distribution of asteroids across the Main Belt has been studied for decades to understand the compositional distribution and what that tells us about the formation and evolution of our solar system. All-sky surveys now provide orders of magnitude more data than targeted surveys. We present a method to bias-correct the asteroid population observed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) according to size, distance, and albedo. We taxonomically classify this dataset consistent with the Bus and Bus-DeMeo systems and present the resulting taxonomic distribution. The dataset includes asteroids as small as 5 km, a factor of three in diameter smaller than in previous works. Because of the wide range of sizes in our sample, we present the distribution by number, surface area, volume, and mass whereas previous work was exclusively by number. While the distribution by number is a useful quantity and has been used for decades, these additional quantities provide new insights into the distribution of total material. We find evidence for D-types in the inner main belt where they are unexpected according to dynamical models of implantation of bodies from the outer solar system into the inner solar system during planetary migration (Levison et al. 2009). We find no evidence of S-types or other unexpected classes among Trojans and Hildas, albeit a bias favoring such a detection. Finally, we estimate for the first time the total amount of material of each class in the inner solar system. The main belt's most massive classes are C, B, P, V and S in decreasing order. Excluding the four most massive asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Hygiea that heavily skew the values, primitive material (C-, P-types) account for more than half main-belt and Trojan asteroids by mass, most of the remaining mass being in the S-types. All the other classes are minor contributors to the material between Mars and Jupiter.Comment: Accepted for publication in Icarus -- 43 pages, 15 figures, 7 table

First disk-resolved spectroscopy of (4) Vesta

Vesta, the second largest Main Belt asteroid, will be the first to be explored in 2011 by NASA's Dawn mission. It is a dry, likely differentiated body with spectrum suggesting that is has been resurfaced by basaltic lava flows, not too different from the lunar maria. Here we present the first disk-resolved spectroscopic observations of an asteroid from the ground. We observed (4) Vesta with the ESO-VLT adaptive optics equipped integral-field near-infrared spectrograph SINFONI, as part of its science verification campaign. The highest spatial resolution of ~90 km on Vesta's surface was obtained during excellent seeing conditions (0.5") in October 2004. We observe spectral variations across Vesta's surface that can be interpreted as variations of either the pyroxene composition, or the effect of surface aging. We compare Vesta's 2 micron absorption band to that of howardite-eucrite-diogenite (HED) meteorites that are thought to originate from Vesta, and establish particular links between specific regions and HED subclasses. The overallcomposition is found to be mostly compatible with howardite meteorites, although a small area around 180 deg. East longitude could be attributed to a diogenite-rich spot. We finally focus our spectral analysis on the characteristics of Vesta's bright and dark regions as seen from Hubble Space Telescope's visible and Keck-II's near-infrared images.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

Precovery of near-Earth asteroids by a citizen-science project of the Spanish Virtual Observatory

This article describes a citizen-science project conducted by the Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO) to improve the orbits of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) using data from astronomical archives. The list of NEAs maintained at the Minor Planet Center (MPC) is checked daily to identify new objects or changes in the orbital parameters of already catalogued objects. Using NEODyS we compute the position and magnitude of these objects at the observing epochs of the 938 046 images comprising the Eigth Data Release of the Sloan Digitised Sky Survey (SDSS). If the object lies within the image boundaries and the magnitude is brighter than the limiting magnitude, then the associated image is visually inspected by the project's collaborators (the citizens) to confirm or discard the presence of the NEA. If confirmed, accurate coordinates and, sometimes, magnitudes are submitted to the MPC. Using this methodology, 3,226 registered users have made during the first fifteen months of the project more than 167,000 measurements which have improved the orbital elements of 551 NEAs (6% of the total number of this type of asteroids). Even more remarkable is the fact that these results have been obtained at zero cost to telescope time as NEAs were serendipitously observed while the survey was being carried out. This demonstrates the enormous scientific potential hidden in astronomical archives. The great reception of the project as well as the results obtained makes it a valuable and reliable tool for improving the orbital parameters of near-Earth asteroids.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted in Astron. Nach

Evidence of a metal-rich surface for the asteroid (16) Psyche from interferometric observations in the thermal infrared

We describe the first determination of thermal properties and size of the M-type asteroid (16) Psyche from interferometric observations obtained with the Mid-Infrared Interferometric Instrument (MIDI) of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer. We used a thermophysical model to interpret our interferometric data. Our analysis shows that Psyche has a low macroscopic surface roughness. Using a convex 3-D shape model obtained by Kaasalainen et al. (2002, Icarus 159, 369-395), we derived a volume-equivalent diameter for (16) Psyche of 247 +- 25 km or 238 +- 24 km, depending on the possible values of surface roughness. Our corresponding thermal inertia estimates are 133 or 114 J.m-2.s-0.5.K-1, with a total uncertainty estimated to 40 J.m-2.s-0.5.K-1. They are among the highest thermal inertia values ever measured for an asteroid of this size. We consider this as a new evidence of a metal-rich surface for the asteroid (16) Psyche.Comment: 45 pages (in referee and preprint format), 6 figure

Spectral properties of near-Earth and Mars-crossing asteroids using Sloan photometry

The nature and origin of the asteroids orbiting in near-Earth space, including those on a potentially hazardous trajectory, is of both scientific interest and practical importance. We aim here at determining the taxonomy of a large sample of near-Earth (NEA) and Mars-crosser (MC) asteroids and analyze the distribution of these classes with orbit. We use this distribution to identify their source regions and to study the strength of planetary encounters to refresh asteroid surfaces. We measure the photometry of these asteroids over four filters at visible wavelengths on images taken by the SDSS. These colors are used to classify the asteroids into a taxonomy consistent with the widely used Bus-DeMeo taxonomy based on spectroscopy. We report here on the taxonomic classification of 206 NEAs and 776 MCs determined from SDSS photometry, representing an increase of 40% and 663% of known taxonomy classifications in these populations. Using the source region mapper by Greenstreet et al. (2012), we compare the taxonomic distribution among NEAs and main-belt asteroids of similar diameters. Both distributions agree at the few percent level for the inner part of the Main Belt and we confirm this region as a main source of near-Earth objects. The effect of planetary encounters on asteroid surfaces are also studied by developing a simple model of forces acting on a surface grain during planetary encounter, which provides the minimum distance at which a close approach should occur to trigger resurfacing events. By integrating numerically the orbit of the 519 S-type and 46 Q-type asteroids back in time and monitoring their encounter distance with planets, we seek to understand the conditions for resurfacing events. The population of Q-type is found to present statistically more encounters with Venus and the Earth than S-types, although both types present the same amount of encounters with Mars.Comment: Accepted for publication in Icarus. 45 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables, 2 tables in appendix (supplementary material

The Micro and Macro of Labor Market Policies

This dissertation documents new evidence on the effects of labor market institutions and provides new tools to assess the impact of labor policies. Many labor market regulations remain controversial, and we lack evidence connecting the impact of these regulations on firms and workers and their aggregate effects. The dissertation evaluates the effects of labor market reforms at the microeconomic level (on workers and firms) and at the aggregate level (on overall employment, welfare, and the unemployment rate). It also accounts for spillovers, general equilibrium effects and heterogeneity to connect the micro and macro impacts. Relying on administrative data on workers and firms and reduced-form evaluation methods, I provide evidence on the effects of labor market policies on targeted individuals and firms, but also on the indirect effects. Second, to quantify the aggregate impact accounting for both direct and indirect effects, I build and estimate structural models, allowing for general equilibrium effects on the labor market. Chapter 1 studies an increase in the level of employment protection in Portugal and Chapter 2 considers the introduction of a minimum working time in France

Prediction of transits of solar system objects in Kepler/K2 images: An extension of the Virtual Observatory service SkyBoT

All the fields of the extended space mission Kepler/K2 are located within the ecliptic. Many solar system objects thus cross the K2 stellar masks on a regular basis. We aim at providing to the entire community a simple tool to search and identify solar system objects serendipitously observed by Kepler. The SkyBoT service hosted at IMCCE provides a Virtual Observatory (VO) compliant cone-search that lists all solar system objects present within a field of view at a given epoch. To generate such a list in a timely manner, ephemerides are pre-computed, updated weekly, and stored in a relational database to ensure a fast access. The SkyBoT Web service can now be used with Kepler. Solar system objects within a small (few arcminutes) field of view are identified and listed in less than 10 sec. Generating object data for the entire K2 field of view (14{\deg}) takes about a minute. This extension of the SkyBot service opens new possibilities with respect to mining K2 data for solar system science, as well as removing solar system objects from stellar photometric time-series