Imaginative Experience

In this essay, the focus is not on what imagination is but rather on what it is like. Rather than exploring the various accounts of imagination on offer in the philosophical literature, we will instead be exploring the various accounts of imaginative experience on offer in that literature. In particular, our focus in what follows will be on three different sorts of accounts that have played an especially prominent role in philosophical thinking about these issues: the impoverishment view (often associated with Hume), the will-dependence view (often associated with Wittgenstein), and the nonexistence view (often associated with Sartre). While there are important insights to be drawn from each of these views, each seems to me to be importantly flawed in various ways. As I will suggest, close examination reveals that none of them gives us an adequate account of the character of imaginative experience. Ultimately, in the final section of this paper, I briefly explore what their failure teaches us about the project of giving an account of imaginative experience

What Imagination Teaches

David Lewis has argued that “having an experience is the best way or perhaps the only way, of coming to know what that experience is like”; when an experience is of a sufficiently new sort, mere science lessons are not enough. Developing this Lewisian line, L.A. Paul has suggested that some experiences are epistemically transformative. Until an individual has such an experience it remains epistemically inaccessible to her. No amount of stories and theories and testimony from others can teach her what it is like to have it, nor is she able to achieve this knowledge by way of imaginative projection. It’s this last claim that is the focus of this paper. In particular, I explore the case for the claim that some experiences are in principle imaginatively inaccessible to someone who has not undergone the experience itself or one relevantly similar. As I will suggest, this case is not as strong as is often thought. Close attention to the mechanisms of imagination, and in particular, to cases of skilled imaginers, suggests how techniques of imaginative scaffolding can sometimes be used to give us epistemic access to experiences we have not had, even ones that are radically different from any that we have had before. As a result, considerably fewer experiences remain imaginatively out of reach than proponents of transformative experience would have us believe. Experience may well be the best teacher, but this paper aims to show that imagination comes in a close second

Is a CEO Turnover Good or Bad News?

Corporate Finance

Sparse Representation of Photometric Redshift PDFs: Preparing for Petascale Astronomy

One of the consequences of entering the era of precision cosmology is the widespread adoption of photometric redshift probability density functions (PDFs). Both current and future photometric surveys are expected to obtain images of billions of distinct galaxies. As a result, storing and analyzing all of these PDFs will be non-trivial and even more severe if a survey plans to compute and store multiple different PDFs. In this paper we propose the use of a sparse basis representation to fully represent individual photo-$z$ PDFs. By using an Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm and a combination of Gaussian and Voigt basis functions, we demonstrate how our approach is superior to a multi-Gaussian fitting, as we require approximately half of the parameters for the same fitting accuracy with the additional advantage that an entire PDF can be stored by using a 4-byte integer per basis function, and we can achieve better accuracy by increasing the number of bases. By using data from the CFHTLenS, we demonstrate that only ten to twenty points per galaxy are sufficient to reconstruct both the individual PDFs and the ensemble redshift distribution, $N(z)$, to an accuracy of 99.9% when compared to the one built using the original PDFs computed with a resolution of $\delta z = 0.01$, reducing the required storage of two hundred original values by a factor of ten to twenty. Finally, we demonstrate how this basis representation can be directly extended to a cosmological analysis, thereby increasing computational performance without losing resolution nor accuracy.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. The code can be found at http://lcdm.astro.illinois.edu/code/pdfz.htm

CPI-E On Every Desktop!

Christian Periodical Index-Electronic is now beginning its third year of \u27-Production. Initial subscriptions to the index were made following conference in 1999 after the official ribbon cutting at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. Since that time we have seen many libraries subscribe. The electronic version is available in both cd-rom format and via the Internet. Libraries have successfully setup access both by ip recognition and by password for patrons accessing the library\u27s databases remotely. This year the CPI Team decided to make a more conscious effort to market the product with several initiatives underway. These include direct mailings with a newly designed brochure, vendor booths at some strategic conferences in addition to our own ACL conference and a regular column in The Christian Librarian. This is our inaugural article for the column

Imaginative Vividness

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not take much reflection to see that these terms are ill understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable

International Stock-Bond Correlations in a Simple Affine Asset Pricing Model

In this paper we use an affine asset pricing model to jointly value stocks and bonds. This enables us to derive endogenous correlations and to explain how economic fundamentals influence the correlation between stock and bond returns. The presented model is implemented for G7 post- war economies and its in-sample and out-of-sample performance is assessed by comparing the correlations generated by the model with conventional statistical measures. The affine framework developed in this paper is found to generate stock-bond correlations that are in line with empirically observed figuresAffine Pricing Models, Stock-Bond Correlations, G-7 Countries