" In Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, psychoanalyst Arnold Modell claims that subjective human experience must be included in any scientific...

The estrangement between genetic scientists and theologians originating in the 1960s is reflected in novel combinations of human thought (subject) and genes (investigational object), paralleling each other through the universal process known in chaos theory as self-similarity. The clash and recombination of genes and knowledge captures what Philip Hefner refers to as irony, one of four voices he suggests transmit the knowledge and arguments of the religion-and-science debate. When viewed along a tangent connecting irony to leadership, journal dissemination, and the (...) activities of the "public intellectual" and the public at large, the sequence of voices is shown to resemble the passage of genetic information from DNA to mRNA, tRNA, and protein, and from cell nucleus to surrounding environment. In this light, Hefner's inquiry into the voices of Zygon is bound up with the very subject matter Zygon covers. (shrink)

Aristotle is oftentimes viewed through a strictly philosophical lens as heir to Plato and has having introduced logical rigor where an emphasis on the theory of Forms formerly prevailed. It must be appreciated that Aristotle was the son of a physician, and that his inculcation of the thought of other Greek philosophers addressing health and the natural elements led to an extremely broad set of biologically- and medically-related writings. As this article proposes, Aristotle deepened the fourfold theory of the elements (...) with anatomic and physiologic observations. In books like History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and the lost Anatomai, he actively dissected organisms and recorded his findings. The corpus of medically-related literature Aristotle developed had a direct influence on subsequent Greek thinkers, including Galen, and on Medieval Islamic and modern Western practitioners such as William Harvey. Aristotle's ideas continue to influence modern medical thinkers in Europe and America through both his interpretation by European philosophers gaining the attention of medical humanists, and his writings' enduring impact on medical researchers balancing scientific with more personalistic approaches to medicine. (shrink)

Abstract.Since the gene splicing debates of the 1980s, the public has been exposed to an ongoing sequence of genetic and reproductive technologies. Many issue areas have outcomes that lose track of people's inner values or engender opposing religious viewpoints defying final resolution. This essay relocates the discussion of what is an acceptable application from the individual to the societal level, examining technologies that stand to address large numbers of people and thus call for policy resolution, rather than individual fiat, in (...) their application. A major source of guidance is the “Genetic Frontiers” series of professional dialogues and conferences held by the National Conference for Community and Justice from 2002 to 2004. Genetic testing, human gene therapy, genetic engineering of plants and animals, and stem cell technology are examined. While differences in perspective on the beginning of life persist, a stepwise approach to the examination of genetic testing reveals areas of general agreement. Stewardship of life, human co‐creativity with the divine, and social justice help define the bounds of application of genetic engineering and therapy; compassionate care plays a major role in establishing stem cell policy. Active, sustained dialogue is a useful resource for enabling sharing of religious values and crystallization of policies. (shrink)

Bilingual dictionaries are an important aid in foreign language acquisition and in interlingual communication. However, when speaking and writing one needs to be able to formulate whole sentences instead of using single words. The term syntagmatics encompasses all that surrounds a word in a sentence. The monograph Syntagmatics in the Bilingual Dictionary explores what one needs to know about a word to use it correctly in a sentence and how a dictionary should be structured to convey this information.

Coherence and correspondence are classical contenders as theories of truth. In this paper we examine them instead as interacting factors in the dynamics of belief across epistemic networks. We construct an agent-based model of network contact in which agents are characterized not in terms of single beliefs but in terms of internal belief suites. Individuals update elements of their belief suites on input from other agents in order both to maximize internal belief coherence and to incorporate ‘trickled in’ elements of (...) truth as correspondence. Results, though often intuitive, prove more complex than in simpler models (Hegselmann & Krause 2002, 2006; Grim, Singer, Reade & Fisher 2015). The optimistic finding is that pressures toward internal coherence can exploit and expand on small elements of truth as correspondence is introduced into epistemic networks. Less optimistic results show that pressures for coherence can also work directly against the incorporation of truth, particularly when coherence is established first and new data is introduced later. (shrink)

This paper outlines the demographic characteristics of the Baiga tribe, one of the most primitive of the aboriginal tribal groups of Central India. The Baiga population has grown steadily since the first anthropological study of the tribe in the 1930s. Age at menarche, age at marriage, breast-feeding, and time interval between marriage and first conception are natural. There are more females than males. Sub-tribe endogamy is common; consanguineous marriage is favoured (34% of marriages are between first cousins) and marital distance (...) is low (mean 7·1 km). Though the mean menarcheal age is high (15·2 years), mean age at first marriage is low (16·6 years), giving a long reproductive period. (shrink)

The paper examines Stanisław Lem’s speculative fiction as a form of meta-epistemological inquiry. Through close analysis of A Perfect Vacuum, Imaginary Magnitude, His Master’s Voice, Solaris, and The Invincible, the essay argues that Lem constructs “anti-models” that reveal the structural limits of representation, intelligibility, and epistemic closure. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of scientific modeling (Frigg & Nguyen, Godfrey-Smith, Weisberg, Elgin, Currie), the article develops a unified account of imagination as a generative but constrained epistemic practice.

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for (...) example, consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects. (shrink)

The Modeling of Nature provides an excellent introduction to the fundamentals of natural philosophy, psychology, logic, and epistemology.

It is largely acknowledged that natural languages emerge not just from human brains but also from rich communities of interacting human brains (Senghas, ). Yet the precise role of such communities and such interaction in the emergence of core properties of language has largely gone uninvestigated in naturally emerging systems, leaving the few existing computational investigations of this issue at an artificial setting. Here, we take a step toward investigating the precise role of community structure in the emergence of linguistic (...) conventions with both naturalistic empirical data and computational modeling. We first show conventionalization of lexicons in two different classes of naturally emerging signed systems: (a) protolinguistic “homesigns” invented by linguistically isolated Deaf individuals, and (b) a natural sign language emerging in a recently formed rich Deaf community. We find that the latter conventionalized faster than the former. Second, we model conventionalization as a population of interacting individuals who adjust their probability of sign use in response to other individuals' actual sign use, following an independently motivated model of language learning (Yang, , ). Simulations suggest that a richer social network, like that of natural (signed) languages, conventionalizes faster than a sparser social network, like that of homesign systems. We discuss our behavioral and computational results in light of other work on language emergence, and other work of behavior on complex networks. (shrink)