Modeling functions is a key aspect of artifact design, including software engineering and business systems modeling, but it is likewise of fundamental importance in natural systems modeling, for example in modeling biological organisms. The Unified Modeling Language (UML), which originated from object-oriented software engineering, is nowadays a de facto standard for conceptual modeling and its current applications go far beyond software engineering. The paper investigates first to what extent UML is suited for modeling functions. We survey various approaches to (...) class='Hi'>function modeling with UML and identify their limitations. Based on the conducted analysis, we introduce a UML profile for function modeling, called the Function Modeling Language (FueL). FueL enables the modeling of the structure of functions, of relations between functions, such as function decomposition, as well as of function ascription, i.e., of relations linking functions with other types of entities. The main application field that we considered while developing FueL is bioinformatics. Nonetheless, the presented profile is domain-independent and is capable of modeling cross-domain systems. The profile has been tested on fragments of the Molecular Function Ontology, a sub-ontology of the Gene Ontology. In this connection the paper further demonstrates that the applications of FueL transcend the construction of new models, by showing how the profile aids restructuring and refactoring existing models. (shrink)

그간의 아도르노의 매체론에 대한 연구는 『계몽의 변증법』과 『미니마 모랄리아』에 집중되었다. 그러나 해당하는 저작들은 아도르노의 본격적인 매체론에 대한 서술보다는 아도르노의 미학에 천착하는 것이며 또한 그마저도 파편적으로 서술되어 있다는 점에서 대부분 그의 견해를 간접적으로 드러내는 것에 그쳤다. 이에 몇몇의 연구들에서는 그의 보다 후기 저작들인 『영화를 위한 작곡』과 논문 「영화투명성」에 관한 탐구를 통해 그의 매체론에 대한 직접적인 해명을 시도하였다. 그러나 국내에서는 아직 「영화투명성」 논문 자체에 대한 분석보다는 그의 전반적인 매체론을 규명하기 위해서 해당 논문이 참조되는 형식을 취하는 연구가 대부분이었다. 이에 본고에서는 「영화투명성」에 등장하는 테제들을 (...) 밝히고 그러한 테제들이 아도르노의 매체론 안에서 어떠한 의의를 갖는지에 대해 규명해보고자 한다. (shrink)

Mental and behavioral disorders represent a significant portion of the public health burden in all countries. The human cost of these disorders is immense, yet treatment options for sufferers are currently limited, with many patients failing to respond sufficiently to available interventions and drugs. High quality ontologies facilitate data aggregation and comparison across different disciplines, and may therefore speed up the translation of primary research into novel therapeutics. Realism-based ontologies describe entities in reality and the relationships between them in such (...) a way that – once formulated in a suitable formal language – the ontologies can be used for sophisticated automated reasoning applications. Reference ontologies can be applied across different contexts in which different, and often mutually incompatible, domain-specific vocabularies have traditionally been used. In this contribution we describe the Mental Functioning Ontology (MF) and Mental Disease Ontology (MD), two realism-based ontologies currently under development for the description of humanmental functioning and disease. We describe the structure and upper levels of the ontologies and preliminary application scenarios, and identify some open questions. (shrink)

Today most philosophers of science believe that models play a central role in science and that one of the main functions of scientific models is to represent systems in the world. Despite much talk of models and representation, however, it is not yet clear what representation in this context amounts to nor what conditions a certain model needs to meet in order to be a representation of a certain system. In this thesis, I address these two questions. First, I will (...) distinguish three senses in which something, a vehicle, can be said to be a representation of something else, a target—which I will call respectively denotation, epistemic representation, and faithful epistemic representation—and I will argue that the last two senses are the most important in this context. I will then outline a general account of what makes a vehicle an epistemic representation of a certain target for a certain user—which, according to the account I defend, is the fact that a user adopts what I call an interpretation of the vehicle in terms of the target—and of what makes an epistemic representation of a certain target a faithful epistemic representation of it—which, according to the account I defend, is a specific sort of structural similarity between the vehicle and the target. (shrink)

Previous research into film preferences and functions has looked above all at teenagers and younger to middle-aged adults. There is a lack of information in this area with respect to the behavior and preferences of older adults. In this study, for the first time, the fifty-and-older cohort was questioned in a representative sample about their film preferences. The analysis shows that the film preferences of the majority of those questioned were formed before the age of thirty. These early preferences (...) remain relatively stable. Older people generally prefer films set in a time period or dealing with historic events that they themselves experienced and with which they therefore have a certain expertise. With increasing age, older men prefer film genres that otherwise tend to be preferred by female viewers. Women, as they are older, tend to increasingly prefer female film content. (shrink)

We analyze the expressivity, succinctness, and complexity of a family of languages based on weighted propositional formulas for the representation of utility functions. The central idea underlying this form of preference modeling is to associate numerical weights with goals specified in terms of propositional formulas, and to compute the utility value of an alternative as the sum of the weights of the goals it satisfies. We define a large number of representation languages based on this idea, each characterized by a (...) set of restrictions on the syntax of formulas and the range of weights. Our aims are threefold. First, for each language we try to identify the class of utility functions it can express. Second, when different languages can express the same class of utility functions, one may allow for a more succinct representation than another. Therefore, we analyze the relative succinctness of languages. Third, for each language we study the computational complexity of the problem of finding the most preferred alternative given a utility function expressed in that language. (shrink)

This paper concerns how motor actions are neurally represented and coded. Action planning and motor preparation can be studied using a specific type of representational activity, motor imagery. A close functional equivalence between motor imagery and motor preparation is suggested by the positive effects of imagining movements on motor learning, the similarity between the neural structures involved, and the similar physiological correlates observed in both imaging and preparing. The content of motor representations can be inferred from motor images at a (...) macroscopic level, based on global aspects of the action (the duration and amount of effort involved) and the motor rules and constraints which predict the spatial path and kinematics of movements. A more microscopic neural account calls for a representation of object-oriented action. Object attributes are processed in different neural pathways depending on the kind of task the subject is performing. During object-oriented action, a pragmatic representation is activated in which object affordances are transformed into specific motor schemas (independently of other tasks such as object recognition). Animal as well as human clinical data implicate the posterior parietal and premotor cortical areas in schema instantiation. A mechanism is proposed that is able to encode the desired goal of the action and is applicable to different levels of representational organization. (shrink)

Haslanger (2000) has argued that we should ameliorate concepts of race or gender to better capture existing structural inequalities. Her analysis was criticized by Simion (2018a), who argued that a concept should be ameliorated only if doing so preserves epistemic accuracy. But, as I argue, this criticism misses Haslanger’s target. In response, Podosky (2018) and McKenna (2018) have argued that conceptual revisions need not preserve “epistemic accuracy” since concepts can “shape reality”, not just represent it. Here I argue that social (...) kind concepts need not “shape” the corresponding social kinds: neither causally nor constitutively. This raises doubts about the function of ameliorative projects for social kind concepts as means to change social reality. (shrink)

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

Models such as the simple pendulum, isolated populations, and perfectly rational agents, play a central role in theorising. It is now widely acknowledged that a study of scientific representation should focus on the role of such imaginary entities in scientists’ reasoning. However, the question is most of the time cast as follows: How can fictional or abstract entities represent the phenomena? In this paper, I show that this question is not well posed. First, I clarify the notion of representation, and (...) I emphasise the importance of what I call the “format” of a representation for the inferences agents can draw from it. Then, I show that the very same model can be presented under different formats, which do not enable scientists to perform the same inferences. Assuming that the main function of a representation is to allow one to draw predictions and explanations of the phenomena by reasoning with it, I conclude that imaginary models in abstracto are not used as representations: scientists always reason with formatted representations. Therefore, the problem of scientific representation does not lie in the relationship of imaginary entities with real systems. One should rather focus on the variety of the formats that are used in scientific practice. (shrink)

Haslanger (Noûs 34(1):31–55, 2000) has argued that we should ameliorate concepts of race or gender to better capture existing structural inequalities. Her analysis was criticized by Simion (Inquiry 61(8):914–928, 2018a), who argued that a concept should be ameliorated only if doing so preserves epistemic accuracy. But, as I argue, this criticism misses Haslanger’s target. In response, Podosky (Inquiry 1–15, 2018) and McKenna (Logos Episteme 9(3):335–342, 2018) have argued that conceptual revisions need not preserve “epistemic accuracy” since concepts can “shape reality”, (...) not just represent it. Here I argue that social kind concepts need not “shape” the corresponding social kinds: neither causally nor constitutively. This raises doubts about the function of ameliorative projects for social kind concepts as means to change social reality. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between the critique of civilization, anti-imperialism, gender and representative government in the political thought of the neglected communist, environmentalist, and gay liberationist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). In recent years, there has been a dramatic growth in the historical literatures on anti-imperialism and representative government, yet these two topics are rarely connected. Meanwhile, a voluminous literature on the concept of civilization and its role in British imperialism has largely ignored its role in justifying social and (...) political domination in Britain itself. Carpenter's writings on these topics are important because he offers a defense of the value of representative government that is grounded in his anti-imperialism. Furthermore, his critique of civilization led him to connect problems of social domination in India to the struggles of women, homosexuals, and the working class. These groups ought in turn to be enfranchised and given roles in the functioning of the state. (shrink)

Using AI systems to make decisions in the place of humans promises greater efficiency, but some authors raise a number of ethical worries about this. The undermining of responsibility, the removal of humans from meaningful participation, and a misalignment of values, it has been claimed, may result from a reliance on algorithmic decision-making. Most ways of avoiding these problems that have been proposed involve somehow ensuring that humans have direct control over the AI systems in question. But there is reason (...) to think that there are limits to what this strategy can achieve. In this paper, I propose an alternative strategy. Building AI systems in a way that allows them to act in the name of humans, I suggest, would allow us to avoid the problems without the need for direct control. Drawing on recent work in democratic theory, I then claim that it is possible, in principle, for AI systems to act in our name. Achieving the benefits of AI without the costs that are often associated with their use may depend on our ability to create AI systems that function as our representatives. (shrink)

This article argues that Jeremy Bentham put forward a distinctive and original theory of representative democracy which can be helpfully analysed through his concept of the ‘deputy’. A deputy, Bentham argued, evoked a specific political relationship between governors and the governed – a relationship that was functionally different to that between the people and a ‘representative’ or a ‘delegate’. Whereas a representative was suggestive of too great a degree of governmental independence from the people and a delegate (...) implied an excessive dependency of governors upon the governed, a deputy for Bentham best described the relationship between the rulers and the ruled that should subsist in a representative democracy. A political form based on deputies, who were to be relatively free to conduct the business of government yet simultaneously accountable to their sovereign electors, was the only way in his eyes to guarantee the promotion of utility in politics and the security of the people from being misruled. (shrink)

Positing representations and operations on them as a way of explaining behavior was one of the major innovations of the cognitive revolution. Neuroscience and biology more generally also employ representations in explaining how organisms function and coordinate their behavior with the world around them. In discussions of the nature of representation, theorists commonly differentiate between the vehicles of representation and their content—what they denote. Many contentious debates in cognitive science, such as those pitting neural network models against symbol processing (...) accounts, have focused on the types of vehicles proposed for mental representation and whether they have the appropriate structure to succeed in bearing their contents. Philosophers, in contrast, have focused their debates on content and the particular way in which vehicles might bear content—that is, the process of representing rather than the format of representations. I will offer a novel answer to the question of how it is that a representation has content by focusing on the architecture of representation. My proposal is that representations occur in a particular type of mechanism—one in which a control system regulates a plant—and that we can gain traction on cognitive systems of representation by considering how this works in physical systems more generally. (shrink)

Despite concerns about the relationships between health professionals and the medical device industry, the issue has received relatively little attention. Prevalence data are lacking; however, qualitative and survey research suggest device industry representatives, who are commonly present in clinical settings, play a key role in these relationships. Representatives, who are technical product specialists and not necessarily medically trained, may attend surgeries on a daily basis and be available to health professionals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to provide (...) advice. However, device representatives have a dual role: functioning as commissioned sales representatives at the same time as providing advice on approaches to treatment. This duality raises the concern that clinical decision-making may be unduly influenced by commercial imperatives. In this paper, we identify three key ethical concerns raised by the relationship between device representatives and health professionals: impacts on healthcare costs, the outsourcing of expertise and issues of accountability and informed consent. These ethical concerns can be addressed in part through clarifying the boundary between the support and sales aspects of the roles of device representatives and developing clear guidelines for device representatives providing support in clinical spaces. We suggest several policy options including hospital provision of expert support, formalising clinician conduct to eschew receipt of meals and payments from industry and establishing device registries. (shrink)

People use commonsense science knowledge to flexibly explain, predict, and manipulate the world around them, yet we lack computational models of how this commonsense science knowledge is represented, acquired, utilized, and revised. This is an important challenge for cognitive science: Building higher order computational models in this area will help characterize one of the hallmarks of human reasoning, and it will allow us to build more robust reasoning systems. This paper presents a novel assembled coherence theory of human conceptual change, (...) whereby people revise beliefs and mental models by constructing and evaluating explanations using fragmentary, globally inconsistent knowledge. We implement AC theory with Timber, a computational model of conceptual change that revises its beliefs and generates human-like explanations in commonsense science. Timber represents domain knowledge using predicate calculus and qualitative model fragments, and uses an abductive model formulation algorithm to construct competing explanations for phenomena. Timber then scores competing explanations with respect to previously accepted beliefs, using a cost function based on simplicity and credibility, identifies a low-cost, preferred explanation and accepts its constituent beliefs, and then greedily alters previous explanation preferences to reduce global cost and thereby revise beliefs. Consistency is a soft constraint in Timber; it is biased to select explanations that share consistent beliefs, assumptions, and causal structure with its other, preferred explanations. In this paper, we use Timber to simulate the belief changes of students during clinical interviews about how the seasons change. We show that Timber produces and revises a sequence of explanations similar to those of the students, which supports the psychological plausibility of AC theory. (shrink)

If we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function. I propose to treat the class of elected officials as a profession, so that their morality is a role morality and it is functionally determined. If we conceive the role morality of legislators to be analogous to the ethics of other professions, then this morality must be functionally defined by the purpose (...) that legislators are to fulfill once in office. Hence, the role morality of legislators will largely be determined by our theory of representation. We will need not a normative account of their role, but an empirical explanatory account. In David Hume's terms, the morality of role holders is one of “artificial” duties, that is to say, duties defined by their functional fit with the institutional purposes of a profession. Our most difficult problem, therefore, is to understand the role of our elected representatives. (shrink)

Scientific models represent aspects of the empirical world. I explore to what extent this representational relationship, given the specific properties of models, can be analysed in terms of propositions to which truth or falsity can be attributed. For example, models frequently entail false propositions despite the fact that they are intended to say something "truthful" about phenomena. I argue that the representational relationship is constituted by model users "agreeing" on the function of a model, on the fit with data (...) and on the aspects of a phenomenon that are modelled. Model users weigh the propositions entailed by a model and from this decide which of these propositions are crucial to the acceptance and continued use of the model. Thus, models represent phenomena when certain propositions they entail are true, but this alone does not exhaust the representational relationship. Therefore, the constraints that produce the choice of the relevant propositions in a model must also be examined and their analysis contributes to understanding the relationship between models and phenomena. (shrink)

Our uncertainty about matters of fact can often be adequately represented by probabilities, but there are also cases in which we, intuitively speaking, know too little even to assign meaningful probabilities. In many of these cases, other formal representations can be used to capture some of the prominent features of our uncertainty. This is a non-technical overview of some of these representations, including probability intervals, belief functions, fuzzy sets, credal sets, weighted credal sets, and second order probabilities.

To the question “What normative ethical theory does early Confucianism best represent?” researchers in the history of early Confucian philosophy respond with more than half a dozen different answers. They include sentimentalism, amoralism, pragmatism, Kantianism, Aristotelian virtue theory, care ethics, and role ethics. The lack of consensus is concerning, as three considerations make clear. First, fully trained, often leading, scholars advocate each of the theories. Second, nearly all participants in the debate believe that the central feature of early Confucianism is (...) its moral thought. However, these normative ethical theories are logically inconsistent with one another, the third point. The entailment is unavoidable: the majority of scholars of early Confucian normative ethics must be incorrect about their attributions of a normative theory to early Confucianism. It would appear, then, that we need a new dao 道 or pathway for the study of early Confucian moral thought. One alternative is to adopt an immersively interdisciplinary research methodology that pivots on the recognition that early Confucianism is a social-functional system the governing purpose of which is to influence cultural leaders. (shrink)

Amygdala is an intensively researched brain structure involved in social processing and multiple major clinical disorders, but its functions are not well understood. The functions of a brain structure are best hypothesized on the basis of neuroanatomical connectivity findings, and of behavioral, neuroimaging, neuropsychological and physiological findings. Among the heaviest neuroanatomical interconnections of amygdala are those with perirhinal cortex (PRC), but these are little considered in the theoretical literature. PRC integrates complex, multimodal, meaningful and fine-grained distributed representations of objects and (...) conspecifics. Consistent with this connectivity, amygdala is hypothesized to contribute meaningful and fine-grained representations of intangible knowledge for integration by PRC. Behavioral, neuroimaging, neuropsychological and physiological findings further support amygdala mediation of a diversity of such representations. These representations include subjective valence, impact, economic value, noxiousness, importance, ingroup membership, social status, popularity, trustworthiness and moral features. Further, the formation of amygdala representations is little understood, and is proposed to be often implemented through embodied cognition mechanisms. The hypothesis builds on earlier work, and makes multiple novel contributions to the literature. It highlights intangible knowledge, which is an influential but insufficiently researched factor in social and other behaviors. It contributes to understanding the heavy but neglected amygdala-PRC interconnections, and the diversity of amygdala-mediated intangible knowledge representations. Amygdala is a social brain region, but it does not represent species-typical social behaviors. A novel proposal to clarify its role is postulated. The hypothesis is also suggested to illuminate amygdala’s involvement in several core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Specifically, novel and testable explanations are proposed for the ASD symptoms of disorganized visual scanpaths, apparent social disinterest, preference for concrete cognition, aspects of the disorder’s heterogeneity, and impairment in some activities of daily living. Together, the presented hypothesis demonstrates substantial explanatory potential in the neuroscience, social and clinical domains. (shrink)

Space can be understood through perception and language, but are the processes that represent spatial information the same in both cases? This paper reviews psychological evidence for the functional equivalence of spatial representations based on perceptual and linguistic inputs. It is proposed that spatial information is processed by a specialised spatial representation system (SRS) that creates geometric representations of space. The SRS receives inputs from perceptual and linguistic systems and uses these basic inputs to construct mental spatial models of the (...) observed or described environment. A mental spatial model is created by determining the coordinate locations of objects in the egocentric or allocentric frame of reference. The goal of the SRS is not to represent strictly what is perceived, but to model an environment that has an inherent three‐dimensional spatial structure. (shrink)

Tarski’s Indefinability Theorem can be generalized so that it applies to many-valued languages. We introduce a notion of strong semantic self-representation applicable to any (sufficiently rich) interpreted many-valued language L. A sufficiently rich interpreted many-valued language L is SSSR just in case it has a function symbol n(x) such that, for any f Sent(L), the denotation of the term n(“f”) in L is precisely ||f||L, the semantic value of f in L. By a simple diagonal construction (finding a sentence (...) l such that l is equivalent to n(“l”) T), it is shown that no such language strongly represents itself semantically. Hence, no such language can be its own metalanguage. (shrink)

This special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies brings together work from a range of philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, behavioural scientists, and computer scientists who are all united in their approach to answering questions about consciousness. The contributions to this journal are inspired by work presented at the inaugural Designed Mind Symposium, held at the University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum on 7-8 November 2017.

First published in 1933, this is Sir Oliver Lodge's defence of the luminiferous ether against the new physics of relativity.

Resumen: El presente trabajo explora el estatuto del arte en la filosofía de Spinoza, en el marco de la inversión copernicana que da origen a la estética y del barroco holandés. Si bien el pensamiento spinozista se inscribe en la conversión antropológica, en donde lo bello resulta ser un efecto en el sujeto y no una cualidad de los objetos, su comprensión del arte es inasimilable a la “estética” como ámbito diferenciado y autónomo que se consolida en el siglo XVIII, (...) y más bien concibe el arte integrado a la vida y a la experiencia común -a la vez que, en cuanto praxis de origen corporal al alcance de cualquiera, presenta puntos de contacto con las vanguardias históricas del siglo XX-. Spinoza, según se propone en este texto, concibe la producción de “obras de arte” menos como un hecho estético que como una actividad corporal éticamente orientada a la vida buena.: The present work explores the status of art in the philosophy of Spinoza, within the framework of the Copernican revolution that gives rise to aesthetics and the Dutch Baroque. Although the Spinozist thought is inscribed in the anthropological conversion by virtue of which beauty turns out to be an effect on the subject and not a property of objects, its understanding of art is unassimilable to "aesthetics" as a differentiated and autonomous area that it was consolidated in the eighteenth century, and rather conceived art integrated to life and common experience -at the same time, as praxis of bodily origin within the reach of anyone, presents points of contact with the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century-. Spinoza conceives the production of "artworks" less as an aesthetic fact than as a body activity ethically oriented to the good life. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the contours of the right to vote in a properly functioning representative democracy. I begin by noting that in all the roles voting can play—whether in non-democratic societies or, in democratic societies, in the service of a variety of democracy-independent goals—the right to vote is both an individual and a collective right. I then argue that its primary function in a representative democracy is to facilitate the participation of its (...) members, through the election of their representatives in the society’s legislature(s), in the making of the major political decisions that help to shape the framework in which they all have to live their lives.The right to vote in a properly functioning representative democracy is a complex right, a right that comprises three distinguishable rights.The first of these is the right of all the (adult) members of a society to cast ballots in the regularly recurring elections that determine the composition of a society’s legislature(s). This is the right to a universal franchise.The second is the right to have all the votes that have been cast in legally permissible ways counted and certified accurately.The third is the right to have all accurately tabulated and confirmed votes count towards the election of legislatures that are reasonably representative of all who have voted.Breaches of all three rights can occur in societies that are widely regarded as representative democracies. Thus. breaches of the first right can occur if, for example, ex-felons are excluded from voting lists, or if the right to vote is denied to certain permanent residents in disregard of the fact that they are full participants in the economic and social life of a country. The second right can be breached if, whether because of inefficiency in the structuring of vote tabulation arrangements or—a more sinister possibility—because of politically-motivated attempts to interfere with these arrangements, not all legally cast votes form part of final election tallies. The third right can be breached if not all the votes that have been correctly tallied are allowed to contribute to the election of a legislature that fairly represents the most important of the political preferences and priorities of all voting members of the electorate.While examples can easily be provided of breaches of the first two kinds that continue to occur, I focus in the paper on a sometimes-overlooked breach of the third sort that is generated by a familiar and widely endorsed electoral system. I argue that the first-past-the-post (or “single-member-constituency”) system—henceforth FPTP for short—has structural features that make it inevitable that many members of FPTP electorates don’t have a democratically defensible version of the right to vote.For one thing, the representation in a legislature that voters hope to secure by the votes they cast as members of an electorate can be obtained, under FPTP rules, only by those voters who vote for the winning candidate in the only electoral contest—viz. the contest at local constituency level—in which the system permits them to cast ballots. The many voters in all such contests who vote for any of the losing candidates are consequently deprived of representation in the legislature. Since the right of members of the electorate to participate indirectly in the making of political decisions is facilitated in a properly functioning representative democracy by the election of members of a legislature who reflect to some reasonable degree their major political preferences and priorities, the fact that the FPTP system permits the election to a legislature of only those candidates who win constituency-level electoral contests means that the many voters in all such contests who vote for any of the losing candidates are deprived of representation in the legislature.Moreover, the fact that all the votes cast in these local elections—including the votes cast for losing candidates—contribute to the jurisdiction-wide popular vote does nothing to alter the seat distribution in a legislature, simply because under FPTP the popular vote is allowed to play absolutely no role in determining election outcomes. Voters who support losing candidates in constituency-level electoral contests and who are consequently deprived of representation in the legislature cannot take comfort in the thought that at least their losing votes add to the jurisdiction-wide popular vote for the political parties they favor in the popular vote. Yes; their losing votes in constituency-level electoral contests help to boost the jurisdiction-wide popular vote secured by the political party that sponsored the local candidate they supported. But No; contributing to the jurisdiction-wide popular vote of the political party they favor makes absolutely no difference to the party’s seat-count in the legislature. The jurisdiction-wide popular vote is permitted by FPTP to play no constitutionally recognized role in determining this seat-count.The conclusion to be drawn is that the version of the right to vote that is conferred on the members of a society by the first-past-the-post electoral system is deficient in a way that threatens the democratic credentials of the representative democracies (like Canada, the UK, and the USA) in which this system is established and maintained. (shrink)

I begin with a gap in the literature on conversational relevance, wherein utterances that shift probability distributions included in the common ground do not count as relevant if they do not rule out one or more answers to the question under discussion. In order to provide a satisfying account of probabilistic conversational relevance, I introduce a relevance measure, \(R(\cdot )\). I motivate six axioms for such a function, and show that they uniquely characterize the symmetrized Kullback–Leibler divergence. I then (...) show how we can incorporate this result into an expanded definition of conversational relevance. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., “may”, “often”) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in representing behavioral pathology focusing, in particular, on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD diagnosis requires reports of non-practitioners (e.g., carers and teachers); an effective understanding of behavioral descriptors by the lay community is thus of paramount importance. The study combines qualitative linguistic discourse analysis and a corpus approach to study the presence and functions of modality, adopting a Systemic (...) Functional perspective towards language. The study argues that in the DSM-5 modality is an important linguistic resource for conveying clinical significance, inferred from graduations of recurrence and probability. However, adopting features of professional discourse in representing behavioral pathology for non-experts, especially when those resources are inherently evaluative, stresses the need of health literacy among the lay social community and accessibility in health communication materials, particularly when non-practitioners are involved in the diagnosis practice. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which the group of people now known as the Windrush generation, who moved to the UK in the period 1948–1971, have been represented in public discourse. This group has been adversely affected by the current ‘hostile environment’ policy in the UK regarding immigration. As I show, in the ensuing and highly critical debate, the government repeatedly positioned them as ‘good’ migrants and placed them in a binary opposition with ‘undesirable’ migrants, who they cite as (...) the intended target of their policy. Using diachronic corpora of parliamentary debates and national media, I compare this contemporary rhetoric with (a) Windrush representations in the 1940s and 1950s, and (b) contemporary representation of those the government constructs as unwanted migrants. Taking metaphor as a key for the comparison I show that there is very little continuity or overlap in how the Windrush migrants were discussed at the time of their arrival and in the current period. Instead, there is a much greater proximity in the past representations of the Windrush migrants and the current representations of ‘undesirable’ migrants. This mismatch in actual and perceived representation at the time of arrival indicates how nostalgia functions in migration discourses, even facilitating anti-immigration arguments. (shrink)

Sequential von Neumann–Morgernstern (VM) games are a very general formalism for representing multi-agent interactions and planning problems in a variety of types of environments. We show that sequential VM games with countably many actions and continuous utility functions have a sound and complete axiomatization in the situation calculus. This axiomatization allows us to represent game-theoretic reasoning and solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium. We discuss the application of various concepts from VM game theory to the theory of planning and multi-agent (...) interactions, such as representing concurrent actions and using the Baire topology to define continuous payoff functions. (shrink)

The implementation of a protection scheme is central to ecotourism. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, the present study accounts for the way protection action is represented in visitors' books at a Greek reserve. Specifically, proceeding to content analysis and considering a wide range of linguistic features, we study whether visitors, through the way they construct protection acts in their texts, display knowledge about and concern for environmental issues within an ecotourism context. The analysis suggests that visitors (...) seem not to be particularly concerned or informed about the protection action undertaken for Dadia forest. With the green aspect of ecotourism rather neglected, this research empirically verifies that ecotourism conceals a consumerist essence under a green wrapping, functioning ideologically. Moreover, the present study offers qualitative insights into ecotourism research, disclosing how the ideological function of ecotourism is evident in the way visitors represent protection acts, since the version of protection action they construct diffuses their responsibilities for the environment. (shrink)

Each developed economic system is based on the principle of division of labor and can’t be imagined without the delegation of certain powers to agents. Any economic activity, particularly carried out through legal entity, is not able to function without the party’s right to authorize other persons to negotiate and make contracts on behalf of the principal. Due to the complexity of the economic order it is sometimes difficult to a third party to ascertain whether the agent acts with (...) authority. Therefore legal regulation expands the scope of authority of the representatives beyond the actually granted powers—often the need to check the credentials of the representatives is rejected, when it is obvious from the facts that they have been granted necessary powers. (shrink)

As political institutions, representative assemblies can be seen as rule-governed structures of interrelated roles with power mandates, which elected officeholders must exercise in accordance with the normative values justifying the institutions' establishment. One such essential value is collective self-government, which requires representatives to consider citizens' input. However, partisan disagreement means citizens often have conflicting views on how representatives should act, especially in polarized contexts. This article defends three propositions: (1) trust between citizens and representatives is essential for realizing collective (...) self-government; (2) for this trust to be justified, representatives must be worthy of it; and (3) partisanship strains citizens' trust in representatives of opposing parties. What I call the partisan predicament illustrates a fundamental issue: representatives inevitably disappoint either their supporters or their non-supporters. Since trust is critical to collective self-government, this dilemma can impair the functioning of representative institutions. Although this shows how citizens' autonomy remains a regulative ideal that is never fully achieved, the presence of procedures through which representatives offer justifications for their own interpretation of their commitments and for their compatibility with broader democratic values helps mitigate the negative effects of partisanship. (shrink)

How does neuronal activity give rise to cognitive capacities? To address this question, neuroscientists hypothesize about what neurons “represent,” “encode,” or “compute,” and test these hypotheses empirically. This process is similar to the assessment of hypotheses in other fields of science and as such is subject to the same limitations and difficulties that have been discussed at length by philosophers of science. In this paper, we highlight an additional difficulty in the process of empirical assessment of hypotheses that is unique (...) to the cognitive sciences. We argue that, unlike in other scientific fields, comparing hypotheses according to the extent to which they explain or predict empirical data can lead to absurd results. Other considerations, which are perhaps more subjective, must be taken into account. We focus on one such consideration, which is the purposeful function of the neurons as part of a biological system. We believe that progress in neuroscience critically depends on properly addressing this difficulty. (shrink)

This paper presents an annotated visual survey of nineteen sigils, seals, characters, and related magical graphic operators drawn from the Western esoteric tradition, spanning five centuries of continuous practice from the Renaissance compilations of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) to the popular grimoire tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries and its modern extensions. The survey serves as empirical complement to the companion paper ‘Toward a Taxonomy of Sigils’ (Keppel Hesselink, 2026), applying that paper's six-axis analytical framework, covering origin type, morphology, (...) function, sigil-referent relationship, activation, and charge, to a representative selection of primary source material drawn from public domain collections. Sources include Agrippa, Paracelsus, Trithemius, the Arbatel, the Grimoire of Honorius, the Clavis Inferni, the Petit Albert, the Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, Lévi, Papus, Vintras, Le Vasseur, and the Gauntlet manuscript, among others. The collection is organised chronologically and concludes with a classification table applying four axes to all nineteen entries and a summary identifying cross-traditional patterns in origin, morphology, function, and sigil-referent relationship. Two entries occupy explicit boundary positions that the taxonomy must address directly. The Trithemius cipher alphabet from the Polygraphia of 1518 is not a sigil under the working definition but a sigil-generative script: a complete graphic substitution system whose individual elements become operative only when combined to render a spirit name or divine formula. It marks the lower boundary of the sigil category, the point where grammar ends and operative mark begins. The serpent woodcut from the Black Letter Edition of the Necronomicon marks a different boundary: it is a fictive-archival mark, a modern fabrication embedded within a fully constructed historical provenance apparatus designed to pass as genuine transmission. Its inclusion forces the taxonomy's most fundamental question about the nature of operative charge: whether charge inheres in historical transmission as such, or in sincere practitioner engagement, whatever the origin of the mark. -/- A central finding of the survey emerges from the Le Vasseur entry. The paired tables in Le Vasseur's 1910 French edition of Agrippa's fourth book classify the graphic primitives of good spirits and evil genii along precisely the axis the present taxonomy employs under the heading of morphology: good spirits are represented through abstract geometric forms, while evil genii are represented through natural, bodily, elemental, and animal-like forms. This demonstrates that the morphology axis is not a modern analytical imposition on the material but a principle the Western sigil tradition encoded in its own graphic practice. The tradition contains its own implicit morphology of the invisible, and the present survey makes that morphology visible for the first time as a sustained analytical argument. (shrink)

In this article, we show that behavioral features can be obtained at a group level even if they do not appear at the individual level. Starting from a standard model of Pareto optimal allocations, with expected utility maximizers but allowing for heterogeneity among individual beliefs, we show in particular that the representative agent has an inverse S-shaped probability distortion function as in Cumulative prospect theory.

Mauro Dorato charts pressing debates within the philosophy of science that centre around scientific expertise, access to knowledge, consensus, debate, and decision-making. This English-language translation of Disinformazione Scientifica e Democrazia argues that the advancement of science depends on an exponential process of specialization, accompanied by the creation of technical languages that are less and less accessible to the general public. Dorato reveals how such a process must align with representative forms of democracies, in which knowledge and decision-making ought to (...) aim at the society's general interest. Given the importance of the principle of competence, however, the role of experts as mediators of knowledge threatens the citizens' autonomy of choice. Consequently, the risk of technocratic regimes calls for new ways to increase literacy about science and its philosophical and probabilistic foundations. Stressing the conceptual conflict between pluralism and conformism, Science and Representative Democracyreveals the obstacles to the functioning of both science and democracy. (shrink)

The common account of the analog vs digital distinction is based on features of physical systems, being related to the usage of continuous vs discrete supports respectively. It is proposed here to alternatively characterize the concepts of analog and digital as related to coding systems, of which a formal definition is given, by suggesting that the distinction refers to the strategy adopted to define the coding function: extensional in digital systems, isomorphic intensional in analog systems. This thesis is supported (...) by examples, in particular of analog systems exploiting discrete supports, and is discussed to explain why digital coding is currently so widespread in technological and social practice. (shrink)

This article discusses the desirability and feasibility of modeling precedents with multiple interpretations within factor-based models of precedential constraint. The main idea is that allowing multiple reasonable interpretations of cases and modeling precedential constraint as a function of what all reasonable interpretations compel may be advantageous. The article explains the potential benefits of extending the models in this way with a focus on incorporating a theory of vertical precedent in U.S. federal appellate courts. It also considers the costs of (...) extending the models in this way, such as the significant increase in the functional size of the case base and the need to provide some kind of ordering on interpretations to select a “best” interpretation. Finally, the article suggests partially incorporating multiple interpretations of dimensions as a realistic starting point for incorporating interpretations generally, and shows how doing so can help address difficulties with dimensions. The conclusion remarks on the use of interpretations to deal with inconsistent precedents. (shrink)