Gilbert Ryle and the Ethical Impetus for Know-How

This paper aims to shed light on an underexplored aspect of Gilbert Ryle’s interest in the notion of “knowing-how”. It is argued that in addition to his motive of discounting a certain theory of mind, his interest in the notion also stemmed (and perhaps stemmed more deeply) from two ethical interests: one concerning his own life as a philosopher and whether the philosopher has any meaningful task, and one concerning the ancient issue of whether virtue is a kind of knowledge. It is argued that Ryle saw know-how as crucial in both respects and, also, that he continued to be interested in these ethical issues throughout his career

Solutions to congruences using sets with the property of Baire

Hausdorff's paradoxical decomposition of a sphere with countably many points removed (the main precursor of the Banach-Tarski paradox) actually produced a partition of this set into three pieces A,B,C such that A is congruent to B (i.e., there is an isometry of the set which sends A to B), B is congruent to C, and A is congruent to (B union C). While refining the Banach-Tarski paradox, R. Robinson characterized the systems of congruences like this which could be realized by partitions of the sphere with rotations witnessing the congruences. The purpose of the present paper is to characterize those systems of congruences which can be satisfied by partitions of the sphere or related spaces (any complete metric space acted on in a sufficiently free way by a free group of homeomorphisms) into sets with the property of Baire. Dougherty and Foreman proved that the Banach-Tarski paradox can be achieved using such sets, and gave versions of this result using open sets and related results about partitions of spaces into congruent sets. The same methods are used here. We also characterize the systems solvable on the sphere using sets with the property of Baire but allowing all isometries (instead of just rotations).Comment: 20 page

Moral Directionality in the Doctor -Patient Relationship

In this paper I propose to examine three models of the doctor patient relationship. After a descriptive characterization of the alternative models, I will offer a series of arguments to support the claim that there is a moral priority of one model over the others, viz. the model of mutual participation

Shape of ammonium chloride dendrite tips at small supersaturation

We report detailed shape measurements of the tips of three-dimensional ammonium chloride dendrites grown from supersaturated aqueous solution. For growth at small supersaturation, we compare two different models: parabolic with a fourth-order correction, and power law. Neither is ideal, but the fourth-order fit appears to provide the most robust description of both the tip shape and position for this material. For that fit, the magnitude of the fourth-order coefficient is about half of the theoretically expected value.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX; updated references; minor edits from v