The Nyāya Argument for Disjunctivism

The Nyāya school of classical Indian epistemology defended (by today’s standards) a radical version of epistemic externalism. They also gave arguments from their epistemological positions to an early version of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. In this paper I assess the value of such an argument, concluding that a modified version of the Nyāya argument may be defensible

Acquaintance and first-person attitude reports

It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought

Acts of desire

ABSTRACT Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content is just to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficulty is insurmountable: the contents of occurrent desires cannot be determined by acts of predication

Phenomenal dispositions

In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p

This Paper Might Change your Mind

Rational decision change can happen without information change. This is a problem for standard views of decision theory, on which linguistic intervention in rational decision-making is captured in terms of information change. But the standard view gives us no way to model interventions involving expressions that only have an attentional effects on conversational contexts. How are expressions with non-informational content - like epistemic modals - used to intervene in rational decision making? We show how to model rational decision change without information change: replace a standard conception of value (on which the value of a set of worlds reduces to values of individual worlds in the set) with one on which the value of a set of worlds is determined by a selection function that picks out a generic member world. We discuss some upshots of this view for theorizing in philosophy and formal semantics

Application of neural networks and sensitivity analysis to improved prediction of trauma survival

Application of neural networks and sensitivity analysis to improved prediction of trauma surviva

Sport and multiculturalism : an European perspective

Opening conference of the academic course 2005/06 of the Olympic Studies Centre (CEO-UAB), given by Dr. Ian P. Henry, director of the Institute for Sport and Leisure Policy at Loughborough University (United Kingdom). The paper is structured around addressing three themes: how concepts of multiculturalism or interculturalism, nationality and citizenship can be linked to sports policy; how we can conceptualise (and therefore evaluate) the benefits which might be claimed to accrue from sporting projects in terms of multicultural or integration policy; and finally the issue of gender, multiculturalism and sports policy.Texto de la conferencia inaugural del curso 2005/06 del Centro de Estudios Olímpicos (CEO-UAB), impartida por el Dr. Ian P. Henry, director del Institute for Sport and Leisure Policy de la Universidad de Loughborough (Reino Unido). El texto se estructura entorno a tres temas: como los conceptos de multiculturalismo o interculturalismo, nacionalidad y ciudadanía pueden vincularse a la política deportiva; como podemos conceptualizar (y por tanto evaluar) los beneficios que pueden esperarse de los proyectos deportivos en términos de política multicultural o de integración; y finalmente los temas de género, multiculturalismo y política deportiva.Text de la conferència inaugural del curs 2005/06 del Centre d'Estudis Olímpics (CEO-UAB), impartida pel Dr. Ian P. Henry, director de l'Institut de Política Esportiva i d'Oci de la Universitat de Loughborough (Regne Unit). El text s'estructura al voltant de tres temes: com els conceptes de multiculturalisme o interculturalisme, nacionalitat i ciutadania es poden vincular a la política esportiva; com podem conceptualitzar (i per tant avaluar) els beneficis que poden esperar-se dels projectes esportius en termes de política multicultural o d'integració; i finalment els temes de gènere, multiculturalisme i política esportiva

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved