What’s Wrong with “You Say You’re Happy, but…” Reasoning?

Disability-positive philosophers often note a troubling tendency to dismiss what disabled people say about their well-being. This chapter seeks to get clearer on why this tendency might be troubling. It argues that recent appeals to lived experience, testimonial injustice, and certain challenges to adaptive-preference reasoning do not fully explain what is wrong with questioning the happiness of disabled people. It then argues that common attempts to debunk the claim that disabled people are happy are worrisome because they threaten everyone’s well-being and are further challenged by an argument from moral risk

Review of Rob Wilson’s Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Cognition

Review of Rob Wilson’s Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Cognitio

Introduction to the special issue “Perspectives on Social Cognition”\ud

Introduction to the special issue “Perspectives on Social Cognition”\u

Saddlepoint approximations for noncentral quadratic forms

Many estimators and tests are of the form of a ratio of quadratic forms in normal variables. Excepting a few very special cases little is known about the density or distribution of these ratios, particularly if we allow for noncentrality in the quadratic forms. This paper assumes this generality and derives saddlepoint approximations for this class of statistics. We first derive and prove the existence of an exact inversion based on the joint characteristic function. Then the saddlepoint algorithm is applied and the leading term found, and analytic justification of the asymptotic nature of the approximation is given. As an illustration we consider the calculation of sizes and powers of F-tests, where a new exact result is found

Review of Teed Rockwell’s Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory

Review of Teed Rockwell’s Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theor

Electromagnetic and Gravitational Waves: the Third Dimension

Plane electromagnetic and gravitational waves interact with particles in such a way as to cause them to oscillate not only in the transverse direction but also along the direction of propagation. The electromagnetic case is usually shown by use of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation and the gravitational by a transformation to a local inertial frame. Here, the covariant Lorentz force equation and the second order equation of geodesic deviation followed by the introduction of a local inertial frame are respectively used. It is often said that there is an analogy between the motion of charged particles in the field of an electromagnetic wave and the motion of test particles in the field of a gravitational wave. This analogy is examined and found to be rather limited. It is also shown that a simple special relativistic relation leads to an integral of the motion, characteristic of plane waves, that is satisfied in both cases.Comment: 22 Pages, 5 figures. Minor corrections and clarifications. To appear in the Canadian Journal of Physic