Actual Arguments Research Articles

有何倫理判準支持複製人？

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.本文從儒家倫理學與西方效益論、美務論、德行論等三種倫理學理論中，抽繹出自我保存、自我發展、自由意志、能力卓越、關係和諧等五項倫理判準，用以考量複製人的倫理問題。基本上，本文主張「自我保存」是支持複製人的最有力論證，雖然此一論證仍有其缺陷。若以自我保存作為唯一的論據，仍有所不足，但它仍然是一個最低要求（minimum requirement）的論證。若就發展而言，可分就多樣化和性質優化兩種發展來考量。複製人基本上是一相反多樣化、差異化的研究方案，不過它仍可因為保存瀕臨滅亡的家庭、種族等而間接有助於多樣化。至於性質優化則需經由自由意志的努力方能成為道德的。此外，自由意志、卓越化和和諧化等判準看來，複製人仍存在看許多倫理問題，將在本文中一一分析。The new ethical situation created by new discoveries in bio-engineering needs the establishment of ethical criteria in order to judge the morality or immorality of a specific act in, for example, human cloning. But, in Chinese ethical tradition, especially in the Confucian one, much attention has been paid to normalize sexual behavior and no ethical consideration was done on reproduction outside human sexuality. Even this is the case, the general ethical principles established by Confucianism and other ethical traditions are still valid when applied to the newly emerging technological ethical issues. Therefore, in this paper, I would first derive from Confucian ethics and Western utilitarian ethics, obligation ethics and virtue ethics, five ethical criteria, restructured in a hierarchical order, for judging the ethical issues of human cloning. These criteria are: the criterion of conservation, the criterion of development, the criterion of free will, the criterion of excellence, the criterion of harmony.Basically, the author of this paper sustain the position that only the criterion of conservation gives us the most supportive argument for doing human cloning, even if this argument is still defective. This means that we can clone a member of family or race in order to conserve it from total perishing or extermination. The criterion of conservation, articulated in Modern Western philosophy and also in Chinese culture, if not morally perfect in itself, serves the technical act of human cloning as the minimum requirement.The criterion of development could be considered in two ways: differential variability and qualitative betterment. Considered from the side of differential variability, the technique of human cloning could be considered as a project of anti-differentiation or anti-variation. Still it could contribute to development only through conservation, of the otherwise perishing races or families for example. As to the qualitative betterment, it should be always achieved through volitional effort and not merely through biological genetic engineering.All human action should be mediated by free will in order to become moral. This should be taken into account also in the human cloning experimentation. But this does not mean, if supported by conservation argument and motivated by altruistic reasons, human cloning cannot be performed without the consent of the future cloning, unable to give consent because of inexistence for the time being. In this case, cloning could be ethically done, taking into account the moral example of donation of organs of the dead in accident, donation agreed by his/her parents rather than by the accident-victim. But this reasoning does not apply in the case of cloning motivated by commercial interest. But even if this kind of experimentation could be morally accepted, there is still a complementary condition: that there is no pre-visible danger, pain or discomfort caused by the experimentation.Up from the criterion of free will, we enter into the domain properly human and moral. It is on this level, and also on the levels of arguments from excellence and harmony, that we find most of the ethical difficulties of human cloning. For example, in the case of criterion of excellence, all moral excellence are morally valuable when resulted from the decision of human free will and volitional effort. No one could be morally legitimate to conduct human cloning by reason of producing a human being with better human qualities. All human qualities are social and historically determined. One quality considered as good in one time could become bad in another. The biological experimentation conducted under the pretext of producing better human race could be just a sign of tyranny, as in the case of Hitler.As I see it, many actual arguments against human cloning are based upon a social interpretation of the criterion of harmony. For example, that human cloning might be subversive to actual human sexual relationship, parenthood and family system. In my view,although ethical relationship is surely to be disturbed by human cloning, still this is not a sufficient argument against doing it. Because, for example, the argument of conservation could be more urgent and stronger. For me the most important consideration here is the interest of the child. It is of higher interest for the child that he/she be born with the love and care of his parents rather than becoming an object of human technological adventure.Argument of conservation, being supportive of human cloning, could be realized and concretized through an ethical committee authorized by relevant laws to decide in which case and under what condition a particular case of human cloning could be interpreted as suitable for the criterion of conservation. But this enters the domain of legal institution and exceeds our ethical concern in this paper.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 56 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Durkheim and Pragmatism: An Old Twist on a Contemporary Debate

Durkheim's lectures on pragmatism, given in 1913–14, constitute both a significant critique of pragmatism and a clarification of Durkheim's own position. Unfortunately, these lectures have received little attention, most of it critical. When they have been taken seriously, the analysis tends to focus on their historical context and not on the details of Durkheim's actual argument. This is partly because the tendency to interpret Durkheim's theory of knowledge in idealist terms makes a nonsense of his criticisms of pragmatism. It is also due to a lack of serious appraisal of the lectures as a series of arguments in their own right.

Procedures and modules in Fortran 90

No new feature in Fortran 90 is more important than modules for the support of effective software engineering methods. Fortran 90 modules make it possible to encapsulate portions of software: to make entities accessible only from those parts of a program in which the software designer desires and plans for their accessibility. Programmers can control the visibility of software entities (variables, procedures, data types, etc.) from the site of declaration (with PUBLIC/PRIVATE specifications) or from usage sites (with USE-ONLY specifications), and these entities can be packaged together in units for convenient and safe access throughout an application. In this way, Fortran 90 modules fully support the concept of data abstraction, one of the most important organizing principles of software design. This paper illustrates the use of modules to create a package of signal processing functions. It discusses the use of explicit interfaces defined in modules or interface blocks to improve the type safety of Fortran code, user-defined generic procedures and operators, specification of the intended use of procedure arguments (INTENT IN, OUT, and INOUT), dummy-argument arrays that inherit their shape from actual arguments, local arrays with shapes that depend on procedure inputs, recursion, optional and keyword procedure-arguments, and functions that deliver arrays or structures as values. The paper is not comprehensive. Topics omitted include internal procedures, statement functions, multiple entry, alternate return, and pointers, and little is said about the large collection of intrinsic procedures in Fortran 90. All of the illustrative code follows a programming method based on formulas and equations rather than step-by-step procedures. In this method, known as functional programming, names are defined only once; their associated values are never replaced with new ones. Fortran 90 facilitates the use of this method by permitting the definition of functions whose values are arrays or structures and by allowing functions to invoke themselves.

Fluted formulas and the limits of decidability

AbstractIn the predicate calculus, variables provide a flexible indexing service which selects the actual arguments to a predicate letter from among possible arguments that precede the predicate letter (in the parse of the formula). In the process of selection, the possible arguments can be permuted, repeated (used more than once), and skipped. If this service is withheld, so that arguments must be the immediately preceding ones, taken in the order in which they occur, the formula is said to be fluted. Quine showed that if a fluted formula contains only homogeneous conjunction (conjoins only subformulas of equal arity), then the satisfiability of the formula is decidable. It remained an open question whether the satisfiability of a fluted formula without this restriction is decidable. This paper answers that question.

Kant and the Mind (review)

524 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 JULY 199 5 Andrew Brook. Kant and the Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994 . Pp. xii + 3~7 . Cloth, $59.95. In this valuable study Andrew Brook undertakes the ambitious project of clarifying Kant's theory of the mind in two main parts. First, he argues that Kant's theory of mind is relevant to contemporary work in the philosophy of mind, since it remains unsurpassed on a number of issues. Second, he presents a detailed textual interpretation of Kant's theory of mind as it is developed in the first and second editions of the Critiqueof Pure Reason. Let me briefly sketch these two parts. Brook attempts to show the relevance of Kant's philosophy of mind to contemporary research in the philosophy of mind by investigating Kant's notions of consciousness and especially self-consciousness or, as Brook prefers to call it, self-awareness. He first finds fault with contemporary philosophy of mind for focusing on the content, at the expense of the nature, of consciousness. To remedy this fault he focuses on Kant's notion of self-awareness by first distinguishing between apperceptive and empirical self-awareness (ASA and ESA) and then pointing out important features of ASA. ESA is awareness we have of ourselves insofar as we are aware of objects of representations (much like inner sense), whereas ASA is awareness we have of ourselves insofar as we are the subject of our representations or the agent of our acts. One of ASA's unusual features is that it is barren in the sense that "through the T, as a simple representation, nothing manifold is given" (B135) and that it is nonascriptive. In contrast to my other knowledge, I can know that I exist (as the subject of my representations) without using descriptive terms to identify or refer to myself and without any information being given to me beyond intuition. Further, any ascriptive awareness of the self presupposes this nonascriptive awareness of self. This type of nonascriptive awareness has of course been discussed by others, e.g., Wittgenstein and Shoemaker, but, Brook argues, Kant's account is superior in that he can explain why ASA is barren in this way. To this end Brook introduces the notion of a global representation, or, in more Kantian terms, a representation of the world or nature. Awareness of an object that helps to constitute a global representation is "experience dividing" and "representation individuating," and will also conflict with the awareness of other objects that constitutes a global representation . Accordingly, Brook argues, "if any representation can serve as the representational base for [ASA], so that [ASA] is not experience dividing, the lack of manifold and the nonascriptiveness that yields it are easy to explain: [ASA] must be independent of recognition of or ascription to oneself of properties or features .... To recognize oneself as subject holds no implications that one will or will not experience any other entity or properties of any particular kind and does not differentiate this entity from what is presented by other representations. But recognizing properties of oneself would have such implications and result in such differentiation. Thus, [ASA] does not involve recognition of properties" (87). In this way (and others) Brook shows how contemporary philosophers of mind might benefit from taking seriously Kant's theory of mind in general and ASA in particular. Brook then discusses various passages in the two editions of the first Critique that bear on Kant's philosophy of mind: the first-edition subjective deduction, the second BOOK REVIEWS 525 and third Paralogisms, and the second edition subjective deduction, always with an eye towards what implications the arguments have for Kant's model of the mind. Discussion of his detailed exegetical work is not possible here, but his major claims should at least be mentioned. First, Brook stresses against Henrich, Strawson, and Guyer that ASA is not crucial to the actual argument of either Transcendental Deduction (TD). Second, Brook argues that the relational categories play a crucial role in the TD, since they alone enable the unification of global objects. Third, Brook notes that Kant's Paralogisms fit nicely with contemporary functionalism...

The Age of German Idealism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 525 and third Paralogisms, and the second edition subjective deduction, always with an eye towards what implications the arguments have for Kant's model of the mind. Discussion of his detailed exegetical work is not possible here, but his major claims should at least be mentioned. First, Brook stresses against Henrich, Strawson, and Guyer that ASA is not crucial to the actual argument of either Transcendental Deduction (TD). Second, Brook argues that the relational categories play a crucial role in the TD, since they alone enable the unification of global objects. Third, Brook notes that Kant's Paralogisms fit nicely with contemporary functionalism's agnosticism about the ultimate structure of the mind. Fourth, Brook interprets the Paralogisms as employing two strategies: a) an analysis of the concepts of a thinking being and of self-awareness and b) an examination of what self-awareness tells us about ourselves. Finally, Brook interprets Kant's model of the mind as implying that we can be aware of the mind as it is and, further, that the mind is a global representation. Brook's twofold project is quite interesting and very worthwhile reading for both contemporary philosophers of mind and Kant scholars. Philosophers of mind will appreciate Brook's attempts to make Kant both accessible and relevant to their own concerns in philosophically interesting ways, while Kant scholars can benefit from his clear and detailed exegetical work. It should be noted, however, that Brook neglects almost entirely the relevant German scholarship on Kant's theory of mind in the form of work by G. Prauss, W. Carl, M. Frank, G. Mohr, B. Th61e, and D. Sturma (to mention but a few), and Brook's arguments are at times not as explicit as one might like. Also, Brook's final claims that we can be aware of the mind as it is and that the mind is a global representation raise serious questions, especially since the latter seems to conflict directly with Kant's belief (based on practical arguments) that the noumenal self is an immaterial substance, not a representation. ERIC WATKINS Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, editors. The Age of German Idealism. Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VI. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xxv + 4o8. Cloth, $85.oo. This is a collaborative work. The eleven chapters have eleven different authors (including the two editors). The editors have added a short introduction, a valuable chronology showing events in politics, the arts, science, and philosophy from the birth of Rousseau (l 712) to the death of Schopenhauer (186o), and a glossary. The authors have tried to write an introductory account of their assigned topic; and the essays are quite self-contained. So the volume fails to be a historyof philosophy at all, because interactions and influences are only sporadically discussed. It will be most useful to students making their first acquaintance with the particular authors (and works) dealt with. I shall offer here only a summary verdict upon it, chapter by chapter; and the reader must remember that myjudgment is probably sounder for the first eight chapters than for the last three. 526 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 JULY 1995 L. W. Beck's "From Leibniz to Kant" is elementary "history of philosophy" at its best. He expounds the German Enlightenment from its two sides (Rationalism and Pietism), looking always for the problems that it bequeathed to Kant. A better historical introduction to the study of Kant could hardly be imagined. Virtually all of us (students and teachers alike) need it; one hopes that all will read it (and fears that many will not). Kant has three chapters, and their value is rather uneven. Daniel Bonevac is content to provide a brief and simple exposition of the deductions of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason--with a few pages on the Dialectic, especially the treatment of the Ontological Proof. Then Don Becker deals with Kant's moral philosophy almost entirely through the Grundlegung; after that he passes to the Metaphysik der Sitten, the essay on history, and "Perpetual Peace." The Critique of Practical Reason itself--which beginning students of the Categorical...

Response to John A. Clark's Review of "The Limits of Reason"

Though I read John A. Clark's somewhat provocative review of The Limits of Reason' with great care, I still do not have a clear picture of Clark's overall position on my theory of social indeterminacy and its application to law, education, morality, and cognitive science. In many places he is critical of my position, my methodology, and my actual arguments. Yet in other parts of the review, often in sections summarizing his arguments, Clark makes statements that strongly suggest a basic agreement with my position. One can, of course, be critical of some aspects of a work and agree with others. But what I am unable to do is relate his fervent support of rationalism and reason to statements recognizing the inadequacies, even the limits, of reason.

A Mind of One's Own

Whatever good or ill it did to Guy Fawkes, his resuscitation at the hands of Bernard Williams has, by any utilitarian reckoning, been a Good Thing. A casual glance at the literature that has accumulated over the past thirty-five years leaves no doubt that the topic has been reduplicated many times over, to the great enjoyment of undergraduates, who have been able to write science fiction under the guise of essays in the Philosophy of Mind, and of dons, who in an age of cvs and Assessments, have been able to notch up page after page of counter-replies to replies to rebuttals of previous papers, not to mention an often welcome tally of references in the citation index. But the actual arguments adduced by Williams can be turned to support a much more traditional view of the self, as a necessarily unique agent whose individuality is established by his capacity for autonomous action.

Influences on the Duration of Wars, Strikes, Riots, and Family Arguments

Utility theory has been frequently applied in the analyses of the outbreak of war. The present study extends the application of utility theory to conflict duration. The authors consider how the perceived utility of continuing conflict changes while conflicts are under way, and posit that conflicts end when the utility of continuing is less than the utility of surrender. Predictions developed from the theory are tested, using hazard models, on duration data from actual wars, strikes, riots, and family arguments. Consistent with utility theory, the likelihood of wars and strikes ending is found to decrease while they are under way, exhibiting a tendency for these conflicts to become entrenched. In sharp contrast to this, but consistent with utility theory, riots and family arguments are more likely to end the longer they last. Size of conflict and dispute issue are shown to effect duration in some circumstances. The results offer a way of explaining how conflicts between “rational” organizations become entrenched and resistant to resolution. Implications for efforts to reduce conflict duration are discussed.

Russell's Theory of Meaning and Denotation and "On Denoting"

Russell's Theory of Meaning and Denotation and "On Denoting" RUSSELL WAHL 1. INTRODUCTION BERTRAND RUSSELL DEVELOPEDhis theory of denoting in ThePrinciplesofMathemat /cs (hereafter Principles)and later rejected it in "On Denoting." The theory is of interest in part because of the problems it was designed to solve, in part because of its similarity to certain related doctrines (such as Frege's distinction between sense and reference, to which Russell likens his theory in the appendix to Principles)and in part because it is not at first clear from the arguments given in "On Denoting" why Russell gave up the theory. The theory is of interest, also, because Russell expanded it considerably in the years between Principles and "On Denoting," actually grafting onto it a theory of meaning and designation not present in Principles, and because he had grander designs for it than are indicated in his published works. "On Denoting" is one of Russell's most important works, for it contains his new theory of descriptions, which many consider to be Russell's most important contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. His theory of descriptions is widely known, if not generally accepted in the form Russell presented it, but the central arguments of "On Denoting" have resisted the many attempts that have been made to understand them. While many of the recent attempts to make sense of the arguments shed some light on them and indicate important points being made by Russell, they ultimately fail in displaying Russell's actual argument.' This paper was written with the help of an NEH Travel Grant for travel to the Bertrand Russell Archives in February of 1989. I wish to thank the NEH and Kenneth Blackwell, the archivist who made many of these manuscripts and letters available to me. I also wish to thank Nicholas Griffin for many helpful comments. Some earlier attempts which reveal much of the argument are Chrystine Cassin, "Russell's Discussion of Meaning and Denotation: A Re-examination," in Klemke, ed., Essays on Bertrand Russell and J. R. Searle, "Russell's Objection to Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference," in [71] 72 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:1 JANUARY X993 In what follows, I will first give a brief account of Russell's theory of denoting as presented in Principles. This will occupy section 2. Section 3 will present modifications to the theory as Russell developed it in the unpublished manuscripts of 1903 - 1905 ." In these manuscripts, Russell developed a theory of meaning and denotation which many have seen to be simply a continuation of the theory of denoting found in Principles. But the manuscripts reveal that Russell's primary purpose in developing this distinction was to solve the Russell contradiction and related paradoxes which he later handled with the ramified theory of types. This aspect of Russell's theory of meaning and denotation has been ignored, despite the fact that in his unpublished writings on meaning and denotation written during 19o3- 19o5 Russell was concerned with the contradiction and methods of resolving it. Russell gave up the project of solving the contradiction by means of the distinction between meaning and denotation, and this is certainly one reason why he never published any of this work. Nevertheless, this aspect of his work on meaning and denotation was important to the development of the argument in "On Denoting." In section 4 I will examine Russell's project of solving the paradox and developing a theory of classes using the distinction between meaning and denotation. This background is crucial to understanding Russell's actual argument against the old theory of denoting, which is the subject of section 5. This argument has its roots in doctrines espoused in Principles and in the unpublished manuscripts. It was in fact formulated in the last of these manuscripts, "On Fundamentals," which has written on it, in Russell's hand, "begun June 7, 19o5," and "Pp. 18ff contain the reasons for the new theory of denoting." This argument is repeated in cryptic form in "On Denoting." While this manuscript is not at all easy to follow, it reveals the complexity of the theory Russell was developing and sheds much light on his reasons...

Deriving descriptions of possible values of program variables by means of abstract interpretation

A PROLOG compiler specializes the code for unification between calls and clause heads as they appear in the program. This code could be further specialized, yielding more efficient code, if more precise information about possible values for actual arguments were available. This paper addresses the problem of gathering such information. It develops a method for obtaining descriptions of possible values of program variables. The method is based upon a framework for abstract interpretation. The descriptions can be regarded as extended modes or a kind of type information. An important issue in the method is the treatment of free variables and the sharing of free variables between different values of program variables.

The impact of argumentativeness and verbal aggression on communicator image: The exchange between George Bush and Dan Rather

In previous research argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness have been conceptually differentiated. This study sought to determine the effect of each concept on the image of participants in an actual public argument, the CBS news interview of George Bush by Dan Rather in January, 1988. Results indicate that both argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness have a significant relationship to communicator image, but unexpected results occur when comparing the images of the two participants. Verbal aggressiveness negatively affected Bush's communicator image, but positively influenced Rather's. Results also suggest differences in the effects of argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness on specific characteristics of communicator image.

Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Epistemological Fiction

Garry Hagberg WITTGENSTEIN, HENRY JAMES, AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL FICTION That Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, brought a deep and powerful argument against a certain conception of philosophical activity, and that this argument in both its content and method was stardingly revolutionary, is widely known. The argument was carried out in the new form ofa philosophical investigation;1 the old conception of philosophy which it supplanted was that ofcarrying out a conceptual analysis in search of an essence. The implications of Wittgenstein's argument have been discussed, both for philosophy generally2 and for aesthetic theory in particular,3 but only in one direction. The discussion has proceeded from Wittgenstein's argument to the concept of art, culminating in the conclusion that art is not a unitary concept, or that there is no single essential feature both necessary and sufficient for arthood. In this essay I want to reverse this direction and ask what significance art, particularly fiction, can hold for our conception of philosophy. Specifically, I will argue that we can indeed arrive at a deeper comprehension of Wittgenstein's conception of a philosophical investigation through a close examination of a piece of fiction than through any attempt at theoretical encapsulation or general metaphilosophical characterizations of method. If we begin by asking the question which some might claim lies at the center of philosophy, "What is knowledge?," we will, if bound by the essentialist presumption, search for a feature, an element, an attribute, indeed an essence, that is present in every case of knowledge and moreover which, by virtue of its presence, renders the case in question a case of knowledge. Thus, just as scotch is identified as a member of a certain class ofbeverages by virtue of the presence ofa certain distillate, 75 76Philosophy and Literature so cases of knowledge are on this traditional view thought to be made to be what they are, to count as knowledge, through the presence of some common ingredient. This definitional core of the concept of knowledge has been given many formulations; perhaps the most prominent has been that ofjustified true belief.4 Thus we have in the foregoing remarks a sketch ofthe position against which Wittgenstein's argument was posed. Should we not at this point ask for a sketch ofWittgenstein's position? Consider Wittgenstein's own words: "I cannot characterize my standpoint better than by saying that it is opposed to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues. For if asked what knowledge is I would list examples of knowledge, and add the words 'and the like.' No common element is to be found in them all."5 This, as a sketch ofa position, is undeniably disappointing. It tells us, again, what the argument is opposed to; it does not shed much light on the actual argument, or the new method ofinvestigation, itself. But this is not surprising, for another well-known aspect of Wittgenstein 's later philosophy is the initially somewhat mysterious impossibility of encapsulation, or, indeed of generally characterizing the standpoint. What, we want to know with some precision, is a philosophical investigation ? To answer this question we will turn to literature. From Henry James's characteristically compressed short story, "The Tree of Knowledge,"6 one can derive an expansive list of the varieties of knowledge.7 But before attempting to assemble that list, let me say a word about the story itself. The story is constructed around four characters, including a father, mother, son, and friend of the family. But, not surprisingly, there ends the simplicity. The father is an artist, a sculptor, known by the family as "the Master"; his name to the world beyond this slightly extended family circle is Morgan Mallow. Mrs. Mallow is a gentle soul who "rejoices " in her husband's statues, and she is "attached to [the friend] Peter Brench . . . because of his affection for Morgan." Peter Brench, however, even though sincerely good friends with Morgan, has secredy been in love with Mrs. Morgan for years. Although all knew that Peter had reached the age offifty and "escaped marriage," they did not know precisely through what means this position in life had been achieved. Furthermore, James, as the narrator, tells us in the...

A Proposal for Making Eiffel Type-safe

Statically type-correct Eiffel programs may produce run-time errors because (1) attributes may be redeclared during inheritance, invalidating assignments in the superclass, (2) a formal method argument type may be restricted in violation of the contravariance of function types, and (3) two applications of a generic class are assumed to conform if the actual arguments conform. The third problem is solved by case analysis on the variance of generic parameters. Declaration by association provides a solution to the first two problems, but is suffers from additional difficulties. Type attributes, or generic parameters with default values, are suggested as a replacement for most cases of declaration by association. The special association type used to express type recursion cannot be explained using type attributes, and its appears to be a truly novel construct for typing object-oriented programs. One consequence of this construct is that Eiffel's conformance hierarchy is a proper subset of its inheritance hierarchy.

Logic programming with external procedures: introducing S-unification

A motivation for this work is the problem of re-usability of existing traditional software in logic programs. It can be viewed in an abstract way as the problem of amalgamation of Horn clause logic with a term reduction system whose rewrite rules are not accesible and thus cannot be used for construction of E-unifiers. Therefore, we introduce a new unification algorithm, called S-unification, which is a special incomplete case of E-unification. It has the property that whenever it succeeds, the result is a singleton complete set of E-unifiers of the arguments. It may also fail or report that it is not able to solve the problem of E-unification for given arguments. If the algorithm fails, the actual arguments have no E-unifier. The paper discusses the problem of amalgamation of external functional procedures in a logic program and gives a characterization of a class of amalgamated programs for which S-unification is complete.

Prior's ‘Thank Goodness’ Argument: A Reply to Hardin

According to C. L. Hardin, A. N. Prior's well-known argument in 'Thank Goodness That's Over'1 may be taken 'to involve the claim that demonstratives are basic to our ontological talk about time and that this marks a fundamental distinction between time and space not already captured by the asymmetry of the earlier-later relation'.2 Hardin proceeds to argue that this claim is false. I shall not challenge his argument; it is both clever and persuasive. Rather, I shall suggest that the argument he criticizes is not at all the argument Prior was offering. Perhaps Prior offers such an argument elsewhere, although I would be surprised if this were so. At any rate, I shall suggest that the argument in 'Thank Goodness That's Over' was intended to say nothing whatever about the ontological significance of our use of demonstratives. The actual argument remains a powerful objection to the tenseless view of time, and this objection is untouched by Hardin's creative discussion. There are two very good reasons to doubt that Prior's argument is essentially about the use of demonstratives. If a claim about demonstratives is indeed basic to the argument, then any statement of the argument should make use of demonstratives. However, the argument is just as strong (or weak) when formulated without demonstratives. For example:

The BC-chain method for representing combinators in linear space

Turner’s combinator implementation (1979) of functional programs requires the memory space of size Ω(n 2) in the worst case for translating given lambda expressions of lengthn to combinator graphs. In this paper a new idea named the BC-chain method for transferring actual arguments to variables is presented. We show that the BC-chain method requires onlyO(n) space for the translation. The basic idea is to group together into a single entity a sequence of combinatorsB, B′, C andC′, for a variable, which appear consecutively along a path in the combinator graph. We formulate two reduction algorithms in the new representation. The first algorithm naively simulates the original normal order reduction, while the second algorithm simulates it in constant time per unit operation of the original reduction. Another reduction method is also suggested, and a technique for practical implementation is briefly mentioned.

Hume on Finding an Impression of the Self

HUME ON FINDING AN IMPRESSION OF THE SELF 47 1 1. Introduction Descartes held that reflection on "the commonest matters", for example our recognition of a piece of wax, reveals our more fundamental awareness of ourselves. And further, if the [notion or] perception of the wax has seemed to me clearer and more distinct, not only after the sight or the touch, but also after many other causes have rendered it quite manifest to me, with how much more [evidence] and distinctness must it be said that I now know myself, since all the reasons which contribute to the knowledge of wax, or any other body whatever, are yet better proofs of the nature of my mind!2 Even if I only seem to see a piece of wax, when I have no eyes to see and there is no wax before me, I still know something. I know myself. When I judge that the wax is soft I am aware of myself as so judging. When I judge that the wax is hard, I am aware that I_ judge it so. I cannot have knowledge of external bodies without having certain knowledge of myself, because even my mere beliefs reveal my self-knowledge. Descartes exploited the insight that he is more intimately conscious of his own mind than anything else to establish that he is "a mind or a soul ... a thing which thinks".3 Philosophers who did not share Descartes' rationalism still held the view that we are intimately conscious of ourselves, and that our awareness of other things enhances our self-awareness, and is epistemically dependent on it. Butler claimed that our awareness of ourselves was beyond doubt, since to doubt that awareness presupposes that we already have it. Whenever we "turn our thoughts upon ourselves" we have 48 "certain conviction, which necessarily and every moment, rises within us" of our personal identity. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume argues against both the intelligibility of the notion of immaterial substance, and the claim that we have simple awareness of our selves independently of our awareness of other objects. when Hume turns his attention squarely to the topic of personal identity in the Treatise, he has already dismissed the rationalist notion of immaterial substance or soul. He attacks the view which tempted rationalists and empiricists alike, that our awareness of ourselves is distinct from our feeling and thinking, but is often enhanced by such experience. Hume's argument has been and continues to be influential. Recent Wittgenstein interpretation suggests that the Tractatus discussion of the unencounterability of the self in experience is directly borrowed from Hume.5 Chisholm's views concerning self-awareness are motivated in part by problems he locates in Hume's negative argument. Chisholm argues that the report that he finds no impression of self commits Hume to the existence of a subject of experience.6 Most recently, Nozick suggests that Hume did not consider the possibility that our awareness of ourselves might be isolated by employing •7 special techniques, such as yoga or meditation. In this paper I will focus on the passage in the Treatise where Hume reports his failure to find an impression of the self and presents this as an argument against the theory of self-awareness which many philosophers found irresistible. Although Hume's argument has been influential and is often discussed in contemporary literature, the Treatise passage in which it occurs appears confused. The confusion is cleared up only when it is seen that Hume really presents two 49 different arguments against the view that we are intimately conscious of ourselves. Finally I suggest how Hume's actual arguments pave the way for his positive views. 2. The Difficulty Hume's discussion of personal identity in the Treatise begins with his consideration of the view of "some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF."8 After characterizing the view, Hume rejects it, having found that we have no idea of self "after the manner it is here explain'd". The unnamed philosophers, as Hume understands them, take the idea of the self to be a simple idea. For Hume, a...

Dr Dyer's Urban Undulations

In seeking to purge what he seems to regard as the dangerously insidious views of an academic ‘gang of four’,Dr Alan Dyer has certainly eschewed gentle persuasion as the appropriate way of re-converting erring heretics. Being apparently the worst offender - and bedaubed in penitential ashes, as I clearly ought to be - it is then hardly for me to answer for the views of my fellow conspirators: Peter Clark, Paul Slack and Penelope Corfield. They are well able to stand up for themselves. All I have space to do here is to reflect on Dr Dyer's re-assertion of the neutralist text-book orthodoxy regarding the state of England's towns in the earlier Tudor period, and so to ponder whether a recantation of my own seemingly obsessional sins might be appropriate. I certainly do not intend simply to reiterate what the disinterested follower of this discussion might wish to read for himself, the actual arguments of my 1975 paper, with its qualifying remarks and its ‘handful’ of 75 urban examples.

Cohesion in English By Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (review)

676LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) into an event' (194). The argument strikes me as faulty: unless we make the unusual assumption (and there is no indication that Menzel makes it) that non-underlying representations must conform to semantic well-formedness constraints, one cannot motivate the application of a syntactic rule such as Equi-NP Deletion in terms of semantic well-formedness. If a verb requires an embedded action, then the embedded action must be well-formed, i.e. subjectless, in the underlying representation. Besides unconvincing arguments, the other drawback of the book is inexplicitness and general infelicity of organization and presentation. No precise delimitation of subject matter, of the range of facts to be accounted for, of basic assumptions, or of proposed explanatory principles is provided anywhere. We are given no definition of such key concepts as 'complement', 'surface structure', or 'deep structure'. The semantic classification of sentences is given in at least two different versions: on p. 40, 'proposition', 'event', 'process', 'action', 'state', 'property', and 'relationship' are mentioned; on p. 200, 'proposition' and 'relationship' are omitted, but 'act' and 'activity are added. Again, on p. 60 it seems that actions, acts, and processes are subtypes of events, while states and properties are subtypes of 'states' (in a generic sense)—an idea raised here but never picked up again (cf. 200). The status of 'propositions' is unclear: if they are coincident with declarative sentences (41), then what exactly is the difference between the labels 'declarative sentence' and 'proposition'? As already mentioned, the place of the semantic distinction between fact and non-fact also remains unclear in the proposed classifications . In addition to such unclear and imprecise passages, the structure of the book places an undue burden on the reader. The actual argument starts in Chapter 3 (p. 63); the preceding two chapters provide a survey of the transformational literature on complementation and of the semantic classification of sentences. Although Menzel repeatedly emphasizes (13 ff., 21) that in these discussions he only talks about things that will be relevant for his own ensuing argument, these two chapters seem somewhat pointless : since the readers do not yet know what Menzel's argument will be, they do not know what to look for in these surveys. A brief introductory section to the book, summarizing its contentions, would have provided guidelines for plowing through these two survey chapters. In spite of its deficiencies of argumentation and presentation, I found Menzel's book useful. Arguments for the main thesis—that at least some syntactic and semantic categories define coextensive classes—are at times unconvincing, but at other times sound. Thus 1 find Menzel's explanations for collocational restrictions among main-clause verbs, head nouns, and complement-clause types, in terms of semantic well-formedness constraints, to be convincing. All in all, the monograph is a somewhat inexplicit and disorderly discussion of the relationship of semantic and syntactic categories within the domain of English complement constructions. As such, it provides difficult but thought-provoking reading for anybody interested in English grammar, in complementation, or in the general relation between meaning and form in language. [Received 25 July 1977.] Cohesion in English. By Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. (English language series, 9.) London: Longman, 1976. Pp. xv, 374. $20.00. Reviewed by Wolfgang U. Dressler, University of Vienna This is a very significant contribution to the study of intersentential coherence and of its interaction with sentence structure. It represents the fruit of about ten years of joint research undertaken by the founder of Systemic (or Scale-and- REVIEWS677 Category) Grammar and his wife, who has specialized in stylistics and discourse analysis. In fact, the first three chapters are a revised version of Hasan 1968; chapters 4 through 6 were written by both authors; and the last two chapters were added by Halliday. Cohesion is seen as 'a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the creation of text' (298). A text is 'a unit of situational-semantic organization' (25), either of written or oral speech, and may be of any length. It 'is not a structural unit'; nor is cohesion 'a structural relation' (6), but a semantic concept. The basic types of cohesive ties...