Plausible Condition Research Articles

Practical Knowledge and the Structural Challenge

Abstract Elizabeth Anscombe characterised practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’. As Anscombe recognised, accepting this view involves rejecting certain basic orthodox epistemological assumptions. But even once this is done, a challenge remains for a conception of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’. For while practical knowledge would appear to be a kind of propositional knowledge, intentions would appear to be a kind of non-propositional attitude. I call this the ‘Structural Challenge’ for an intention-based account of practical knowledge. After rejecting two suggested responses – one which views intentions as propositional attitudes; one which views practical knowledge as non-propositional knowledge – I offer my own solution by showing how simply having and carrying out an intention to φ will ordinarily meet a plausible neutral condition on propositional knowledge. Knowing a fact will in general involve being mentally related to it via a successful exercise of relevant concepts. The account I develop turns on viewing a person’s carrying out an intention to φ as their constituting the fact that they are φ-ing, through a practical exercise of their concept of φ-ing. The resulting account sheds light both on the analogies, and on the crucial formal differences, between practical and theoretical knowledge.

Retrograde cricopharyngeal dysfunction and treatment with botulinum toxin: a systematic review.

Retrograde cricopharyngeal dysfunction (RCPD) is a disease first described systematically in 2019. The main symptom is inability to belch due to cricopharyngeal muscle dysfunction. Other symptoms include gurgling noises, chest pain, bloating, and excessive flatulence. This paper aims to describe RCPD, the aetiology and diagnosis, treatment options, follow-up, and treatment with botulinum toxin (BT). A systematic review was done according to the PRISMA guidelines, using the databases PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane at 8/3/2024. The search combined BT with different descriptions of RCPD. All papers were screened by two authors. 120 papers were identified in the search. After screening 13 papers describing 472 patients in total were included. Mean age was 29.3years with 51.1% men. Diagnosis was established in 82.4% of the cases by symptomatology, 2.1% by high-resolution manometry, and 15.3% by oesophagoscopy. The mean amount of BT was 66 units (U). Mean follow-up time was 13months. After 1-4weeks 93.7% had an effect post-treatment and 81.0% after 6months. Common symptoms were inability to belch (99.8%), chest pain and/or bloating (95.4%), gurgling noises (84.9%), and excessive flatulence (75.9%). Common complications were mild and transient dysphagia (59.4%) and reflux (35.4%). The accumulated numbers of patients with RCPD indicates a growing attention to the plausible condition. Injection with BT is a good and safe treatment of RCPD. Most patients only experience mild and transient complications to the treatment. Much is still unknown about RCPD and conditions for setting the diagnosis needs to be evaluated and established internationally.

Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate

Cumulative cultural evolution has been claimed to be a uniquely human phenomenon pivotal to the biological success of our species. One plausible condition for cumulative cultural evolution to emerge is individuals’ ability to use social learning to acquire know-how that they cannot easily innovate by themselves. It has been suggested that chimpanzees may be capable of such know-how social learning, but this assertion remains largely untested. Here we show that chimpanzees use social learning to acquire a skill that they failed to independently innovate. By teaching chimpanzees how to solve a sequential task (one chimpanzee in each of the two tested groups, n = 66) and using network-based diffusion analysis, we found that 14 naive chimpanzees learned to operate a puzzle box that they failed to operate during the preceding three months of exposure to all necessary materials. In conjunction, we present evidence for the hypothesis that social learning in chimpanzees is necessary and sufficient to acquire a new, complex skill after the initial innovation.

Henderson on Meta-Induction and the Problem of Induction

Abstract This note presents a short reply to Henderson’s critical discussion of Schurz’s approach to the problem of induction based on the optimality of meta-induction. Henderson objects that the meta-inductive a posteriori justification of object-induction rests on a certain premise—namely, an approximation condition—that she reveals as untenable. I reply that Henderson’s approximation condition is indeed too strong to be plausible, but it is not needed by the meta-inductive approach; a much weaker and highly plausible approximation condition is sufficient.

Oxygen isotope exchange between molten silicate spherules and ambient water vapor with nonzero relative velocity: Implication for chondrule formation environment

Oxygen isotope compositions of chondrules reflect the environment of chondrule formation and its spatial and temporal variations. Here, we present a theoretical model of oxygen isotope exchange reaction between molten silicate spherules and ambient water vapor with finite relative velocity. We found a new phenomenon, that is, mass-dependent fractionation caused by isotope exchange with ambient vapor moving with nonzero relative velocity. We also discussed the plausible condition for chondrule formation from the point of view of oxygen isotope compositions. Our findings indicate that the relative velocity between chondrules and ambient vapor would be lower than several 100ms−1 when chondrules crystallized.

Generative adversarial network for predicting visible deterioration and NDE condition maps in highway bridge decks

Bridge decks tend to degrade faster than other bridge components due to environment exposure and vehicular loading. Periodic degradation monitoring is needed for timely rehabilitation measures and development of service life models in bridge decks. Surface degradation are identified through visual inspection (VI) and post-processing of high-definition imagery. Although VI is the primary NDE method employed by most transportation authorities, many anomalies (e.g., cracking, corrosion, and delamination) remain hidden under the surface until deteriorations have grown large enough to surface (e.g., spalling). Subsurface degradation is best identified through other forms of non-destructive evaluation (NDE). Inferences can be made between the various NDE methods, as the mechanisms behind the damages sensed by each method are shared. For instance, condition map from an NDE method may infer future visible deterioration, as well as condition maps for other NDE methods. In this paper, a deep learning approach based in a conditional generative adversarial network is presented for modeling of plausible visible deterioration and NDE condition maps. Two applications are explored: (i) visualization of plausible future deterioration based on current NDE condition map, and (ii) visualization of condition maps for NDE methods from other NDE methods. Field and experimental data from the BEAST facility at Rutgers University are used to develop the training databases for each application.

Thermal features of Heisenberg antiferromagnets on edge- versus corner-sharing triangular-based lattices: a message from spin waves

We propose a new scheme of modifying spin waves so as to describe the thermodynamic properties of various noncollinear antiferromagnets with particular interest in a comparison between edge- versus corner-sharing triangular-based lattices. The well-known modified spin-wave theory for collinear antiferromagnets diagonalizes a bosonic Hamiltonian subject to the constraint that the total staggered magnetization be zero. Applying this scheme to frustrated noncollinear antiferromagnets ends in a poor thermodynamics, missing the optimal ground state and breaking the local U(1) rotational symmetry. We find such a plausible double-constraint condition for spin spirals as to spontaneously go back to the traditional single-constraint condition at the onset of a collinear Néel-ordered classical ground state. We first diagonalize only the bilinear terms in Holstein-Primakoff boson operators on the order of spin magnitude S and then bring these linear spin waves into interaction in a perturbative rather than variational manner. We demonstrate specific-heat calculations in terms of thus-modified interacting spin waves on various triangular-based lattices. In zero dimension, modified-spin-wave findings in comparison with finite-temperature Lanczos calculations turn out so successful as to reproduce the monomodal and bimodal specific-heat temperature profiles of the triangular-based edge-sharing Platonic and corner-sharing Archimedean polyhedral-lattice antiferromagnets, respectively. In two dimensions, high-temperature series expansions and tensor-network-based renormalization-group calculations are still controversial especially at low temperatures, and under such circumstances, modified spin waves interestingly predict that the specific heat of the kagome-lattice antiferromagnet in the corner-sharing geometry remains having both mid-temperature broad maximum and low-temperature narrow peak in the thermodynamic limit, while the specific heat of the triangular-lattice antiferromagnet in the edge-sharing geometry retains a low-temperature sharp peak followed by a mid-temperature weak anormaly in the thermodynamic limit. By further calculating one-magnon spectral functions in terms of our newly developed double-constraint modified spin-wave theory, we reveal that not only the elaborate modification scheme but also quantum corrections, especially those caused by the O(S 0) primary self-energies, are key ingredients in the successful description of triangular-based-lattice noncollinear antiferromagnets over the whole temperature range of absolute zero to infinity.

Semantic plausibility preferentially affects the semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading: evidence from an eye-movement study.

Numerous studies have confirmed that skilled readers can benefit from a semantically related preview word (i.e., semantic preview benefit, SPB), suggesting that readers can extract semantic information from the parafovea to achieve efficient reading. It is still under debate whether the occurrence of this benefit is because of the semantic association between the preview and target words or because of the contextual fit of the preview word in the sentence context. Two independent factors, preview plausibility (preview plausible/implausible) and semantic relatedness (semantically related/unrelated), were manipulated, and we further strictly controlled for syntactic plausibility in the present study. The results showed that the first-pass reading times of the target words were significantly shorter in the plausible preview condition than in the implausible preview condition. However, the main effect of semantic relatedness was found only in the gaze duration measure. The pattern of results revealed that semantic plausibility affects the semantic preview benefit preferentially in Chinese reading, supporting the contextual fit account. Our findings have implications for a better understanding of parafoveal processing and provide empirical support for the eye-movement control model.

The Modal Future

<i>The Modal Future</i>

Real-Time Lighting Estimation for Augmented Reality via Differentiable Screen-Space Rendering.

Augmented Reality (AR) applications aim to provide realistic blending between the real-world and virtual objects. One of the important factors for realistic AR is the correct lighting estimation. In this paper, we present a method that estimates the real-world lighting condition from a single image in real-time, using information from an optional support plane provided by advanced AR frameworks (e.g. ARCore, ARKit, etc.). By analyzing the visual appearance of the real scene, our algorithm could predict the lighting condition from the input RGB photo. In the first stage, we use a deep neural network to decompose the scene into several components: lighting, normal, and BRDF. Then we introduce differentiable screen-space rendering, a novel approach to providing the supervisory signal for regressing lighting, normal, and BRDF jointly. We recover the most plausible real-world lighting condition using Spherical Harmonics and the main directional lighting. Through a variety of experimental results, we demonstrate that our method could provide improved results than prior works quantitatively and qualitatively, and it could enhance the real-time AR experiences.

New-Onset Bipolar Disorder in Late Life: a case report and review of literature

IntroductionThe elderly represents the fastest growing group of the population. It is fair to assume that the portion of old age patients suffering from bipolar disorder will grow in a similar manner. Elderly patients represent approximately 25% of the bipolar population. Summarizing, 5–10% of patients were 50 years of age when they experienced their first manic episode, constituting the subgroup of late onset bipolar disorder (LOBD).ObjectivesThe purpose of this case report and literature review is to emphasise the importance of LOBD in old population and to highlight its still sparse-knowledge.MethodsDescriptive case study and review of literature (Arnold,I. et al. Old Age Bipolar Disorder—Epidemiology, Aetiology and Treatment. Medicina 2021,57,587; Baldessarini et al. Onset-age of bipolar disorders at six international sites. J Affect Disord 2010;121(1-2):143-6).ResultsA 60-year-old woman is brought to the emergency department for evaluation by her family. Over the past 7 days, the patient has become increasingly irritable and argumentative, is sleeping less, is talking faster than usual and has begun to express paranoid concerns about her students “stealing my exam”. The patient is a university professor.In the assessment interview she is hyperverbal, expansive, and grandiose. The family has also just recently discovered that she has spent a large sum of money on the Internet.She has no history of psychiatric contact or substance use disorders; however, she has a family history of severe depression.In the absence of any plausible non-psychiatric condition that could mimic or induce mania, the working diagnosis is bipolar I disorder, most recent episode (MRE) manic with psychotic features.Image:Image 2:ConclusionsThe share of older age bipolar disorder will grow constantly in the next decades and further research on this neglected patient group is urgently required.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Benefits are Better than Harms: A Reply to Feit

ABSTRACT We have argued that the counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) violates the plausible adequacy condition that an act that would harm an agent cannot leave her much better off than an alternative act that would benefit her. In a recent paper in this journal, however, Neil Feit objects that our argument presupposes questionable counterfactual backtracking. He also argues that CCA proponents can justifiably reject the condition by invoking so-called plural harm and benefit. In this reply, we argue that Feit’s lines of criticism are both unsuccessful.

Precis of Conjoining Meanings

Precis of Conjoining Meanings

The evolution of cognitive biases in human learning

Cognitive biases like underinference, the hard-easy effect, and recurrently non-monotonic confidence are evolutionarily puzzling when viewed as persistent flaws in how people learn from environmental feedback. To explain these empirically robust cognitive biases from an evolutionary perspective, we propose a model of ancestral human learning based on the cultural-evolutionary-theoretic hypothesis that the primary selection pressure acting on ancestral human cognition pertained not to learning individually from environmental feedback, but to socially learning task-specific knowledge. In our model—which is inspired by classical Bayesian models—an ancestral human learner (the student) attempts to learn task-specific knowledge from a role model, with the option of switching between different tasks and role models. Suppose that the student’s method of learning from their role model is a priori uncertain—in that it can either be successful imitation learning or de facto innovation learning—and the ecological fitness costs of meaningfully retaining environmental feedback are high. Then, the student’s fitness-maximizing strategy does not retain their environmental feedback and—depending on the choice of model parameters—can be characterized by all of the aforementioned cognitive biases. Specifically, in order for the evolutionarily optimal estimate of confidence in this learning environment to be recurrently non-monotonic, it is necessary (as long as the environment’s marginal payoff function satisfies a plausible quantitative condition) that a positive proportion of ancestral humans’ attempted imitation learning was unknowingly implemented as de facto innovation learning. Moreover, an ecologically rational strategy of selective social learning can plausibly cause the evolutionarily optimal estimate of confidence to be recurrently non-monotonic in the empirically documented way: general increase with an intermediate period of decrease.

The visual pathway in sea spiders (Pycnogonida) displays a simple serial layout with similarities to the median eye pathway in horseshoe crabs

BackgroundPhylogenomic studies over the past two decades have consolidated the major branches of the arthropod tree of life. However, especially within the Chelicerata (spiders, scorpions, and kin), interrelationships of the constituent taxa remain controversial. While sea spiders (Pycnogonida) are firmly established as sister group of all other extant representatives (Euchelicerata), euchelicerate phylogeny itself is still contested. One key issue concerns the marine horseshoe crabs (Xiphosura), which recent studies recover either as sister group of terrestrial Arachnida or nested within the latter, with significant impact on postulated terrestrialization scenarios and long-standing paradigms of ancestral chelicerate traits. In potential support of a nested placement, previous neuroanatomical studies highlighted similarities in the visual pathway of xiphosurans and some arachnopulmonates (scorpions, whip scorpions, whip spiders). However, contradictory descriptions of the pycnogonid visual system hamper outgroup comparison and thus character polarization.ResultsTo advance the understanding of the pycnogonid brain and its sense organs with the aim of elucidating chelicerate visual system evolution, a wide range of families were studied using a combination of micro-computed X-ray tomography, histology, dye tracing, and immunolabeling of tubulin, the neuropil marker synapsin, and several neuroactive substances (including histamine, serotonin, tyrosine hydroxylase, and orcokinin). Contrary to previous descriptions, the visual system displays a serial layout with only one first-order visual neuropil connected to a bilayered arcuate body by catecholaminergic interneurons. Fluorescent dye tracing reveals a previously reported second visual neuropil as the target of axons from the lateral sense organ instead of the eyes.ConclusionsGround pattern reconstruction reveals remarkable neuroanatomical stasis in the pycnogonid visual system since the Ordovician or even earlier. Its conserved layout exhibits similarities to the median eye pathway in euchelicerates, especially in xiphosurans, with which pycnogonids share two median eye pairs that differentiate consecutively during development and target one visual neuropil upstream of the arcuate body. Given multiple losses of median and/or lateral eyes in chelicerates, and the tightly linked reduction of visual processing centers, interconnections between median and lateral visual neuropils in xiphosurans and arachnopulmonates are critically discussed, representing a plausible ancestral condition of taxa that have retained both eye types.

A model of conflict and leadership: Is there a hawkish drift in politics?

We analyze conflict between a citizenry and an insurgent group over a fixed resource such as land. The citizenry has an elected leader who proposes a division such that, the lower the land ceded to the insurgents, the higher the cost of conflict. Leaders differ in ability and ideology such that the higher the leader’s ability, the lower the cost of conflict, and the more hawkish the leader, the higher his utility from retaining land. We show that the conflict arises from the political process with re-election motives causing leaders to choose to cede too little land to signal their ability. We also show that when the rents of office are high, the political equilibrium and the second best diverge; in particular, the policy under the political equilibrium is more hawkish compared to the second best. When both ideology and ability are unknown, we provide a plausible condition under which the probability of re-election increases in the leader’s hawkishness, thereby providing an explanation for why hawkish politicians may have a natural advantage under the electoral process.

Investigating Heritage Language Processing: Meaning Composition in Chinese Classifier-Noun Phrasal Contexts.

The aim of the present study was to investigate how Chinese-Malay bilingual speakers with Chinese as heritage language process semantic congruency effects in Chinese and how their brain activities compare to those of monolingual Chinese speakers using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. To this end, semantic congruencies were manipulated in Chinese classifier-noun phrases, resulting in four conditions: (i) a strongly constraining/high-cloze, plausible (SP) condition, (ii) a weakly constraining/low-cloze, plausible (WP) condition, (iii) a strongly constraining/implausible (SI) condition, and (iv) a weakly constraining/implausible (WI) condition. The analysis of EEG data focused on two event-related potential components, i.e., the N400, which is known for its sensitivity to semantic fit of a target word to its context, and a post-N400 late positive complex (LPC), which is linked to semantic integration after prediction violations and retrospective, evaluative processes. We found similar N400/LPC effects in response to the manipulations of semantic congruency in the mono- and bilingual groups, with a gradient N400 pattern (WI/SI > WP > SP), a larger frontal LPC in response to WP compared to SP, SI, and WI, as well as larger centro-parietal LPCs in response to WP compared to SI and WI, and a larger centro-parietal LPC for SP compared to SI. These results suggest that, in terms of event-related potential (ERP) data, Chinese-Malay early bilingual speakers predict and integrate upcoming semantic information in Chinese classifier-noun phrase to the same extent as monolingual Chinese speakers. However, the global field power (GFP) data showed significant differences between SP and WP in the N400 and LPC time windows in bilinguals, whereas no such effects were observed in monolinguals. This finding was interpreted as showing that bilinguals differ from their monolingual peers in terms of global field power intensity of the brain by processing plausible classifier-noun pairs with different congruency effects.

Standing to epistemically blame

A plausible condition on having the standing to blame someone is that the target of blame's wrongdoing must in some sense be your “business”—the wrong must in some sense harm or affect you, or others close to you. This is known as the business condition on standing to blame. Many cases of epistemic blame discussed in the literature do not obviously involve examples of someone harming or affecting another. As such, not enough has been said about how an individual's epistemic failing can really count as another person's business. In this paper, I deploy a relationship-based account of epistemic blame to clarify the conditions under which the business condition can be met in the epistemic domain. The basic idea is that one person's epistemic failing can be another's business in virtue of the way it impairs their epistemic relationship.

A dilemma for permissibility-based solutions to the paradox of supererogation

Abstract We argue that permissibility-based solutions to the paradox of supererogation encounter a nested dilemma. Such approaches solve the paradox by distinguishing moral and rational permissions. If they do not also include a bridge condition that relates these two permissions, then they violate a very plausible monotonicity condition. If they do include a bridge condition, then permissibility-based solutions either amount to rational satisficing or they collapse back into the classical account of supererogation and fail to resolve the paradox.

The N400 and Post-N400 positivity effect in Mandarin classifier-noun congruence: An ERP study

The current study employed electrophysiological measures to investigate semantic processing within a local classifier-noun phrase in Chinese. Toward this aim, semantic congruence between classifiers and nouns was manipulated, resulting in four conditions: (i) a strong-constraint/high-cloze plausible (SP) condition, (ii) a weak-constraint/low-cloze plausible (WP) condition, (iii) a strong-constraint/implausible (SI) condition, and (iv) a weak-constraint/implausible (WI) condition. Participants were asked to judge the acceptability of the classifier-noun pairs. Our results corroborated previous findings by showing that the processing of classifier-noun congruence is sensitive to manipulations of constraint and cloze probability, as indicated by a gradient N400 effect (SP < WP < SI/WI). In addition, WP (mean cloze score = 0.04) elicited a larger frontal-central positivity than SP (mean cloze score = 0.45) in the time window of 500–900 ms, whereas no such differences were observed between SI and WI. In the same time window, implausible nouns elicited a larger central-parietal positivity than plausible nouns. The results are discussed in terms of a functional dissociation between these two types of post-N400 positivity (PNP): a more frontally distributed PNP associated with successful post-lexical composition/integration, and a more centrally distributed PNP elicited by plausibility-driven reanalysis after failed integration attempts. • A graded N400 response was elicited by manipulating semantic congruence. • Low-cloze plausible nouns elicited a larger frontal-central post-N400 positivity than high-cloze plausible nouns. • Implausible nouns elicited a larger central-parietal post-N400 positivity than plausible nouns.