Defending Particularism from Supervenience/Resultance Attack

I take the debate between the particularists and the principlists to be centered on the issue of whether there are true moral principles. One argument the principlists often appeal to in support of their claim that there are true moral principles is the argument from supervenience. Roughly, the argument is made up of the following three statements: (P1) If the thesis of moral supervenience holds, then there are true moral principles. (P2) The thesis of moral supervenience holds. (C) There are true moral principles, and hence particularism is false. In this paper, I argue that the above argument is not sound by attacking (P1). I hold that no general supervenient/resultance base has a robust enough configuration of contextual features as to ground the existence of true moral principles. If I am right about this, I think it would be indicative of a reason to be less confident about the truth of principlism and more confident about the truth of particularism.     

Moral concepts: From thickness to response-dependence

The paper examines three tenets of Dancy's meta-ethics, finds them incompatible, and proposes a response-dependentist (or response-dispositional) solution. The first tenet is the central importance of thick concepts and properties. The second is that such concepts essentially involve response(s) of observers, which Dancy interprets in a way that fits the pattern of context-dependent resultance: thick concepts are well suited for the particularist grounding of moral theory. However, and this is the third tenet, in his earlier paper (1986) Dancy forcefully argues against response-dispositional accounts of moral concepts and properties. The present paper argues that an anti-dispositional view is incompatible with the first two points concerning thick concepts. If thick concepts and properties are paramount and ubiquitous in moral thought and reality, and if they are essentially tied to human responses, then anti-dispositionalism is false. Dancy himself avoids obvious contradiction by characterizing thick items (concepts) differently from the usual characterization of response-dependent items. Actions that satisfy thick concepts do so in virtue of meriting a determinate response. The (non-reductionist) response-dependentist usually puts it slightly differently: such actions satisfy a given moral concepts in virtue of eliciting a merited response. I have argued at length that this tenuous difference in formulation is too weak to support a relevant difference in rebus. If the argument is right, Dancy is implicitly committed to a kind of response-dependentism. Finally, the particularist should embrace thick concepts and properties, and reject anti-dispositionalism. However, this would bring back the analogy with color and other secondary qualities. Since there are ceteris paribus laws governing such properties, the analogy suggests that moral properties might also be best accounted for by a ceteris paribus, or hedged account, a compromise between traditional generalism and the particularism of Dancy's variety.     

Particularism and the structure of reasons

I argue that particularism (or holism) about reasons, i.e., the view that a feature that is a reason in one case need not be a reason in another case, is true, but uninterestingly so. Its truth is best explained by principles that govern a weaker notion than that of being a reason: one thing can be ‘normatively connected’ to something else without its being a reason for what it is normatively connected to. Thus, even though true, particularism about reasons does not support the particularist’s general idea that the normative domain is not governed by principles.     

Modelling a property's time to sale by inflating its previous selling price

The modelling of the time to sale for residential property is complex because of complicating factors such as properties changing their price or being withdrawn from sale, changing market conditions, the presence of submarkets, whether the property represents ‘good value’, and seller motivation. This paper analyses a data set of modern properties that contains information about their previous selling price. This information is used to value the properties instead of the standard method of regressing on the physical characteristics of the properties. A survival analysis approach is then used to model the time to sale with this time being adjusted to take into account changing market circumstances and alterations to the list price during this period. It is found that the hazard rate for selling a property is approximately constant for the first 9 months a property is marketed.     

Localizing combinatorial properties of partitions

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for the analysis of combinatorial properties of partitions. Our focus is on the relation between global properties of partitions and their localization to subpartitions. First, we study properties that are characterized by their local behavior. Second, we determine sufficient conditions for classes of partitions to have a member that has a given property. These conditions entail the possibility of being able to move from an arbitrary partition in the class to one that satisfies the given property by sequentially satisfying local variants of the property. We apply our approach to several properties of partitions that include consecutiveness, nestedness, order-consecutiveness, full nestedness and balancedness, and we demonstrate its usefulness in determining the existence of optimal partitions that satisfy such properties.     

The riddle of aesthetic principles

The problem of aesthetic principles and that of the nature of aesthetic reasons get confronted. If aesthetic reasons play an important role in our aesthetic evaluations and judgments, then both some general aesthetic principles and rules could support them (aesthetic generalism) or again their nature may be particularistic (aesthetic particularism). A recent argument in support of aesthetic generalism as proposed by Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar is presented and criticized for its misapprehension of particularism. Their position of irreversible aesthetic generalism is questioned. Aesthetic particularism is restated by the help of proposals by Jonathan Dancy’s version of moral particularism.     

Four Properties to Characterize Chebyshev Blossoms

The blossom of a polynomial function of degree less than or equal to n is known as the unique function of n variables to be symmetric, affine with respect to each variable, and to coincide with the polynomial function itself when all the variables are equal. Chebyshev blossoms do satisfy similar properties, the affinity being now replaced by a pseudoaffinity property with respect to each variable. However, by themselves, these three properties may be insufficient to clearly identify the blossom of a given function. In this paper we show that this identification is made possible through an additional appropriate requirement of differentiability. June 15, 1999. Date revised: January 20, 2000. Date accepted: May 8, 2000.     

Tracing of pseudotrajectories of dynamical systems and stability of prolongations of orbits

We investigate properties of dynamical systems associated with the approximation of pseudotrajectories of a dynamical system by its trajectories. According to modern terminology, a property of this sort is called the “property of tracing pseudotrajectories” (also known in the English literature as the “shadowing property”). We prove that dynamical systems given by mappings of a compact set into itself and possessing this property are systems with stable prolongation of orbits. We construct examples of mappings of an interval into itself that prove that the inverse statement is not true, i.e., that dynamical systems with stable prolongation of orbits may not possess the property of tracing pseudotrajectories. Institute of Mathematics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev. Translated from Ukrainskii Matematicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 49, No. 8, pp. 1016–1024, August, 1997.     

Are Bare Particulars Constituents?

In this article I examine an as yet unexplored aspect of J.P. Moreland’s defense of so-called bare particularism — the ontological theory according to which ordinary concrete particulars (e.g., Socrates) contain bare particulars as individuating constituents and property ‘hubs.’ I begin with the observation that if there is a constituency relation obtaining between Socrates and his bare particular, it must be an internal relation, in which case the natures of the relata will necessitate the relation. I then distinguish various ways in which a bare particular might be thought to have a nature and show that on none of these is it possible for a bare particular to be a constituent of a complex particular. Thus, Moreland’s attempt to resurrect bare particulars as ontologically indispensable entities is not wholly without difficulties.     

Multiphase transport based on compact distributions

Many multiphase transport problems are characterized by a random mixing of the phases (e.g., transport in porous media). In general, because of this randomness, instrumentation windows are designed such that only averages of field properties over the various phases are measured. In this article we identify an instrument window with a compact distribution. If the field property being filtered lies in the space of tempered distributions, then constraints may be derived on the structure of the filter. Distributional equations are derived which represent transport of a filtered property. The equations are general enough to allow for the use of different instruments to measure different properties. An equation representing the relationship between phase properties and filtered properties is derived when the filter is given by a measure with compact support.     

Dancy Cartwright: Particularism in the philosophy of science

This paper aims to explore the space of possible particularistic approaches to Philosophy of Science by examining the differences and similarities between Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism—as expressed in both his earlier writings (e.g., Moral Reasons, 1993), and, more explicitly defended in his book Ethics without Principles (2004)—and Nancy Cartwright’s particularism in the philosophy of science, as defended in her early collection of essays, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), and her later book, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (1999). I shall argue that Dancy’s particularism is more radical, but also more plausible, than Cartwright’s, concluding that we have good reason to embrace a scientific particularism that is far closer to Dancy’s ethical particularism than any view defended by Nancy Cartwright, or any other philosopher from the ‘Stanford school’ of scientific theory.     

Remarks on Centers of Rings

It is proved that for matrices A,B in the n by n upper triangular matrix ring Tn(R) over a domain R,if AB is nonzero and central in Tn(R) then AB =BA.The n by n full matrix rings over right Noetherian domains are also shown to have this property.In this article we treat a ring property that is a generalization of this result,and a ring with such a property is said to be weakly reversible-over-center.The class of weakly reversible-over-center rings contains both full matrix rings over right Noetherian domains and upper triangular matrix rings over domains.The structure of various sorts of weakly reversible-over-center rings is studied in relation to the questions raised in the process naturally.We also consider the connection between the property of being weakly reversible-over-center and the related ring properties.     

Recurrence and the asymptotic pseudo-orbit tracing property

In this paper, asymptotic pseudo-orbits and the asymptotic pseudo-orbit tracing property are considered for continuous maps from a compact metric space into itself. We investigate transitive properties and recurrent properties for a map with the asymptotic pseudo-orbit tracing property. In particular, a condition for which a homeomorphism is a non-wandering homeomorphism is obtained.     

Multidimensional bony attractors

In this paper we study attractors of skew products, for which the following dichotomy is ascertained. These attractors either are not asymptotically stable or possess the following two surprising properties. The intersection of the attractor with some invariant submanifold does not coincide with the attractor of the restriction of the skew product to this submanifold but contains this restriction as a proper subset. Moreover, this intersection is thick on the submanifold, that is, both the intersection and its complement have positive relative measure. Such an intersection is called a bone, and the attractor itself is said to be bony. These attractors are studied in the space of skew products. They have the important property that, on some open subset of the space of skew products, the set of maps with such attractors is, in a certain sense, prevalent, i.e., ??big.?? It seems plausible that attractors with such properties also form a prevalent subset in an open subset of the space of diffeomorphisms.     

Schedule-induced posets

Schedules are a basic tool in the treatment of project networks and sequencing problems. For many questions, however, it is not the schedule itself but a partial order (poset) naturally induced on the set of activities that is really relied on. In fact, this correspondence of the usually uncountably many schedules to a finite system of posets was a key to many recent results in this field and constitutes the discrete character of the described problems, all the more so as additional properties of the respective schedules can very often be reflected in related properties of these induced posets.The present paper gives insights into the class of those posets that can be induced by schedules. An immediate observation is that schedule-induced posets are just the interval orders. More involved characterizations are concerned with the possible ‘local optimality’ of such structures. One such property is the existence of activity durations that will result in a project duration of the considered poset that is shorter (simultaneously) than the duration of all its extensions. A similar, related characterization for general regular cost functions (in particular tardiness cost) is also included, as are insights into ‘best’ activity durations with the mentioned properties.The paper closes with some remarks and numerical data on the considered class of posets as a whole.     

Generalism without foundations

This paper is a defence of a holistic version of the generalist view of moral reasoning based on prima facie principles. In Section 1 I summarise Dancy’s arguments for particularism. Then I argue that particularism goes against strong intuitions regarding reasoning in general (Section 2), fails to account for the asymmetry of reasons (Section 3) and to make sense of compunction and moral imbecility (Section 4). I conclude (Section 5) that a holistic generalism is the right view of moral reasoning. Then I discuss Dancy’s objections to it. I argue that Dancy’s appeal to default reasons is philosophically equivalent to a holistic version of generalism, and hence incompatible with particularism (Section 6) and that his resistance to accept holistic generalism is the result of a foundationalist view of reasoning (Section 7). As an alternative to foundationalism I defend an Aristotelian dialectical view of moral reasoning.     

On Dual Gabor Frame Pairs Generated by Polynomials

We provide explicit constructions of particularly convenient dual pairs of Gabor frames. We prove that arbitrary polynomials restricted to sufficiently large intervals will generate Gabor frames, at least for small modulation parameters. Unfortunately, no similar function can generate a dual Gabor frame, but we prove that almost any such frame has a dual generated by a B-spline. Finally, for frames generated by any compactly supported function φ whose integer-translates form a partition of unity, e.g., a B-spline, we construct a class of dual frame generators, formed by linear combinations of translates of φ. This allows us to chose a dual generator with special properties, for example, the one with shortest support, or a symmetric one in case the frame itself is generated by a symmetric function. One of these dual generators has the property of being constant on the support of the frame generator.     

Banach空间的p-弱近似性质

给出了Banach空间的p-弱近似性质和p-有界弱近似性质的定义,获得了这些性质的一些刻画.利用这些刻画证明了如果一个Banach空间X的对偶空间X~*有p-弱近似性质(或p-有界弱近似性质),则X有p-弱近似性质(或p-有界弱近似性质),在一般情况下反之不成立.     

Mathematical developments arising from ‘semantical implication’ and the evaluation of membership characteristic functions

In this paper, the actuation of a semantical ordering in a property set is exposed. Such an ordering follows from the concept of semantical implication: the relation that takes place between two properties, when the values of the details forming one of these are the same as of the other excepting those which, in the implied property, are irrelevant. Mainly, the argumentation deals with the analysis of the operations which, due to the relations in subject, are allowed in the property set considered. This, with the direct purpose of attaining to the structure of the set itself.     

No More Tears in Heaven: Two Views of Response-Dependence

The paper defends a neo-Lockean view of secondary qualities, in particular color, according to which the being of a given color amounts to having the disposition to produce in normal viewers under normal circumstances the response of seeing an objective manifest simple color. It also defends the view that the naïve color-concept, the simple color concept, so to speak, is a fully objective property. The defense of this view is carried against its “nearest cousin”, the view proposed and defended by Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson, according to which the naive color concept is response dependent, whereas color itself is fully objective. It is argued that the neo-Lockean alternative better captures the phenomenology of color, and better predicts or accounts for the dramatic character of the historical scientific discoveries (of Newton and his followers). Against metaphysical response dependence, the paper proposes a brief positive argument from the unity of color properties, and a criticism of Jackson’s counter-argument against metaphysical response-dependence from the naïve intuitions about causal properties of color.