Reply to Nathan: How to reconstruct the causal argument

Nicholas Nathan tries to resist the current version of the causal argument for sense-data in two ways. First he suggests that, on what he considers to be the correct re-construction of the argument, it equivocates on the sense of proximate cause. Second he defends a form of disjunctivism, by claiming that there might be an extra mechanism involved in producing veridical hallucination, that is not present in perception. I argue that Nathan’s reconstruction of the argument is not the appropriate one, and that, properly interpreted, the argument does not equivocate on proximate cause. Furthermore, I claim that his postulation of a modified mechanism for hallucinations is implausibly ad hoc.     

Pit your wits against young minds!

This column is a place for those bits of contagious mathematics that travel from person to person in the community, because they are so elegant, suprising, or appealing that one has an urge to pass them on. Contributions are most welcome.     

Analysis of plane and axisymmetric flows of incompressible fluids with the stream tube method: Numerical simulation by trust-region optimization algorithm

New concepts for the study of incompressible plane or axisymmetric flows are analysed by the stream tube method. Flows without eddies and pure vortex flows are considered in a transformed domain where the mapped streamlines are rectilinear or circular. The transformation between the physical domain and the computational domain is an unknown of the problem. In order to solve the non-linear set of relevant equations, we present a new algorithm based on a trust region technique which is effective for non-convex optimization problems. Experimental results show that the new algorithm is more robust compared to the Newton-Raphson method.