Nicholaos Jones

Engineers commonly validate complex systems by considering arguments, pro and con, that a system possesses (or will possess) desired properties, such as safety or high-quality performance. This argumentation is often conducted in service of a decision, such as passing a critical design review or deploying a system for a given task. It can question facts, methods, and inferences, including generalizations from test cases, analogies between application tasks, and expert opinion. However, very few formalisms support quantitative reasoning about system properties in the presence of such arguments. This article develops a representation for stating conflicting arguments and evaluating such structures into probabilistic assertions about claims. We employ Toulmin argumentation models as a base, an informal representation of rhetorical argument that connects premises through warrants (justifications) to claims. We provide a novel, probabilistic interpretation of warrants as methods for making defeasible inferences by separating the relevance (or aptness) of the method from the likelihood of its conclusion. We use this interpretation to formally integrate Toulmin models into influence diagrams. We illustrate the value of this integration for systems validation by employing the machinery of decision analysis to examine a decision in the presence of engineering arguments. We consider a choice between two rover wheel designs, given a simulation package that affirms one option, and an expert who casts doubt on the validity of the simulation. Then, we determine the expected value of conducting a physical test to resolve a key uncertainty in the presence of these conflicting arguments.

Life scientists increasingly rely upon abstraction-based modeling and reasoning strategies for understanding biological phenomena. We introduce the notion of constraint-based reasoning as a fruitful tool for conceptualizing some of these developments. One important role of mathematical abstractions is to impose formal constraints on a search space for possible hypotheses and thereby guide the search for plausible causal models. Formal constraints are, however, not only tools for biological explanations but can be explanatory by virtue of clarifying general dependency-relations and patterning between functions and structures. We describe such situations as constraint-based explanations and argue that these differ from mechanistic strategies in important respects. While mechanistic explanations emphasize change-relating causal features, constraint-based explanations emphasize formal dependencies and generic organizational features that are relatively independent of lower-level changes in causal details. Our distinction between mechanistic and constraint-based explanations is pragmatically motivated by the wish to understand scientific practice. We contend that delineating the affordances and assumptions of different explanatory questions and strategies helps to clarify tensions between diverging scientific practices and the innovative potentials in their combination. Moreover, we show how constraint-based explanation integrates several features shared by otherwise different philosophical accounts of abstract explanatory strategies in biology.

Fazang is one of the most celebrated and influential thinkers in the history of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. Metaphors for Interdependence is a rigorous and accessible exploration of Fazang’s metaphysical theories, focusing in particular on his vision of reality as a realm in which everything is interdependent and interpenetrating. Fazang explains this vision with metaphors about Indra’s net, coin counting, and a building. The result is the systematic articulation of metaphysics for the Huayan tradition of Buddhism. This book reconstructs the intellectual background that gives meaning to Fazang’s theories. It provides vivid examples to help readers understand Fazang’s distinctive insights. The book also develops incisive interpretations of Fazang’s metaphors by examining how Buddhist optical theory, breathing meditation, and ancient Chinese architecture inform Fazang’s theorizing. By situating Fazang’s insights within broader traditions of Buddhism, Metaphors for Interdependence challenges facile conceptions of interdependence while inviting readers to reconsider a range of common metaphysical assumptions.

Fazang is a seminal figure for the tradition of Huayan Buddhism. Essay on the Golden Lion is the most widely translated into English of his writings. Yet systematic English-language scholarship on Fazang’s Essay is relatively sparse. Scholars agree that the central focus of the Essay is the relation between principle and thing — a relation akin to the one between emptiness and form and, according to Fazang, also akin to the relation between the golden substance of a lion statue and the statue itself. Scholars disagree about what principle is. They also disagree about how Fazang conceptualizes the relation between principle and thing. This paper develops a novel interpretation for Fazang's conception of the principle-thing relation. The methodology involves situating Fazang's metaphor of the golden lion in relation to prior efforts, by Chinese Buddhists, to conceptualize the emptiness-form relation and using theoretical considerations, from some of Fazang’s other writings, to interpret various remarks Fazang makes about his metaphor of the golden lion.

The scholar Mark Siderits defends two views about Buddhism. The first is that the Buddhist denial of independently existing selves is best understood as a kind of reductionism, according to which wholes, by virtue of being nothing more than their atomic parts, are conventionally real but ultimately unreal. The second is that the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness is not a metaphysical thesis, according to which nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, but rather a semantic thesis, according to which no statement about ultimate reality is true. This chapter uses central metaphysical doctrines from the Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism to develop, in contrast, a nonreductionist approach to wholes and a metaphysical construal of emptiness.

Noah McKay provides a novel argument for theism over naturalism. The argument is novel because it connects metaphysical issues to issues regarding moral epistemology. The connection concerns the power of theism and naturalism, respectively, to explain the human capacity to obtain correct beliefs about the domain of morality. The gist of McKay’s argument is that theism provides a much more plausible account of this capacity than naturalism. The reason for this superiority, according to McKay, is that theism secures an intimate connection between human moral intuitions and truths within the domain of morality while naturalistic explanations sever the connection between human moral intuitions and truths within the domain of morality. A central contention of McKay’s argument is that there are exactly two plausible and naturalistic explanations for the content of human moral intuitions—one appealing to evolutionary considerations, the other appealing to social conventions. I argue that this contention is incorrect. Some Buddhist traditions locate veridical moral intuitions in a kind of experience available to those who achieve freedom from ignorance and attachment. This explanation is naturalistic (as McKay understands that term) and no less plausible than the theistic explanation that McKay considers.

Standard views about metaphysical structure presume that if metaphysical structure is hierarchical, any priority ordering of individuals is rigid or situationally invariant. This paper challenges this presumption. The challenge derives from an effort to interpret the kind of metaphysical structure implicit in writings central to the Huayan tradition of Chinese Buddhism. The Huayan tradition views reality as a realm of thoroughgoing interdependence. Close attention to primary sources indicates that this view does not fit comfortably in any of the metaphysical structures familiar from contemporary analytic metaphysics. Accordingly, this paper also develops a conception of metaphysical structure that rejects the standard presumption. Motivation for this conception derives from attending to certain formal analogies between kinds of metaphysical structure and kinds of social organization. These analogies provide guidance for a conception of metaphysical structure as heterarchical or situationally variable. This conception breaks new ground for analytic metaphysics and opens conceptual space for interpreting Huayan metaphysics as a heterarchical variation of foundationalism.

Aang is unwilling to kill Ozai in order to secure peace. The Lion Turtle's remark indicates that Aang's alternative strategy involves bending Ozai's energy, and that Aang is victorious because his spirit is unbendable while Ozai's presumably is bendable. Buddhist teachings identify five fundamental hindrances that foster duhkha. Aang struggles with all five hindrances, but he ultimately overcomes them and has a true heart. The first hindrance concerns sensory desire, longing for pleasure through the bodily senses. The second hindrance is ill will. The third hindrance is dullness and drowsiness. The fourth hindrance is restlessness and remorse. The fifth and final hindrance is doubt. By virtue of overcoming emotional hindrance and delusion, Aang becomes a person who embraces obstacles and strives to overcome them through compassion rather than control.

Abstract: According to certain dispositional accounts of meaning, an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an idealized version of this agent has in optimal conditions. We argue that such attempts cannot properly fix meaning. For even if there is a way to determine which features of an agent should be idealized without appealing to what the agent means, there is no non-circular way to determine how those features should be idealized. We sketch an alternative dispositional account that avoids this problem, according to which an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an abstract version of this agent has in optimal conditions.

Fazang’s arguments in his Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan provide a philosophical foundation for the Avatamsaka Sutra’s rich and suggestive imagery. This chapter focuses on one of Fazang’s central arguments in that treatise, namely, his argument that mutually reliant dharmas are mutually identical. The chapter presents the background context for Fazang’s argument, reconstructs the argument’s logical structure, interprets the central concepts appearing therein, and explains why Fazang might have found plausible his argument’s premises. Specific discussion points include: the non-duality of existence and emptiness; relations between causes and their conditions; the meaning of creation and identity; connections with the ti-yong paradigm; Fazang’s analogy of the ten coins. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of Fazang’s metaphysics for contemporary discussions of substance and ontological foundations.

Extant discussions of Buddhist mereology give minimal attention to the soteriological significance of denying the reality of wholes. This is unfortunate, because the connection between mereology and soteriological is both significant and problematic. The connection is significant, because it supports an argument for the unreality of composite wholes that does not depend upon any claim about the nature of wholes. The connection is also problematic, because some Buddhists endorse the soteriological relevance of mereology despite admitting that composite wholes are real. I address these issues by reviewing early Pāli Buddhist attitudes toward the soteriological significance of mereology, developing an argument for the unreality of wholes from the work of Buddhaghosa, and explicating an alternative approach from the Chinese tradition of Huayan 華嚴 Buddhism that calls into question some common assumptions about parts and wholes.

According to many experiments in cross-cultural psychology, East Asians exhibit holistic cognitive style typified by use of resemblance heuristics, field dependence, external sources of causation, intuitive forms of reasoning, and interdependent forms of social thinking. Holistic cognitive style contrasts with analytic cognitive style, which is common to Westerners. Section 1 presents information on the background of Buddhism’s entry into and treatment by China. Section 2 discusses experimental evidence for the representation of holistic cognitive style in contemporary East Asians. Section 3 presents preliminary evidence for the interaction between holistic cognitive style and the history of ideas in China at large. Section 4 analyzes two discussions of the same philosophical problem conducted by Chinese Buddhist philosopher Fazang and Indian Vedic philosopher Shankara. It is provisionally argued that the interpretive strategies displayed by Fazang interact with several components of holistic cognitive style, in contrast with Shankara. Implications are discussed.

This paper examines the metaphysics of interdependence in the work of the Chinese Buddhist Fazang. The dominant approach of this metaphysics interprets it as a species of metaphysical coherentism wherein everything depends upon everything else, no individual is more fundamental than any other, and so reality itself is non-well-founded in the sense that chains of dependence never terminate. I argue, to the contrary, that Fazang's metaphysics is better interpreted as a novel variety of foundationalism. I argue, as well, using set- and graph-theoretic techniques, that there is a consistent way to model this alternative interpretation, and that this model differs in significant ways from a coherentist model.

Comparing Buddhist and contemporary analytic views about mereological composition reveals significant dissimilarities about the purposes that constrain successful answers to mereological questions, the kinds of considerations taken to be probative in justifying those answers, and the value of mereological inquiry. I develop these dissimilarities by examining three questions relevant to those who deny the existence of composite wholes. The first is a question of justification: What justifies denying the existence of composite wholes as more reasonable than affirming their existence? The second is a question of ontology: Under what conditions are many partless individuals arranged composite-wise? The third is a question of reasonableness: Why, if there are no composites available to experience, do “the folk” find it reasonable to believe there are? I motivate each question, sketch some analytic answers for each, develop in more detail answers from the Theravādin Buddhist scholar Buddhaghosa, and extract comparative lessons.

I propose an account of generous action in the Pāli Buddhist tradition, whereby generous actions are instances of giving in which the donor has esteem for the recipient of their giving. The account differs from recent Anglophone accounts of generous action. These tend to construe generous actions as instances of a donor freely offering a gift to the recipient for the sake of benefiting the recipient. Unlike the Buddhist account I propose, these accounts do not require donors to esteem their recipient. Accordingly, I also offer a partial account of esteem, whereby one esteems another only if they refrain from noticing the other’s faults and they encounter the other as someone who is superior in virtue and goodness. Taken together, the Buddhist accounts of generous action and esteem offer insight into certain ways in which different philosophical traditions tend to characterize generous action.

Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant and ideologically parsimonious strategy for analyzing the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi. The strategy is ideologically parsimonious, because it appeals to no analytic resources beyond those of standard predicate logic. The strategy is elegant, because it is, in effect, an application of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions to Buddhist contexts. The strategy imposes some minor adjustments upon Russell's theory. Attention to familiar catuṣkoṭi from Vacchagotta and Nagarjuna as well as more obscure catuṣkoṭi from Khema, Zhi Yi, and Fa Zang motivates the adjustments. The result is a principled structural distinction between affirmative and negative catuṣkoṭi, as well as analyses for each that compare favorably to more recent efforts from Tillemans, Westerhoff, and Priest.

This paper examines the Huayan teaching of the six characteristics as presented in the Rafter Dialogue from Fazang's Treatise on the Five Teachings. The goal is to make the teaching accessible to those with minimal training in Buddhist philosophy, and especially for those who aim to engage with the extensive question-and-answer section of the Rafter Dialogue. The method for achieving this goal is threefold: first, contextualizing Fazang's account of the characteristics with earlier Buddhist attempts to theorize the relationships between wholes and their parts; second, explicating the meaning Fazang likely attributes to each of the six characteristics; third, situating the characteristics as explicated within Fazang's broader metaphysical framework.

This paper explicates the counting ten coins metaphor as it appears in Fazang’s Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan. The goal is to transform Fazang’s inexact and obscure mentions of the metaphor into something that is clearer and more precise. The method for achieving this goal is threefold: first, presenting Fazang’s version of the metaphor as improving upon prior efforts by Zhiyan and Ŭisang to interpret a brief stanza in the Avataṁsaka sutra; second, providing textual evidence to support this interpretation; third, contrasting this interpretation with alternatives from Francis Cook as well as Yasuo Deguchi and Katsuhiko Sano.

I consider three explanatory strategies from recent systems biology that are driven by mathematics as much as mechanistic detail. Analysis of differential equations drives the first strategy; topological analysis of network motifs drives the second; mathematical theorems from control engineering drive the third. I also distinguish three abstraction types: aggregations, which simplify by condensing information; generalizations, which simplify by generalizing information; and structurations, which simplify by contextualizing information. Using a common explanandum as reference point—namely, the robust perfect adaptation of chemotaxis in Escherichia coli—I argue that each strategy invokes a different combination of abstraction types and that each targets its abstractions to different mechanistic details.

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) promises a relatively objective and tractable methodology for ranking the plausibility of competing hypotheses. Unlike Bayesianism, it is computationally modest. Unlike explanationism, it appeals to minimally subjective judgments about relations between hypotheses and evidence. Yet the canonical procedures for ACH allow a certain kind of instability in applications of the methodology, by virtue of supporting competing rankings despite common evidential bases and diagnosticity assessments. This instability should motivate advocates of ACH to focus their efforts toward creating structured methods for individuating items of evidence.

Cyborg and prosthetic technologies frame prominent posthumanist approaches to understanding the nature of race. But these frameworks struggle to accommodate the phenomena of racial passing and racial travel, and their posthumanist orientation blurs useful distinctions between racialized humans and their social contexts. We advocate, instead, a humanist approach to race, understanding racial hierarchy as an industrial technology. Our approach accommodates racial passing and travel. It integrates a wide array of research across disciplines. It also helpfully distinguishes among grounds of racialization and conditions facilitating impacts of such racialization.

This is an attempt to explain, in a way familiar to contemporary ways of thinking about mereology, why someone might accept some prima facie puzzling remarks by Fazang, such as his claims that the eye of a lion is its ear and that a rafter of a building is identical to the building itself. These claims are corollaries of the Huayan Buddhist thesis that everything is part of everything else, and it is intended here to show that there is a rational basis for this thesis that involves a nonstandard notion of parthood and, importantly, that does not violate the principle of noncontradiction.

Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood better attributed to less obvious sources. But while the tendency to blame idealizations is common among both philosophers of science and scientists themselves, the blame is misplaced. Attention to the nature of idealizing conditions, the content of idealized hypotheses, and scientists’ attitudes toward those hypotheses shows that idealizing conditions are blameless when hypotheses misrepresent. These conditions help to determine the content of idealized hypotheses, and they do so in a way that prevents those hypotheses from being false by virtue of their constituent idealizations

When comparing alternative courses of action, modern military decision makers often must consider both the military effectiveness and the ethical consequences of the available alternatives. The basis, design, calibration, and performance of a principles-based computational model of ethical considerations in military decision making are reported in this article. The relative ethical violation (REV) model comparatively evaluates alternative military actions based upon the degree to which they violate contextually relevant ethical principles. It is based on a set of specific ethical principles deemed by philosophers and ethicists to be relevant to military courses of action. A survey of expert and non-expert human decision makers regarding the relative ethical violation of alternative actions for a set of specially designed calibration scenarios was conducted to collect data that was used to calibrate the REV model. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey showed that people, even experts, disagreed greatly amongst themselves regarding the scenarios’ ethical considerations. Despite this disagreement, two significant results emerged. First, after calibration the REV model performed very well in terms of replicating the ethical assessments of human experts for the calibration scenarios. The REV model outperformed an earlier model that was based on tangible consequences rather than ethical principles, that earlier model performed comparably to human experts, the experts outperformed human non-experts, and the non-experts outperformed random selection of actions. All of these performance comparisons were measured quantitatively and confirmed with suitable statistical tests. Second, although humans tended to value some principles over others, none of the ethical principles involved—even the principle of not harming civilians—completely overshadowed all of the other principles.

One recent priority of the U.S. government is developing autonomous robotic systems. The U.S. Army has funded research to design a metric of evil to support military commanders with ethical decision-making and, in the future, allow robotic military systems to make autonomous ethical judgments. We use this particular project as a case study for efforts that seek to frame morality in quantitative terms. We report preliminary results from this research, describing the assumptions and limitations of a program that assesses the relative evil of two courses of action. We compare this program to other attempts to simulate ethical decision-making, assess possibilities for overcoming the trade-off between input simplification and output reliability, and discuss the responsibilities of users and designers in implementing such programs. We conclude by discussing the implications that this project highlights for the successes and challenges of developing automated mechanisms for ethical decision making.

While mechanistic explanation and, to a lesser extent, nomological explanation are well-explored topics in the philosophy of biology, topological explanation is not. Nor is the role of diagrams in topological explanations. These explanations do not appeal to the operation of mechanisms or laws, and extant accounts of the role of diagrams in biological science explain neither why scientists might prefer diagrammatic representations of topological information to sentential equivalents nor how such representations might facilitate important processes of explanatory reasoning unavailable to scientists who restrict themselves to sentential representations. Accordingly, relying upon a case study about immune system vulnerability to attacks on CD4+ T-cells, I argue that diagrams group together information in a way that avoids repetition in representing topological structure, facilitate identification of specific topological properties of those structures, and make available to controlled processing explanatorily salient counterfactual information about topological structures, all in ways that sentential counterparts of diagrams do not.