Bennett on Parts Twice Over

Having a Part Twice Over

I argue that is intuitive and useful to think about composition in light of the familiar functionalist distinction between role and occupant. This involves factoring the standard notion of parthood into two related notions: being a parthood slot and occupying a parthood slot. One thing is part of another just in case it fills one of that thing’s parthood slots. This move opens room to rethink m...

On the Bennett-Hoeffding inequality

The well-known Bennett-Hoeffding bound for sums of independent random variables is refined, by taking into account positive-part third moments, and at that significantly improved by using, instead of the class of all increasing exponential functions, a much larger class of generalized moment functions. The resulting bounds have certain optimality properties. The results can be extended in a sta...

Symmetry as an Epistemic Notion (Twice Over)

Symmetries in physics are a guide to reality. That much is well known. But what is less well known is why symmetry is a guide to reality. What justifies inferences that draw conclusions about reality from premises about symmetries? I argue that answering this question reveals that symmetry is an epistemic notion twice over. First, these inferences must proceed via epistemic lemmas: premises abo...

Vaulting over the MRCP (UK) part I hurdle--twice over.

Malcolm Bennett

Poppy, who also was a co-organiser of the meeting, leads a new research project called ASSETS (Attaining Sustainable Services from Ecosystems through Trade-off Scenarios). This project investigates two model regions at the forest–agriculture interface, one in Colombia and one in Malawi. The case studies cover around two million people, but the researchers believe that the results they obtain wi...