Turing starts on an equivocation. We know now that what he will go on to consider is not whether or not machines can think, but whether or not machines can do what thinkers like us can do -and if so, how. Doing is performance capacity, empirically observable. Thinking (or cognition) is an internal state, its correlates empirically observable as neural activity (if we only knew which neural acti...

During recent years there has been increasing interest in the study of fat absorption, particularly in the investigation of conditions associated with steatorrhoea. The need for a single diagnostic test for steatorrhoea, suitable for use with both outpatients and in-patients, has become apparent. Ideally, such a test should be easy to carry out for the patient and nursing staff as well as for t...

Harris argues that ifQALYs are used only 50% of the population will be eligible for survival, whereas if random methods of allocation are used 100% will be eligible. We argue that this involves an equivocation in the use of "eligible", and provides no support for the random method. There is no advantage in having a 100% chance of being "eligible" for survival behind a veil of ignorance ifyou st...

In their article “Out of nowhere: Thought insertion, ownership and context-integration” (2013), Jean-Remy Martin & Elisabeth Pacherie propose a novel approach to the explanation of thought insertion: the context-integration approach. Since the article contains many novel and important ideas, it is the more regrettable that it suffers from considerable conceptual confusions which result in a mis...

In the recent medical ethics literature, several authors have recommended terminal sedation and refusal of hydration and nutrition as important, morally acceptable, and relatively uncontroversial treatment options for end-of-life suffering. However, not all authors use these terms to refer to the same practices. This paper examines the various ways that the terms terminal sedation and refusal o...

I canvass eight possible approaches to representing ambiguity within truth-conditional semantics, and I argue that all are unsatisfactory. For example, it would be a mistake to hold that "x is a bank" is true iff x is a financial institution while "x is a bank" is true iff x is a slope, for then x would be a financial institution iff x is a slope. It would also be a mistake to hold that some to...

Harris argues that if QALYs are used only 50% of the population will be eligible for survival, whereas if random methods of allocation are used 100% will be eligible. We argue that this involves an equivocation in the use of "eligible", and provides no support for the random method. There is no advantage in having a 100% chance of being "eligible" for survival behind a veil of ignorance if you ...

We present CONIKS, an end-user key verification service capable of integration in end-to-end encrypted communication systems. CONIKS builds on transparency log proposals for web server certificates but solves several new challenges specific to key verification for end users. CONIKS obviates the need for global third-party monitors and enables users to efficiently monitor their own key bindings ...

Among many properties suggested for action selection mechanisms, one prominent one is the ability to select compromise actions, i.e. actions that are not the best to satisfy any active goal in isolation, but rather compromise between the multiple goals. This paper performs an analysis of compromise actions in situations where the agent has one proscriptive goal. It concludes that optimal compro...

Abstract Gillian Russell has recently proposed counterexamples to such elementary argument forms as Conjunction Introduction (e.g. ‘Snow is white. Grass green. Therefore, snow white and grass green’) Identity white’). These purported involve expressions that are sensitive linguistic context—for example, a sentence which true when it appears alone but false embedded in larger sentence. If they g...