The most famous objection to the ontological argument is given in Kant’s dictum that existence is not a real predicate. But it is not obvious how this slogan is supposed to relate to the ontological argument. Some, most notably Alvin Plantinga, have even judged Kant’s dictum to be totally irrelevant to Anselm’s version of the ontological argument. In this paper I argue, against Plantinga and ot...

Specification denotes the type of pattern that highly improbable events must exhibit before one is entitled to attribute them to intelligence. This paper analyzes the concept of specification and shows how it applies to design detection (i.e., the detection of intelligence on the basis of circumstantial evidence). Always in the background throughout this discussion is the fundamental question o...

Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism aims to show that the conjunction of contemporary evolutionary theory (E) with the claim that there is no God (N) cannot be rationally accepted. Where R is the claim that our cognitive faculties are reliable, the argument is: P1. The probability of R given N and E is low or inscrutable. P2. Anyone who sees (1) and accepts (N&E) has a de...

Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism aims to show that the conjunction of contemporary evolutionary theory (E) with the claim that there is no God (N) cannot be rationally accepted. Where R is the claim that our cognitive faculties are reliable, the argument is: P1. The probability of R given N and E is low or inscrutable. P2. Anyone who sees (1) and accepts (N&E) has a de...

Plantinga argues that cases involving ‘fixed’ beliefs refute the coherentist thesis that a belief’s belonging to a coherent set of beliefs suffices for its having justification (warrant). According to Plantinga, a belief cannot be justified if there is a ‘lack of fit’ between it and its subject’s experiences. I defend coherentism by showing that if Plantinga means to claim that any ‘lack of fit...

In this paper we discuss the design and evolution of Trinity College’s ALVIN robot, an autonomous ground vehicle that has participated in the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) since 2000. The paper first discusses the Trinity Robot Study Team, which has been responsible for developing ALVIN. We then illustrate the four generatio...

We present Alvin, a system for managing concurrent transactions running on a set of geographically distributed sites. Alvin supports general-purpose transactions, and guarantees strong consistency criteria. Through a novel partial order broadcast protocol, Alvin maximizes the parallelism of ordering and local transaction processing. Alvin processes read-only transactions either locally or globa...

Citation Zens, Timothy, Piotr Becla, Anuradha M. Agarwal, Lionel C. Kimerling, and Alvin Drehman. “Amorphous InSb and InAs[subscript 0.3]Sb[subscript 0.7] for long wavelength infrared detection.” In Infrared Technology and Applications XXXVII, edited by Bjørn F. Andresen, Gabor F. Fulop, and Paul R. Norton, 80123Y-80123Y-8. SPIE International Society for Optical Engineering, 2011. © (2011) COPY...