Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a ‘global reductionist’, where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume’s reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, th...

Hume is a Turing-complete programming language, designed to guarantee space and time bounds whilst still working on a high-level. Formal properties of Hume programs, such as invariants and transformations, have previously been verified using the temporal logic of actions (TLA). TLA properties are verified in an inductive way, which often requires lemma discovery or generalisations. Rippling was...

The epidemiologic approach to causal inference (i.e., Hill's viewpoints) consists of evaluating potential causes from the following 2, noncumulative angles: 1) established results from comparative, observational, or experimental epidemiologic studies; and 2) reviews of nonepidemiologic evidence. It does not involve statements of statistical significance. The philosophical roots of Hill's viewpo...

HUME is a domain-specific programming language targeting resourcebounded computations, such as real-time embedded systems. Rate analysis is a novel algorithm for HUME that determines the relative rates (i.e. how often events occur, or components need to run) within the whole system, and as such the algorithm possess the following useful properties: • Deadlock Detection – of some cases. • Schedu...

The question whether it is possible to be both a Humean and a contractarian arises from the interpretation of Hume as a theorist of spontaneous order, a theory that is usually taken to be incompatible with contractarianism. I argue that this interpretation is unconvincing and anachronistic. The real reason why it is problematic to view Hume as a contractarian is not because he is proponent of s...

We describe the implementation of a subset of the Hume programming language on a FPGA architecture at the gate level. Hume is a domain specific language for developping multi-process systems requiring strong static guarantees that resource bounds are met. The compiler produces RT-level, synthetizable VHDL code that can be processed by a standard tool chain to program FPGAs at the gate level. Pr...

There is growing evidence that terrestrial ecosystems are exporting more dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to aquatic ecosystems than they did just a few decades ago. This "browning" phenomenon will alter the chemistry, physics, and biology of inland water bodies in complex and difficult-to-predict ways. Experiments provide an opportunity to elucidate how browning will affect the stability and fun...

The word ‘Induction’ and its cognates in other languages, of which for present purposes the most important is Latin ‘inductio’, have a complex semantic history, as does the Greek ἐπαγωγή from which they were derived. Though some of these uses — electromagnetic induction, or the induction of a clergyman into a new benefice — are manifestly irrelevant, others that still diverge significantly from...

Thomas Reid offers a powerful challenge to Hume and his skeptical system. In “Thomas Reid on Epistemic Principles,” William Alston gives an explanation of that challenge and concludes in favor of a Reidian-inspired thesis. I argue, however, that Alston’s thesis is a diluted version of Reid’s radical position, one that Reid’s principles cannot accommodate. Thus, I conclude that, because Alston’s...