OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an...

In the following I discuss the debate between epistemological internalists and externalists from an unfamiliar meta-epistemological perspective. In doing so, I focus on the question of whether rationality is best captured in externalist or internalist terms. Using the idea of epistemic judgments as “doxastic plans”, I characterize one important subspecies of judgments about epistemic rationalit...

The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about and redirect some aspects of our own cognition. One consequence of this is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously g...

What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scie...

In opposition to toxicology of mammals piscine toxicology is closely connected with the conditions of external environment. The aquatic environment is necessary for embryonic development and after hatching during short or long-lasting larval period of most fish species. An aquatic environment is polluted by many industrial and agricultural wastes. Ammonia as a toxic and common compound in water...

We sketch some of the different roles played by Whitham times in connection with averaging, adiabatic invariants, soliton theory, Hamiltonian structures, topological field theory (TFT), Seiberg-Witten (SW) theory, isomonodromy problems, Hitchin systems, WDVV and PicardFuchs equations, renormalization, soft supersymmetry breaking, etc.

These are mere slogans in need of clarification and refinement, but they express the conviction of many epistemologists that in order to be epistemic an evaluation must focus on some aspects of beliefs and believers and leave other aspects of them out of consideration. For example, typically, what evidence for the truth of p a subject has is treated as a consideration relevant for making an epi...