Eliminativism and Evolutionary Debunking

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory.

An Alternative to the Proof Paradigm for Ground-Level Rationality

In Chapter 5, the author uses the clues from previous chapters to begin the construction of a theory of epistemic rationality in which mistake-correcting reasoning is the paradigm for reasoning. On his account, cognitive models are composed of scenarios, which are themselves sets of propositions that have expectations for experience. Models are tested not by propositions describing experience but by experiences themselves because scenarios holistically generate expectations for experience which the agent’s actual experience can either satisfy or fail to satisfy. On the author’s theory, only scenarios with full or partial necessitation hypotheses can earn rational confidence. He identifies two main conceptual frameworks, the ordinary object framework and the person framework, both of which are causal frameworks. The imagination plays a crucial role in rationality in the author’s theory. He ends with informal statements of two principles of epistemic rationality, of which the formal versions are stated in Appendix A.

EFM-Net: Feature Extraction and Filtration with Mask Improvement Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Object detection is an essential task in computer vision. Many methods have made significant progress in ordinary object detection. Due to the particularity of remote sensing images, the detection target is tiny, the background is messy, dense, and has mutual occlusion, which makes the general detection method challenging to apply to remote sensing images. For these problems, we propose a new detection framework feature extraction and filtration method with a mask improvement network (EFM-Net) to enhance object detection ability. In EFM-Net, we designed a multi-branched feature extraction (MBFE) module to better capture the information in the feature graph. In order to suppress the background interference, we designed a background filtering module based on attention mechanisms to enhance the attention of objects. Finally, we proposed a mask generate the boundary improvement method to make the network more robust to occlusion detection. We tested the DOTA v1.0, NWPU VHR-10, and UCAS-AOD datasets, and the experimental results show that our method has excellent effects.

Ethical Debates about Cloning

Human cloning is a big step for humankind, a great scientific achievement, but it is also risky and dangerous. Will this tremendous advancement in biomedicine and genetic engineering threaten the whole of mankind and whether in the future man will become the ordinary object of experiment. There are many doubts about cloning, and of which are most important is where it actually leads, and will we be able to stop it in time.

Teaching the Ordinary: What’s in a Chair

In a teacher education class, students were asked to analyze a standard classroom desk-chair to see how “an ordinary object contained within it an array of social and political relations.”

Gündelik Nesnenin Sanatsal Dönüşümü: Sıradan Nesnelerin Sanat Eserine Dönüşüm Süreci Üzerine Sosyolojik Bir Değerlendirme / Artistic Transformation of Casual Objects: A Sociological Evaluation on the Process of Transformation of Ordinary Objects into Art

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>All products in the art field have a cultural character and reflect the characteristics of the social space in which they are situated. Objects have no meaning in their own rights and all objects, including art objects, acquire its meaning through social construction. In this respect, the meaning of artwork is symbolic and conceptual. The purpose of this work is to reveal how and by what conditions ordinary objects are transformed into artworks by artists. It is aimed to determine which social mechanisms take place in the process of artistic transformation of objects and what the role of social space and artists is in the construction and operation of these mechanisms. For this purpose, the study is composed of two parts. In the first part, how social context of an artwork is being constructed and according to this context how an object and space acquire artistic meaning have been set forth through semiotics approach. In the second part, an approach to the artistic transformation of an ordinary object through the role of artist and construction of social context with the examples selected from the art history have been put forward. In this section, the "bed" was chosen as the ordinary object and a discussion was made about the transformation process of the bed into a work of art through the work of Tracy Emin's "My Bed". As a result of the study, it was understood that ordinary objects have their own unique cultural spaces, and that they have an active role in the social context in which these objects have their meaning. Through the action of the artist towards an artistic goal, it has been specified that at the end of processes such as the removal of an ordinary object from the cultural space and its isolation from its functions, it is possible to change its social context and corresponding meaning. After this process, it has become possible to evaluate the object as an art work with the expansion of its meaning by turning it into an indicator.</p><p><strong>Öz</strong></p><p>Sanat alanındaki tüm üretimler kültürel bir nitelik taşır ve içerisinde yer aldığı sosyal alanın karakteristiklerini yansıtırlar. Nesnelerin kendi başına anlamları yoktur ve sanat nesneleri de dahil her türlü nesne anlamını toplumsal inşa süreciyle kazanır. Bu bakımdan sanat eserinin anlamı sembolik ve kavramsaldır. Bu çalışmanın amacı sıradan nesnelerin sanatçılar tarafından sanat eserine nasıl ve hangi koşullarda dönüştürüldüğünün ortaya konmasıdır. Nesnelerin sanatsal dönüşümü sürecinde hangi sosyal mekanizmaların yer aldığı ve bu mekanizmaların inşası ve işleyişinde sosyal mekânın ve sanatçının rolünün ne olduğunun belirlenmesine yöneliktir. Bu amaçla çalışma iki kısma ayrılmıştır. Birinci kısımda sanat alanında bir nesnenin sosyal bağlamının nasıl inşa edildiği ve bu bağlama göre nesnenin ve mekânın nasıl sanatsal bir anlam kazandığı göstergebilim yaklaşımı üzerinden ortaya konulmuştur. İkinci kısımda ise sanat tarihinden seçilen örneklerle sosyal bağlamın inşası ve sanatçının rolü üzerinden sıradan bir nesnenin sanatsal dönüşümüne yönelik bir yaklaşım ortaya konulmuştur. Bu kısımda sıradan nesne olarak “yatak” seçilmiş ve Tracy Emin’ in “My Bed” (benim yatağım) isimli çalışması üzerinden yatağın sanat eserine dönüşüm sürecine yönelik bir tartışma gerçekleştirilmiştir. Çalışmanın sonucunda sıradan nesnelerin kendilerine özgü kültürel mekânlarının olduğu ve bu mekânların nesnelere yönelik anlamın ortaya çıkmasını sağlayan sosyal bağlamın inşasında etkin bir role sahip olduğu anlaşılmıştır. Sanatsal bir hedefe yönelmiş olan sanatçının eylemselliği aracılığıyla sıradan bir nesnenin kültürel mekânı dışına çıkartılması ve işlevlerinden soyutlanması gibi süreçler sonucunda sosyal bağlamının ve buna bağlı olarak anlamının değiştirilmesinin mümkün olduğu belirlenmiştir. Bu süreç sonrasında nesnenin göstergeye dönüşerek anlamının genişlemesiyle birlikte sanat yapıtı olarak değerlendirilmesinin imkanlı hale geldiği görülmüştür.</p>

A Stage-Theoretical Account of Diachronic Identity

Diachronic identity is understood as an identity holding between something existing at one time and something existing at another time. On the stage view, however, ordinary objects are instantaneous stages that do not exist at other times so diachronic identity is, at best, problematic. On account proposed here a name does not, as Sider and others suggest, denote a stage concurrent with its utterance. Rather, at any time, t, a name of an ordinary object designates a stage-at-t as its primary referent and refers indeterminately over it and all and only those stages counterpart-related to it—its reference class at t. At any time, t, a at t1 is the same object as b at t2 iff for every stage x counterpart-related to a’s stage-at t and every stage y counterpart-related to b’s stage-at-t, x=y. Diachronic identity statements, therefore, assert strict identities—between concurrent stages. Ordinarily names select the same reference classes at every time so, in ordinary cases, identity statements are not ‘occasional’. In fission cases names select different reference classes at different times. Where a becomes b and c, at any pre-fission time ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ have same the primary referent and so select the same reference class—therefore, before fission b is the same object as c. At any post-fission time ‘b’ and ‘c’ select different reference classes—so after fission b is not the same object as c. Identity is not occasional but, in extraordinary cases, identity statements are—because reference is.