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Brian Cutter (Analysis 77: 278-287, 2017) argues that one of the most prominent versions of the consequence argument—viz., Peter van Inwagen’s (An Essay on Free Will. Oxford University Press, 1983) ‘Third Formal Argument’—does not support an incompatibility thesis that every paradigmatic compatibilist would reject. Justin Capes (Thought 8: 50-56, 2019) concedes Cutter’s conclusion concerning van Inwagen’s Third Formal Argument and tries to meet the important challenge that Cutter issues at the end of his paper—viz., articulate a promising version of the consequence argument whose conclusion is an incompatibility thesis that every paradigmatic compatibilist would reject. After arguing that Capes’s response to Cutter’s challenge fails, I meet Cutter’s challenge by presenting and discussing a version of the consequence argument that focuses on ordinary human agents in circumstances that are ordinary for human agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Say that a 'practical decision' is a momentary intentional mental action of intention formation. According to what I'll call the 'Decisional Prior Intention Thesis' ('DPIT'), each practical decision is intentional at least partly in virtue of the representational content of some previously acquired intention. DPIT is entailed by the following widely endorsed thesis that I'll call the 'General Prior Intention Thesis' ('GPIT'): each intentional action is intentional at least partly in virtue of the representational content of some previously acquired intention. Alfred Mele argues that a certain kind of case impugns DPIT. I defend DPIT from Mele's argument by showing that his focal case is impossible. I then develop a new argument for an important portion of DPIT – viz., the thesis that, necessarily, if at t you decide to A, then just before t you have an intention whose representational content enables it to play an intentionality-grounding role relative to an act of deciding to A. The defense of DPIT and argument for the indicated portion of it jointly foreground and shed new light on the phenomenon of practical unsettledness – i.e. the felt unsettledness about what to do that precedes a practical decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here are two prima facie plausible theses about propositional knowledge: (i) a belief could still constitute knowledge even if the belief is justified in a way that's compatible with its being either false or accidentally true; (ii) each instance of knowledge is related to its subject in a way similar to that in which each intentional action is related to its agent. Baron Reed (2007, 2009) develops and defends a novel argument for the incompatibility of (i) and (ii). In this paper, I clarify and critically assess Reed's incompatibility argument. Against the backdrop of an example in which an action is non-intentional due to the role that an accidentally true belief plays in the action's etiology, I argue that Reed's incompatibility argument defeats itself: two of its premises are themselves jointly incompatible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Graham (2017) argues against the prima facie plausible thesis that one can be directly blameworthy only for one's conduct—that is, only for one's actions or omissions to act. Because this thesis serves as a premise in a challenging recent argument for the revisionist conclusion that we're at most rarely directly blameworthy for anything, Graham's argument holds out a promise of contributing to a defense of a wide range of commonsense ascriptions of blameworthiness. After reconstructing Graham's argument for the possibility of direct blameworthiness for non-conduct, I develop the following objection to it: in light of a clear counterexample, one of Graham's two premises must be weakened, which in turn requires that Graham's other premise be strengthened; unfortunately, the resulting strengthened premise is implausible on balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Development of a rapid, sensitive, and accurate assay for confirmation of Neisseria gonorrhoeae in clinical samples.Method: Two real time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays, developed on the LightCycler for amplification of the N gonorrhoeae cppB gene, were utilised for confirmation of this bacterial pathogen in samples positive by the Roche Cobas Amplicor assay. Performance characteristics of the two assays were compared with other commercial nucleic acid amplification assays, including the Abbott LCx and Roche 16S rRNA tests.Results: All related Neisseria as well as other bacterial species tested negative by both cppB gene based assays, whereas 120 N gonorrhoeae clinical isolates from various geographical regions gave in positive results. Both assays had a sensitivity of one copy per reaction. 122 clinical samples positive and another 50 samples negative for N gonorrhoeae by Roche Cobas Amplicor were selected from a specimen pool of more than 3000 women tested previously. Overall, 73 of 122 (59.8%) samples were confirmed as positive. The two real time assays had sensitivities of 99% and 100% and specificities of 98% and 100%, respectively. The 16S and LCx assays produced similar results to the real time assays, indicating a similar sensitivity to and specificity of both real time assays.Conclusion: The data from this study highlight the need to confirm N gonorrhoeae positive Cobas Amplicor PCR results as an important part of the testing algorithm of all diagnostic laboratories utilising this assay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blake Roeber argues that examples of a certain neglected kind cast doubt on the following piece of epistemological orthodoxy: your acquisition of a particular belief couldn’t itself be a directly voluntary action. In this paper, I undermine and then rebut Roeber’s anti-involuntarism conclusion. After arguing for the denial of one of the premises on which Roeber’s conclusion is based, I articulate a plausible pro-involuntarism explanation of Roeber’s focal example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An event in a schedule is a job start, interruption, resumption or completion time. A shift in a schedule is an non-idling interval between two events that does not contain other events. If a scheduling problem with a regular criterion has only integer data (and we consider here only such problems), then the length of smallest shifts required in optimal nonpreemptive schedules is obviously 1. The length of smallest shifts required in optimal preemptive schedules, however, can be infinitely small. As Sauer and Stone (Order 4:195-206, ) showed more than 25 years ago, shifts of length less than $$m^{-n}$$ are not required in shortest preemptive schedules of $$n$$ unit-length jobs with precedence constraints on $$m$$ identical parallel machines. They showed, on the other hand, that there are instances for infinitely many $$n$$ such that shifts of length less than $$(m-1)^{-n/(3m)}(m-2)/m$$ can be required if $$m\ge 3$$ . In this paper, we continue research in the same direction and strengthen their results, finding the respective tighter bounds, $$m^{-(n+1)/2}$$ and $$(m-1)^{-n/(m+3)}$$ . We also obtain similar results for other preemptive scheduling problems on identical parallel machines. A useful consequence of certain of these results is that preemptive scheduling problems with unequal release dates and/or unequal due dates can require even smaller shifts for optimality. We also identify problems whose optimal preemptive schedules do not require shifts of length less than $$1/m$$ . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to reorient current theorizing about luck as an aid to our discerning this concept's true philosophical significance. After introducing the literature's leading theories of luck, it presents and defends counterexamples to each of them. It then argues that recent luck theorists' main target of analysis-the concept of an event's being lucky for a subject-is parasitic on the more fundamental notion of an event's being a stroke of luck for a subject, which thesis serves as at least a partial diagnosis of the leading theories' failure. Next, it develops an analysis of strokes of luck that utilizes insights from the recent luck literature. Finally, having set out a comprehensive new analysis of luck-the Enriched Strokes Account of lucky events-the essay revisits the initial counterexamples to the literature's leading theories and argues that the Enriched Strokes Account properly handles all of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main parts. In the first part, I argue that prominent moves in two related current debates in epistemology-viz., the debates over classical invariantism and the knowledge first movement-depend on one or the other of two claims about epistemic propriety: (1) Impropriety due to lack of a particular epistemic feature suffices for epistemic impropriety; and (2) Having justification to believe P suffices for having warrant to assert P. In the second part, I present and defend novel arguments against both claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper fortifies and defends the so called Sufficiency Argument (SA) against Classical Invariantism. In Sect. 2, I explain the version of the SA formulated but then rejected by Brown (). In Sect. 3, I show how cases described by Hawthorne (), Brown (), and Lackey (forthcoming) threaten to undermine one or the other of the SA's least secure premises. In Sect. 4, I buttress one of those premises and defend the reinforced SA from the objection developed in Sect. 3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategy-based approach to portfolio margining has been used for margining customer accounts for more than four decades. The risk-based approach was proposed in the mid eighties for margining some inventory accounts of brokers but permitted for margining customer accounts only in 2005. This paper presents a computational experiment with the strategy-based approach and the risk-based approach with the purpose of clarifying which one yields lower margin requirements under different scenarios. There exists a widespread opinion, cf. (Reuters 2007; Longo 2007; Smith 2008), that the risk-based approach is always a winner in this competition, and therefore the strategy-based approach must be disqualified as outdated. However, the results of our experiment with portfolios of stock options show that, in many practical situations, the strategy-based approach yields substantially lower margin requirements in comparison with the risk-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]