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Standard accounts hold that regularities of behavior must be arbitrary to constitute a convention. Yet, there is growing consensus that conventionality is a graded phenomenon, and that conventions can be more or less natural. I develop an account of natural conventions that distinguishes two basic dimensions of conventional naturalness: a probabilistic dimension and an inherent one. A convention is probabilistically natural if it is likely to emerge in a population of agents, and inherently natural if its content is a regularity that scores high on relevant measures for naturalness. I motivate the proposal on conceptual grounds and then showcase its descriptive benefits by discussing two case studies in language: the tendency towards word-length optimality and the prevalence of shape opacity in spoken language vocabularies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among those who posit properties, liberals (mostly nominalists) admit abundant, ontologically free properties, which particulars possess whenever they satisfy the same predicate and belong to the same class, however artificial. I call them "L-properties" (for "Liberal"). Some liberals also admit that some few L-properties are natural, while most of them are artificial (the same applies to the corresponding classes). Others (mostly but not only realists) commit to a more discriminating use of the category: properties are sparse, they make for the objective similarities among particulars, and more importantly, they allow to analyze "objective similarity" and "class naturalness" in terms of property-possessing and sharing. They give particulars their "true nature", and I call them "A-properties" (for "Analytical"). This article provides a defense of this second type of properties, in the particular case of sortals. To that end, a new fact is put forward: that sorts are classes which are natural not as a primitive feature, but in virtue of what the particulars which belong to them are, and which makes them naturally belong to them. I then argue that this fact entails the existence of the desired type of properties, "sortal A-properties", although leaving open the question of how they should be construed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alethic pluralism holds that there are many ways of being true. The view has been accused of being unable to do justice to the traditional account of logical validity, understood as necessary truth preservation. In this paper I reformulate the debate in terms of the naturalness of generic truth, and discuss some notable consequences of this more careful reformulation. I show not only that some alleged solutions, like the resort to plural quantification, are ineffective, but also that the problem is not really posed by mixed inferences, as usually thought. Finally, I argue that the traditional account of logical validity does carry a commitment to generic truth, so that a strong version of alethic pluralism can hardly vindicate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental philosophers are often puzzled as to why many armchair philosophers question the philosophical significance of their research. Armchair philosophers, in contrast, are often puzzled as to why experimental philosophers think their work sheds any light on traditional philosophical problems. I argue there is truth on both sides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several authors have debated about the justifiability of so-called scientific imperialism. To date, however, widespread disagreements remain regarding both the identification and the normative evaluation of scientific imperialism. In this paper, I aim to remedy this situation by making some conceptual distinctions concerning scientific imperialism and by providing a detailed assessment of the most prominent objections to it. I shall argue that these objections provide a valuable basis for opposing some instances of scientific imperialism, but do not yield cogent reasons to think that scientific imperialism in general is objectionable or unjustified. I then highlight three wide-ranging implications of this result for the ongoing philosophical debate about the justifiability of scientific imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will give an argument for what I call pannormism, the view according to which if x instantiates a metaphysically basic normative property F, then whatever grounds the being of x also instantiates F. In slogan form: if there is normativity, there is normativity all the way down. Such pannormism is in many ways analogous to panpsychism, and my discussion also contains an important lesson for panpsychism, a way to avoid its so-called combination problem. In Sect. 1, I present the argument; in Sect. 2, I discuss its conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a prominent view of organism persistence (“vitalicism”), organisms cease to exist at death. According to a rival view (“somaticism”), organisms can continue to exist as dead organisms. Most of the arguments in favor of the latter view rely on linguistic and common sense intuitions. I propose a new argument for somaticism by appealing to two other sources that have thus far not figured in the debate: the concept of naturalness, and biological descriptions of organisms, in particular in ethology and ecology. I show that if we hone in on the relevant notion of naturalness, we can show that organisms can (and often do) continue to instantiate the natural property being an organism after death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is part of a perfectly natural, or fundamental, relation? Philosophers have been hesitant to take a stand on this issue. One reason for this hesitancy is the worry that, if parthood is perfectly natural, then the perfectly natural properties and relations are not suitably 'independent' of one another. (Roughly, the perfectly natural properties are not suitably independent if there are necessary connections among them.) In this paper, I argue that parthood is a perfectly natural relation. In so doing, I argue that this 'independence' worry is unfounded. I conclude by noting some consequences of the naturalness of parthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is shown that counterpart theory and the duplication account of intrinsicality-two key pieces of the Lewisian package-are incompatible. In particular, the duplication account yields the result that certain intuitively extrinsic modal properties are intrinsic. Along the way I consider a potentially more general worry concerning certain existential closures of internal relations. One conclusion is that, unless the Lewisian provides an adequate alternative to the duplication account, the reductive nature of their total theory is in jeopardy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper does two things. First, it argues for a metaphilosophical view of conceptual analysis questions; in particular, it argues that the facts that settle conceptual-analysis questions are facts about the linguistic intentions of ordinary folk. The second thing this paper does is argue that if this metaphilosophical view is correct, then experimental philosophy (or 'x-phi') is a legitimate methodology to use in trying to answer conceptual-analysis questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenge to enhance the naturalness and efficiency of spoken language man-machine interface, emotional speech identification and its classification has been a predominant research area. The reliability and accuracy of such emotion identification greatly depends on the feature selection and extraction. In this paper, a combined feature selection technique has been proposed which uses the reduced features set artifact of vector quantizer (VQ) in a Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) environment for classification. In the initial stage, Linear Prediction Coefficient (LPC) and time-frequency Hurst parameter ( pH) are utilized to extract the relevant feature, both exhibiting complementary information from the emotional speech. Extensive simulations have been carried out using Berlin Database of Emotional Speech (EMO-DB) with various combination of feature set. The experimental results reveal 76 % accuracy for pH and 68 % for LPC using standalone feature set, whereas the combination of feature sets, ( LP VQC and pH VQC) enhance the average accuracy level up to 90.55 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing a text to speech (TTS) system, commonly referred as TTS, that sounds similar to human natural speech is being attempted over the years, but still not achieved by even the best of presently available TTS algorithms. Most of these still sound robotic, unless human speech itself is present in them. However, such human speech necessitates creation of a large database of each and every word of that language which is quite an onerous task. This research article illustrates a new approach and methodology that helps to reduce database size by using 'syllabic based concatenative speech synthesis'. In this method, new words are 'created' using existing words and syllables from the database. The naturalness of these 'created' words in speech are further improved by 'position based syllabification 'and 'objective spectral noise reduction'. A combination of neural and classification network and non-neural methods are used for syllabification. After new words are 'created', the spectral distortion present at joints is reduced with objective spectral estimation and reduction methods in time and frequency domains. These approaches result in improved naturalness for proposed Marathi-TTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine physicists' charge of ad hocness against the Higgs mechanism in the standard model of elementary particle physics. We argue that even though this charge never rested on a clear-cut and well-entrenched definition of 'ad hoc', it is based on conceptual and methodological assumptions and principles that are well-founded elements of the scientific practice of high-energy particle physics. We further evaluate the implications of the recent discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider for the charge of ad hocness against the Higgs mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops the approach to testing considered in [1]. A formal model of test interaction of the most general type and reduction-type conformance are proposed for which there is hardly any dependence between errors. It is shown that many known types of conformance in various interaction semantics are particular cases of this general model. The paper is devoted to the problem of dependence between errors defined by specification and to the related problem of optimization of tests. There is dependence between errors if there exists a strict subset of errors such that any nonconformal implementation (i.e., implementation that contains some error) contains an error from this subset. Accordingly, it is sufficient that the tests detect errors only from this subset. In the general model proposed, the dependence between errors may arise when one chooses, as a class of implementations under test, some strict subset of the class of all implementations. Partial interaction semantics and/or various implementation hypotheses (in particular, a safety hypothesis) precisely suggest that an implementation under test is not arbitrary but belongs to some subclass of (safe) implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Isolation Lemma of Valiant and Vazirani (Theor Comput Sci 47:85-93, ) provides an efficient procedure for isolating a satisfying assignment of a given satisfiable circuit: Given a Boolean circuit C on n input variables, the procedure outputs a new circuit C′ on the same n input variables such that (i) every satisfying assignment of C′ also satisfies C and (ii) if C is satisfiable, then C′ has exactly one satisfying assignment. In particular, if C is unsatisfiable, then (i) implies that C′ is unsatisfiable. The Valiant-Vazirani procedure is randomized, and when C is satisfiable, it produces a uniquely satisfiable circuit C′ with probability Ω(1/ n). Is it possible to have an efficient deterministic witness-isolating procedure? Or, at least, is it possible to improve the success probability of a randomized procedure to a large constant? We prove that there exists a non-uniform randomized polynomial-time witness-isolating procedure with success probability bigger than 2/3 if and only if NP $${\subseteq }$$ P/poly. We establish similar results for other variants of witness isolation, such as reductions that remove all but an odd number of satisfying assignments of a satisfiable circuit. We also consider a blackbox setting of witness isolation that generalizes the setting of the Valiant-Vazirani Isolation Lemma and give an upper bound of O(1/ n) on the success probability for a natural class of randomized witness-isolating procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I attempt to accommodate the phenomenon of vagueness with classical logic and bivalence. I hold that for any vague predicate there is a sharp cut-off between the things that satisfy it and the things that do not; I claim that this is due to the greater naturalness of one of the candidate meanings of that predicate. I extend the thought to the problem of the many and Benacerraf cases. I go on to explore the idea that it is ontically indeterminate what the most natural meanings are, and hence ontically indeterminate where the sharp cut-off in a sorites series is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that phonetic naturalness and unnaturalness can interact within a single grammatical system. In Japanese loanword phonology, only voiced geminates, but not voiced singletons, devoice to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent. The neutralizability difference follows from a ranking which Japanese speakers created on perceptual grounds: I dent(voi)Sing » I dent(voi)Gem. On the other hand, the trigger of devoicing—OCP(voi)—has no phonetic underpinning because voicing does not have phonetic characteristics that would naturally lead to confusion-based dissimilation (Ohala, Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society: Papers from the parasession on language and behaviour, 1981, in: Jones (ed.) Historical linguistics: Problems and perspectives, 1993). OCP(voi) in Modern Japanese originated as a phonetically natural OCP(prenasal) in Old Japanese because the spread out heavy nasalization would lead to perceptual confusion, but it divorced from its phonetic origin when prenasalization became voicing. The interaction of the three constraints in Modern Japanese suggests that phonetic naturalness (the ranking I dent(voi)Sing » I dent(voi)Gem) and unnaturalness (OCP(voi)) co-reside within a single module. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider an objection to ``natural class'' trope nominalism, the view that a trope's nature is determined by its membership in a natural class of tropes. The objection is that natural class trope nominalism is inconsistent with causes' being efficacious in virtue of having tropes of a certain type. I argue that if natural class trope nominalism is combined with property counterpart theory, then this objection can be rebutted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]