meditations of sir scholar

Meditations on Visual Quality

Digital video is one of the most attractive meansof conveying information, and the quality of thevideo is one of the determining factors for theend user experience. In order to improve thevisual user experience, one has to understand thequality expectation of users for the specific videoapplication, and deliver upon good video qualityor find ways to enhance it. The o...

Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology

Throughout the 20 century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the 20 century, including Russell, Moore and Wittg...

Meditations on Quantified Constraint Satisfaction

The quantified constraint satisfaction problem (QCSP) is the problem of deciding, given a structure and a first-order prenex sentence whose quantifier-free part is the conjunction of atoms, whether or not the sentence holds on the structure. One obtains a family of problems by defining, for each structure B, the problem QCSP(B) to be the QCSP where the structure is fixed to be B. In this articl...

Meditations in Ethno-epistemology1

5 For related discussion, see Brueckner (1999) and BruCckner (2001). 6 See, again, the papers in Ludlow and Martin for discussion of this point. 7 See Bmeckner (1998) and (1986a) and Wright (1992b) for other versions of the objection. 8 For further discussion of the 'question-begging' objection, see Brueckner (1992a) and (1996). 9 Here I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Byeong-uk Yi, 'Ske...

Some Non-Cartesian Meditations

As the historians of science who touch upon the matter are fond of remarking, Goethe’s approach to natural science is not that of the present scientific community. Until recently, however, there has been little interest in alternative empirical methods, especially in methods connected with the tradition of German Naturphilosophie, which P. B. Medawar, for example, terms “a philosophical indoor ...

TRANSSENTENTIAL MEDITATIONS Ups and downs in dynamic semantics TRANSSENTENTIAL MEDITATIONS Ups and downs in dynamic semantics