The basic idea in PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS THEORY is to distinguish the invariants of human language (the principles) from the major points of crosslinguistic variation (the parameters). Both principles and parameters are taken to reflect innately determined, biological characteristics of the human brain (see UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR). In the course of normal child development, however, the two diver...

The author highlights the importance of emotions in all ethical reflections. He describes the most common positions of ethicists employing duties and rights as the basis for ethical thought. The author, goes to Freudian theory as viewed by the utilitarians, stating that the 'quest for pleasure' is not necessarily egocentric, especially for adults. For example, the feeling of solidarity emerges ...

The above approaches certainly have their place but also have their limitations. The repeated invocation of archival material tends to create an impression that ethical edicts are merely of historical significance and are irrelevant today. Some of the historical texts on medical ethics are based on morality, at times even bordering on the spiritual or the religious. This could be a hindrance to...

Remnant low-energy effects of Planck-scale Lorentz breaking in candidate fundamental theories typically include modified one-particle dispersion relations. Theoretical constraints on such modifications are discussed leading to the exclusion of a variety of previously considered Lorentz-violating parameters. In particular, the fundamental principle of coordinate independence, the role of an effe...

1 Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems Faculty of Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1081A, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2 Computer and Law Institute Faculty of Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands 3 The Center for Law, Public Administration and Informatization Faculty of Law, Tilburg University Warandelaan 2, 5000...

Scientific and ethical theories are examined in terms of the practice of epidemiology, the study of the determinants and distributions of disease, and the application of the knowledge gained to prevent disease and improve the health of populations. Scientific theories provide explanations and predictions for epidemiologic studies of disease etiology and prevention. Causal theory is the key exam...

This work contains both a theoretical development and a novel application of ideas introduced in [1] for using reflection in formal metareasoning. From the theoretical side, we extend the metareasoning principles proposed in [1] to cover the case of metatheorems about equational theories which are unrelated by the inclusion relation. From the practical side, we apply the newly introduced metare...

OO F Abstract The common consequence paradox of Allais can be decomposed into three simpler principles: transitivity, coalescing, and restricted branch independence. Different theories attribute such paradoxes to violations of restricted branch independence only, to coalescing only, or to both. This study separates tests of these two properties in order to compare these theories. Although rankd...