The many-worlds and many-minds formulations of quantum mechanics are reconstructions of Hugh Everett ill's (19578, 1957b, 1973) relative-state fonnulation of quantum mechanics. Each is presented as a proposal for solving the quantum measurement problem. Much of the philosophical interest in these theories derives from the metaphysical commitments they suggest. They illustrate the roles played b...

Traditional conceptions of cognitive development have failed to account for changes in adult cognition as well as more subjective and intuitive features of human experience. This paper reviews recent theories and research in cognitive development and spirituality with the aim of providing connections between the two domains. Neo-Piagetian and postformal theories of cognitive development suggest...

This paper describes and discusses diversity among lesbian and gay families along central dimensions of social stratification: gender, sexual orientation, generation, age, race and ethnicity. We examine implications of this diversity for traditional family theories, identify and discuss sexist and heterosexist assumptions of dominant family theories and suggest the usefulness of an integrative ...

Traditional unit tests in test-driven development compare a few concrete example executions against the developer’s definition of correct behavior. However, a developer knows more about how a program should behave than can be expressed through concrete examples. These general insights can be captured as theories, which precisely express software properties over potentially infinite sets of valu...

One of the main shortcomings of the traditional methods for combining theories is the complexity of guessing the arrangement of the variables shared by the individual theories. This paper presents a reformulation of the Nelson-Oppen method that takes into account explicit equality propagation and can ignore pairs of shared variables that the theories do not care about. We show the correctness o...

This paper shows an example of developing a fusion system in a formal framework, i.e., through the use of formal operators in the development process. Two main concepts of formal methods are theories and models. In our approach, the development of a fusion system consists of operations on theories and models. We show, on a simple example, how theories and models are combined in the process of d...

The theories of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) originated from experiences doctors had with patients in ancient times. We ask the question whether aspects of TCM theories can be reconstructed through modern day data analysis. We have recently analyzed a TCM data set using a machine learning method and found that the resulting statistical model matches the relevant TCM theory well. This is a...

There is good reason to suppose that our best physical theories are false: In addition to its own internal problems, the standard formulation of quantum mechanics is logically incompatible with special relativity. There is also good reason to suppose that we have no concrete idea concerning what it might mean to claim that these theories are approximately or vaguely true. I will argue that prov...

During the last decades, many attempts have beenmade in order to explain and formalize mathematically a large set of phenomena that, at a first glance, are not well described by traditional theories. Among those attempts one finds the whole theory of self-organized criticality and some statistical theories. In recent years, a popular approach has been a Daróczy-like entropy [2] and its correspo...

It is shown how traditional development of theories of fluids based upon the concept of physical clustering can be adapted to an alternative local clustering definition. The alternative clustering definition can preserve a detailed valence description of the interactions between a solution species and its nearneighbors, i.e., cooperativity and saturation of coordination for strong association. ...