In this paper I examine the following claims by William Eaton in his monograph Boyle on Fire： （i） that Boyle＇s religious convictions led him to believe that the world was not completely explicable, and this shows ...In this paper I examine the following claims by William Eaton in his monograph Boyle on Fire： （i） that Boyle＇s religious convictions led him to believe that the world was not completely explicable, and this shows that there is a shortcoming in the power of mechanical explanations; （ii） that mechanical explanations offer only sufficient, not necessary explanations, and this too was taken by Boyle to be a limit in the explanatory power of mechanical explanations; （iii） that the mature Boyle thought that there could be more intelligible explanatory models than mechanism; and （iv） that what Boyle says at any point in his career is incompatible with the statement of Maria Boas-Hall, i.e., that the mechanical hypothesis can explicate all natural phenomena. Since all four of these claims are part of Eaton＇s developmental argument, my rejection of them will not only show how the particular developmental story Eaton diagnoses is inaccurate, but will also explain what limits there actually are in Boyle＇s account of the intelligibility of mechanical explanations. My account will also show why important philosophers like Locke and Leibniz should be interested in Boyle＇s philosophical work.展开更多
Automatic web image annotation is a practical and effective way for both web image retrieval and image understanding. However, current annotation techniques make no further investigation of the statement-level syntact...Automatic web image annotation is a practical and effective way for both web image retrieval and image understanding. However, current annotation techniques make no further investigation of the statement-level syntactic correlation among the annotated words, therefore making it very difficult to render natural language interpretation for images such as "pandas eat bamboo". In this paper, we propose an approach to interpret image semantics through mining the visible and textual information hidden in images. This approach mainly consists of two parts: first the annotated words of target images are ranked according to two factors, namely the visual correlation and the pairwise co-occurrence; then the statement-level syntactic correlation among annotated words is explored and natural language interpretation for the target image is obtained. Experiments conducted on real-world web images show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.展开更多
文摘In this paper I examine the following claims by William Eaton in his monograph Boyle on Fire： （i） that Boyle＇s religious convictions led him to believe that the world was not completely explicable, and this shows that there is a shortcoming in the power of mechanical explanations; （ii） that mechanical explanations offer only sufficient, not necessary explanations, and this too was taken by Boyle to be a limit in the explanatory power of mechanical explanations; （iii） that the mature Boyle thought that there could be more intelligible explanatory models than mechanism; and （iv） that what Boyle says at any point in his career is incompatible with the statement of Maria Boas-Hall, i.e., that the mechanical hypothesis can explicate all natural phenomena. Since all four of these claims are part of Eaton＇s developmental argument, my rejection of them will not only show how the particular developmental story Eaton diagnoses is inaccurate, but will also explain what limits there actually are in Boyle＇s account of the intelligibility of mechanical explanations. My account will also show why important philosophers like Locke and Leibniz should be interested in Boyle＇s philosophical work.
基金Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos 60533090 and 60603096)the National High-Tech Research and Development Program (863) of China (No 2006AA 010107)
文摘Automatic web image annotation is a practical and effective way for both web image retrieval and image understanding. However, current annotation techniques make no further investigation of the statement-level syntactic correlation among the annotated words, therefore making it very difficult to render natural language interpretation for images such as "pandas eat bamboo". In this paper, we propose an approach to interpret image semantics through mining the visible and textual information hidden in images. This approach mainly consists of two parts: first the annotated words of target images are ranked according to two factors, namely the visual correlation and the pairwise co-occurrence; then the statement-level syntactic correlation among annotated words is explored and natural language interpretation for the target image is obtained. Experiments conducted on real-world web images show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
