This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter-what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

The definitive and essential collection of classic and new essays on analytic theories of truth, revised and updated, with seventeen new chapters. The question What is truth? is so philosophical that it can seem rhetorical. Yet truth matters, especially in a post-truth society in which lies are tolerated and facts are ignored. If we want to understand why truth matters, we first need to understand what it is. The Nature of Truth offers the definitive collection of classic and contemporary essays on analytic theories of truth. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated, incorporating both historically central readings on truth's nature as well as up-to-the-moment contemporary essays. Seventeen new chapters reflect the current trajectory of research on truth.

This edited volume brings together 18 state-of-the art essays on pluralism about truth and logic. Parts I and II are dedicated to respectively truth pluralism and logical pluralism, and Part III to their interconnections. Some contributors challenge pluralism, arguing that the nature of truth or logic is uniform. The majority of contributors, however, defend pluralism, articulate novel versions of the view, or contribute to fundamental debates internal to the pluralist camp. The volume will be of interest to truth theorists and philosophers of logic, as well as philosophers interested in relativism, contextualism, metaphysics, philosophy of language, semantics, paradox, epistemology, or normativity.

Evaluation Methods in Medical Informatics, Second Edition is a heavily updated and revised volume based on editors Friedman and Wyatt's successful first edition. This book incorporates the solid foundation of evaluation theories, methods, and techniques laid out in the first edition, and builds on it to include case studies from real world situations. Designed as a guide for both the informatics novice and the seasoned professional seeking a comprehensive resource, this book explores information systems evaluation from the ground up. Critique and disscussion of actual evaluation efforts will guide the reader through real world application of the techniques described.

Just like its first edition, this volume is an unparalled reference for a broad range of health information professionals. From those in training for careers in informatics to on-site medical information systems staff, Evaluation Methods in Medical Informatics, Second Edition is an invaluable guide to successful evaluation of information technology in health care.

Robot learning is an exciting and interdisciplinary ?eld. This state is re?ected in the range and form of the papers presented here. Techniques that have - come well established in robot learning are present: evolutionary methods, neural networkapproaches, reinforcement learning; as are techniques from control t- ory, logic programming, and Bayesian statistics. It is notalbe that in many of the papers presented in this volume several of these techniques are employed in conjunction. In papers by Nehmzow, Grossmann and Quoy neural networks are utilised to provide landmark-based representations of the environment, but di?erent techniques are used in each paper to make inferences based on these representations. Biology continues to provide inspiration for the robot learning researcher. In their paper Peter Eggenberger et al. borrow ideas about the role of n- romodulators in switching neural circuits, These are combined with standard techniques from arti?cial neural networks and evolutionary computing to p- vide a powerful new algorithm for evolving robot controllers. In the ?nal paper in this volume Bianco and Cassinis combine observations about the navigation behaviour of insects with techniques from control theory to produce their visual landmarklearning system. Hopefully this convergence of engineering and biol- ical approaches will continue. A rigourous understanding of the ways techniques from these very di?erent disciplines can be fused is an important challenge if progress is to continue. Al these papers are also testament to the utility of using robots to study intelligence and adaptive behaviour.

The European Societies for Arti cial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) and M- ical Decision Making (ESMDM) were both established in 1986.A major activity of both these societies has been a series of international conferences, held bi- nially over the last 13 years. In the year 1999 the two societies organized a joint conference for the r st time. It took place from June 20{24th, 1999 in Aalborg, Denmark. This \Joint European Conference on Arti cial Intelligence in Medicine and Medical Decision Making (AIMDM'99)" was the seventh conference for each of thetwosocieties.ThisconferencefollowstheAIMEconferencesheldinMarseilles (1987), London (1989), Maastricht (1991), Munich (1993), Pavia (1995), and Grenoble(1997).PreviousESMDMconferenceshavebeenheldinLeiden(1986), Copenhagen (1988), Glasgow (1990), Marburg (1992), Lille (1994), and Torino (1996). The AIMDM conference is the major forum for the presentation and d- cussion of new ideas in the areas of Arti cial Intelligence and Medical Decision Making in Medicine. This ful lls the aims of both societies. The aims of AIME are to foster fundamental and applied researchin the applicationof Arti cial - telligence (AI) techniques to medicalcareandmedicalresearch, andto providea forum for reporting signi cant results achieved. ESMDM's aims are to promote research and training in medical decision-making, and to provide a forum for circulating ideas and programs of related interest. In the AIMDM'99 conference announcement, authors were encouraged to submit original contributions to the development of theory, techniques, and - plications of both AI in medicine (AIM) and medical decision making (MDM).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe, AIME'97, held in Grenoble, France, in March 1997.
The volume presents 33 revised full papers selected from a total of 82 submissions; also included are three invited presentations and 25 posters. The papers are organized in topical sections on protocols and guidelines, knowledge acquisition and learning, decision-support theories, diagnostic problem solving, probabilistic models and fuzzy logic, temporal reasoning and planning, natural language and terminology, image and signal processing, and hybrid and cooperative systems.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 5th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe, AIME '95, held in Pavia, Italy in June 1995.
The volume contains 32 full refereed selected papers contributed by researchers and professionals coming from computer science departments, medical informatics departments, and hospitals; in addition there are the keynote address and 28 poster presentations. The volume is organized in topical sections on medical records, temporal reasoning and simulation, probabilistic models, patient management and therapy planning, evaluation of knowledge-based systems, diagnostic support systems, models for clinical information systems, and neural networks and image interpretation.

The Second European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine followed the successful meeting in Marseilles in 1987. As for AIME 87, the goal of AIME 89 was to promote scientific interchange within and between all subfields of AI in medicine, among researchers from all over the world, and especially from Europe. There were sessions on: knowledge elicidation and acquisition, architectures for medical knowledge-based systems, clinical applications, methodology, reasoning based on physiological models, and uncertainty. It is clear form the quality of papers presented, that the rate of development which took place between the Pavia meeting of 1985 and AIME 87 has been well maintained. With the launch of the European Community's exploratory programme in Advanced Informatics in Medicine in Europe, 1989 is clearly a very important year for this discipline. AIME 89 provided an important forum which demonstrated progress in some of the more difficult methodological problems, and advances in the application of these techniques to real-world medicine. This volume should be consulted by anyone who wishes to appreciate the state of the art in Medical AI in Europe.