The representational theory of measurement has long been the central paradigm in the philosophy of measurement. Such is not the case anymore, partly under the influence of the critique according to which RTM offers too poor descriptions of the measurement procedures actually followed in science. This can be called the metrological critique of RTM. I claim that the critique is partly irrelevant. This is because, in general, RTM is not in the business of describing measurement procedures, be it in idealized (...) form. To support this claim, I present various cases where RTM can be said to investigate measurement without providing any measurement procedure. Such limit cases lead to a better understanding of the RTM project. They also illustrate some of the questions which the philosophy of measurement can explore, when it is ready to go beyond the metrological viewpoint. (shrink)

Selon l’interprétation traditionnelle, la révolution copernicienne, qui opère le passage du géocentrisme à l’héliocentrisme, aurait détrôné et dévalorisé l’homme, en lui retirant sa position cen­trale, et donc privilégiée, dans le cosmos, pour le reléguer sur une planète devenue analogue aux autres et occupant une place quelconque à l’intérieur du système solaire. Cette inter­prétation ne pèche pas seulement dans sa compréhension de l’héliocentrisme copernicien, mais également dans sa percep­tion du géocentrisme aristotélico-médiéval. Il faut donc dénon­cer sa fausseté générale et, plus encore, (...) lui substituer un autre schéma interprétatif qui, peut-être moins évocateur de notre rapport au monde, soit plus respectueux de la vérité historique. ––– According to the traditional interpretation, the Copernican revo­lution, which brought about the transfer from geocentrism to heliocentrism, is said to have dethroned and devalued man by removing his central and hence privileged position in the cos­mos and by relegating him to a planet now seen as analogous to others occupying an insignificant position within the solar system. This interpretation fails not only in its understanding of Copernican heliocentrism, but also in its percep­tion of Aristo­telian mediaeval geocentrism. It is necessary, therefore, not only to denounce its general falsity, but also to substitute for it a different interpretative scheme which, although it may empha­size less our link with the world, may be more respectful of historical truth. (shrink)

"The earth revolved around the sun long before man and all conscious beings appeared on its surface." Yes really, how could I imagine otherwise? The problem is precisely in the : "How could I imagine?" The difficulty is indeed twofold: 1) Whenever we represent the world without our presence, whether it is the earth a hundred million years ago or a Cartesian space only flanked by its 3 axes, we are in reality at the very center of this representation. 2) (...) Nothing can be said about the world that is not previously knowledge (s) having made sense. Not only can the knowing subject in no way extract himself from his representation of the world, but he does not have any concept of representation which is not subject to the preliminary laws of formation of meaning. It follows that the proposition "reality has form" is unprovable. We will not come back to the idea according to which time and space are “something” in which reality would bathe, something “in addition” to reality and which therefore escapes this question of form. 1) the necessary presence of the subject at the centre of any representation, 2) the precedence of the laws of formation of meaning over meaning and therefore over form. (shrink)

This thesis provides an account of acquaintance with abstract objects. The notion of acquaintance is integral to theorising on reference and singular thought, since it is generally taken to be the relation that must exist between a subject and an object, in order for the subject to refer to, and entertain singular thoughts about the object. The most common way of understanding acquaintance is as a form of causal connection. However, this implies a problem. We seem to be able to (...) refer and have singular thoughts about abstract objects. But given that abstract objects are causally inert, this would mean that we are unable to become acquainted with them. This problem shall be the focus of this thesis. I first argue that these traditional causal interpretations of acquaintance are lacking. Instead, I show that acquaintance is dependent to some degree on factors internal to the subject, namely the skills that they possess. From doctors to sommeliers to mathematicians (and possibly even philosophers!) – these subjects seem to succeed in becoming acquainted with certain objects precisely in virtue of their respective skills. Thus, building off from Evans’ The Varieties of Reference, I present a novel account of acquaintance, which I term as Skill-based Acquaintance (SBA). On SBA, a subject is said to be acquainted with an object when they possess discriminating knowledge of that object, gained through the use of their capacities and skills. The SBA account is applied to virtual (Ch.3), fictional (Ch.4), and mathematical objects (Ch.5), as well as God (Ch.6). SBA is successful in explaining how subjects can indeed become acquainted with these problematic categories of objects - some of which are abstract – thus being able to refer and entertain singular thoughts about them. Overall, then, SBA is shown to have greater explanatory power than competing accounts and should thus be preferred. (shrink)

Jean Piaget's theory of human mental development mirrors many issues related to human. According to this theory, one's view of himself, nature/universe and God is changing. According to this theory, which is basically divided into four main periods and subtitles, the thinking skill of man changes according to age, physical development, education and society. These differences affect the way individuals obtain information. Individuals who acquire knowledge with an emotional intuition before the age of seven acquire information through an inductive (...) way, in other words, through concrete intuition, through concrete processes, experimentation and observation, in parallel with the development of the brain and senses. At the age of eleven and after which intellectual reasoning develops, information becomes abstract and information is obtained through abstract intuition based on theories, hypotheses and assumptions. In the love experience of Rumi, a mystical thinker, knowledge is obtained only with emotional intuition, and it is claimed that the only way to obtain information is love-based emotional intuition. In this love-based emotional intuition, the ways of obtaining concrete/experimental and abstract/rational knowledge requiring high level mental skills are rejected and these methods are said to be 'devil’s work'. In this study, Rumi's approach to human, universe and God in this one-sided and emotional way is criticized and its inconsistency is revealed. (shrink)

When considering the possibility of a vision of God, a paradox seems to appear in John Scot-tus Eriugena’s philosophy. On the one hand, God is said to be invisible, unthinkable, inac-cessible to any creature, be it rational or intellectual, man or angel. On the other hand, a vision of God, a contemplation, is said to be the reward of all nature in paradise, and this very contemplation the condition of all future souls. The solution of this false problem (...) is to be found in the notion of theophany. Its analysis and interpretation are the core of this article. Eriugena finds this ancient greek term, which means literally ‘manifestation of God’, in the corpus of the Pseudo-Dionysus and promptly uses it in a new philosophical way. Four different meanings of theophany may be found in John Scottus’ writing. They are: the manifestation of the first principle, the sensible world, the Christ, and finally human nature deified. This order encompasses Eriugena’s whole philosophical system: everything is a theophany, and the creatures participate in the creation of the creator. A theophany is thus a manifestation of God, as in a manifestation of himself to himself. According to Eriugena, God as principle isn’t yet a being; for God to be, he has to show himself and see himself through humankind. (shrink)

It is often said that human rights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the human rights landscape doesn’t look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of human rights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this essay, I trace the ways in which rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories (...) of people. I set the stage for my discussion of the human in relation to human rights by examining John Locke’s account of the justification for punishment. For Locke, in committing a crime one abrogates one’s humanity and forfeits one’s rights. Likewise, I argue, human rights discourse takes a scalar view of humanity. I consider victims of genocide who are dehumanized as helpless and passive, victims of state persecution who are super-humanized as righteously agentic, and perpetrators of genocide who are dehumanized as out-of-control beasts. In each case I use relevant testimony to argue that the scalar view of humanity is factually incorrect and morally deplorable. For genocide victims, I discuss testimony that Selma Leydesdorff gathered from women who survived the Srebrenica massacre. For a victim of persecution, I discuss Liao Yiwu’s memoire of his detention and imprisonment in China because of his artwork protesting the Tiananmen Square massacre. For perpetrators of genocide, I discuss testimony Jean Hatzfeld gathered from Hutu men who systematically murdered Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. Finally, I apply my critique of dehumanized and super-humanized victims and dehumanized perpetrators to the problem of transnational trafficking in persons and argue that the view I advocate necessitates reforming immigration policy with respect to persons trafficked into forced labor. (shrink)

‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist’.1 Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl’s phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano’s: that intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano’s originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the (...) terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts or intentiones.2 Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it’.3 This is Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. Despite the centrality of the concept of intentionality in contemporary philosophy of mind, and despite the customary homage paid to Brentano as the one who revived the terminology and placed the concept at the centre of philosophy, Brentano’s thesis is widely rejected by contemporary philosophers of mind. What is more, its rejection is not something which is thought to require substantial philosophical argument. Rather, the falsity of the thesis is taken as a starting-point in many contemporary discussions of intentionality, something so obvious that it only needs to be stated to be recognised as true. Consider, for instance, these remarks from the opening pages of Searle’s Intentionality: Some, not all, mental states and events have Intentionality. Beliefs, fears, hopes and desires are Intentional; but there are forms of nervousness, elation and undirected anxiety that are not Intentional.... My beliefs and desires must always be about something. But my nervousness and undirected anxiety need not in that way be about anything.4 Searle takes this as obvious, so obvious that it is not in need of further argument or elucidation. (shrink)

It can be said that Rousseau is one of the most acute thinkers of the corruption of civilisation. In fact, the Second Discourse and the Essay on the Origins of Languages could be read as elaborate analyses of advancing social and cultural decline inasmuch as mankind is continually moving away from the original state of natural innocence. But Rousseau’s idea of corruption is not straightforward. I try to show that in the Essay, Rousseau emphasizes the natural causes for corruption. (...) I argue that an opposition between necessity and contingency, which more accurately represents the two modes operating in Rousseau’s doctrine, should replace the standard nature/culture divide. The contingency of natural catastrophes is found to be ultimately responsible for the corruption in the social realm, which is therefore largely driven by natural causes. (shrink)

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

A deeply personal reckoning with family, mental illness, and suicide, Dana Trusso captures the meaning of Nietzsche's armor fati--to love one's fate--through her surreal imagery and longing to heal intergenerational wounds. Lines are drawn from Lars von Trier's Melancholia, Sonic Youth's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, and lines she read from her aunt's journals as a child. -/- The photo is a sculpture of an earth goddess by Jean-Philippe Richard located in the botanical gardens of Èze, France. (...) Nearby is Le Chemin de Nietzsche, a steep hike from the seaside to mountainous ruins that is said to have inspired Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (shrink)

In this eighth book of scilogs collected from my nest of ideas, one may find new and old questions and solutions, – in email messages to research colleagues, or replies, and personal notes handwritten on the planes to, and from international conferences, about all kind of topics, centered mostly on Paradoxism and Neutrosophy. -/- Exchanging ideas with: Robert Neil Boyd, Joseph Brenner, Ahmed Cevik, Victor Christianto, Adrian Curaj, Jean Dezert, Andrei-Lucian Drăgoi, Ervin Goldfain, Young Bae Jun, Yale Landsberg, Radu (...) Munteanu, Paul Piștea, Viorel Roman, Ridvan Sahin, Said Broumi, Selcuk Topal, Eric W. Weisstein, Xiaohing Zhang.‬‬‬ . (shrink)

In this eleventh book of scilogs – called in-turns and out-turns –, one may find new and old questions and solutions, referring mostly to topics on Neutrosophy, but also Multispace, with miscellaneous addition of topics on Physics, Mathematics, or Sociology – email messages to research colleagues, or replies, notes about authors, articles, or books, spontaneous ideas, and so on. -/- Exchanging ideas with Prem Kumar Singh, Feng Liu, Nicolae Bălașa, Jimmy Quellet, Minodora Rușchița, Frank Gelli, A. R. Vătuiu, Victor Christianto, (...) Vladimir I. Rogozhin, Robert Neil Boyd, Akira Kanda, Stefan Spaarmann, Oliver Consa, Yabin Shao, Junle Zhuo, Nivetha Martin, Said Broumi, Jean Dezert, Erick González, Tomasz Witczak, B. De Baets, I. Couso, D. Dubois, L. Good, Mihaela Colhon, Atiqe Ur Rahman, Muhammad Saeed, Muhammad Ihsan, Edeline Nancy, Shawkat Alkhazaleh, Shazia Rana, Vasantha Kandasamy, Santanu Acharjee, Mohamed Al-Shmrani, Parimala Manie, Mehmet Unver, Murat Olgun, Adel Aleidhri, Akira Kanda, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, Mircea Zărnescu, R. Tayebi Khorami, Arsham Borumand Saeid, Maisam Jdid, M. Abobala, Riad Hamido, Rafael Rojas, Esmaeil Zarei, Faisal Khan, Rouzbeh Abbassi, Adel Al-Odhari, Henry Garrett, Ackbar Rezaei, Saeid Jafari, Karthika Muthusamy, Harish Garg, Huda E. Khalid, Gonca D. Güngör, Muslim A. Noah Zainal, Fakhry Asad Agusfrianto, Madeleine Al-Tahan, Mariam Hariri, Yudi Mahatma, Masoud Ghods, Marco Brigliadori, Luis Enrique Aponte Pérez, Amr Mohammed, M. Aslam (in order of reference in the book). (shrink)

Riječ “intelektualac” francuskog je porijekla, nastala krajem 19. vijeka. Stvorena tokom afere Dreyfus, uglavnom se odnosi na one mislioce koji su spremni da interveniraju u javnom forumu, čak i ako to znači da sebe izlažu riziku (Le Sueur 2001:2). Teoretičari kao što su Edward Said, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre i Michael Waltzer dali su doprinos diskusiji o intelektualcima: intelektualca Said vidi kao kritički nastrojenog autsajdera, Ricoeur kao političkog edukatora, Sartre kao čovjeka od akcije, a Waltzer kao brižnog (...) insajdera. Opisati intelektualca na ovaj način, pak, ne spominje prostor unutar kojeg intelektualac djeluje, tj. građansko društvo. Upravo se u takvom prostoru ljudskog udruživanja i odnosnih mreža može promovirati kultura dijaloga, tolerancije, umjerenosti i uzajamno korisnog rješavanja sukoba, upravo onakva kultura kakva otjelotvorava stavove i vrijednosti demokratizacije. Mada intelektualac, onakav kakav je gore opisan, igra značajnu ulogu u održavanju dobro razvijenih demokratskih društava, u postkonfliktnim društvima, kakva su i kosovsko i bosanskohercegovačko, pojavljuje se potreba za intelektualcem koji je više od pukog kritičara društva, edukatora, čovjeka od akcije i saosjećajnog pojedinca. I tu na scenu stupa hiperintelektualac. Najupečatljivija karakteristika hiperintelektualca je možda upravo stepen u kojem se intelektualac bavi društvenom kritikom, političkim obrazovanjem, akcijom i “insajderizmom”, ne kao ideolog, već kao nestranačka fi gura. Društvena kritika i političko obrazovanje hiperintelektualca manifestiraju se na nestranački način, tako da se jasno čuje sve što je moguće i napadati i braniti, i sa jedne i sa druge strane. To je poseb-. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to both look beyond our general contempt for torture to investigate the processes and procedures that must be in place for torture to even occur and show how our contempt actually serves to support these processes and procedures. The idea that the torturer is not simply someone who performs a particular activity but rather someone who, through his activity, becomes something alien and nightmarish to us has become so ingrained in our understanding of torture that (...) it is rather difficult to remember that, regardless of how we might feel about it, the torturer is still a person performing an activity. Yet if we begin to take this simple fact more seriously and try to understand how particular people came to perform these particular activities then perhaps we can achieve a more realistic depiction of torture that is not just victim versus torturer, but instead something far more complicated. By looking at what torturers have said - in interviews, testimonies, and memoirs - rather than only what has been said about them, we can find that many of the concepts that have been applied to victims of torture can be usefully applied to the perpetrators as well, thus requiring that we pay more attention to the context in which torture takes place and less attention to merely our outrage over the fact that torture does take place. (shrink)

The basic axioms or formal conditions of decision theory, especially the ordering condition put on preferences and the axioms underlying the expected utility formula, are subject to a number of counter-examples, some of which can be endowed with normative value and thus fall within the ambit of a philosophical reflection on practical rationality. Against such counter-examples, a defensive strategy has been developed which consists in redescribing the outcomes of the available options in such a way that the threatened axioms or (...) conditions continue to hold. We examine how this strategy performs in three major cases: Sen's counterexamples to the binariness property of preferences, the Allais paradox of EU theory under risk, and the Ellsberg paradox of EU theory under uncertainty. We find that the strategy typically proves to be lacking in several major respects, suffering from logical triviality, incompleteness, and theoretical insularity. To give the strategy more structure, philosophers have developed “principles of individuation”; but we observe that these do not address the aforementioned defects. Instead, we propose the method of checking whether the strategy can overcome its typical defects once it is given a proper theoretical expansion. We find that the strategy passes the test imperfectly in Sen's case and not at all in Allais's. In Ellsberg's case, however, it comes close to meeting our requirement. But even the analysis of this more promising application suggests that the strategy ought to address the decision problem as a whole, rather than just the outcomes, and that it should extend its revision process to the very statements it is meant to protect. Thus, by and large, the same cautionary tale against redescription practices runs through the analysis of all three cases. A more general lesson, simply put, is that there is no easy way out from the paradoxes of decision theory. (shrink)

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...) respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality. (shrink)

Est-il possible de parler de ce qui n’est pas ou d’y penser sans présupposer une forme d’être pour cela même que nous pensons ne pas exister? La vieille énigme parménidienne, qui hante toujours la philosophie contemporaine, est au cœur non seulement de la philosophie médiévale mais aussi des études médiévales, comme en témoigne le récent ouvrage d’Alain de Libera sur la référence vide. L’objet de cette étude est en comparaison beaucoup plus...

I examine Bayle's infamous statement that Christian mysteries are not only "above" human reason, but are "against" it. I put it back in the context of 16th-17th century Reformed thought. I then discuss the relation between reason and faith according to Bayle.

Supra-Bayesianism is the Bayesian response to learning the opinions of others. Probability pooling constitutes an alternative response. One natural question is whether there are cases where probability pooling gives the supra-Bayesian result. This has been called the problem of Bayes-compatibility for pooling functions. It is known that in a common prior setting, under standard assumptions, linear pooling cannot be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. We show by contrast that geometric pooling can be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. Indeed, we show that, under certain assumptions, geometric and (...) Bayes-compatible pooling are equivalent. Granting supra-Bayesianism its usual normative status, one upshot of our study is thus that, in a certain class of epistemic contexts, geometric pooling enjoys a normative advantage over linear pooling as a social learning mechanism. We discuss the philosophical ramifications of this advantage, which we show to be robust to variations in our statement of the Bayes-compatibility problem. (shrink)

This paper investigates the notion of ‘distributed cognition’—the idea that entities external to one’s organic brain participate in one’s overall cognitive functioning—and the challenges it poses to the notion of personhood. Related to this is also a consideration of the ever-increasing ways in which neuroprostheses replace and functionally replicate organic parts of the brain. However, the literature surrounding such issues has tended to take an almost exclusively physicalist approach. The common assumption is that, given that non-physicalist theories (chiefly, dualism, and (...) hylomorphism) postulate some form of immaterial ‘soul’, then they are immune from the challenges that these advances in cognitive science pose. The first aim of this paper, therefore, is to argue that this is not the case. The second aim of this paper is to attempt to elucidate a route available for the non-physicalists that will allow them to accept the notion of distributed cognition. By appealing to an Aristotelian framework, I propose that the non-physicalist can accept the notion of distributed cognition by appealing to the notion of ‘unitary life’ which I introduce, as well as to Aristotle’s dichotomy between active and passive mind. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the problem of Bayle's skepticism. I show that he is not a wholesale skeptic. Rather, he thinks that reason is plagued by internal conflicts. But its principles, which clash with each other, can be adopted separately from each other. It is often what we have to do when dealing with metaphysical problems. This also entails that reason is not to be rejected as a whole when it happens to be contradicted by faith; only some of (...) its principles have to be denied, and solely in that case. Further, Bayle believes that we possess absolute certainly in our knowledge of ethical principles. I show how this is compatible with his relativism in other domains by putting back his contention in the context of Reformed thought. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

This summary is not exactly the way I would have done it myself but I must admit that my writing is sometimes a challenge to read. So I asked an AI to do this summary expecting that it will give an easily understandable although not totally accurate view on Ontology of Knowledge and from this general understanding help the reader to read the original papers. Jean-Louis Boucon’s works, "Introduction to the Ontology of Knowledge" and "Time, Space, and World as (...) Knowledge," delve into the intricate nature of reality, meaning, and the process of knowing. Boucon challenges traditional dichotomies in philosophy and science, presenting a cohesive framework where the knowing subject and the world are intertwined aspects of a single dynamic reality. His ideas provide a robust foundation for exploring ontological and epistemological questions, including the interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Smarandache (1995) defined the notion of neutrosophic sets, which is a generalization of Zadeh's fuzzy set and Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy set. In this paper, we first develop some similarity measures of neutrosophic sets. We will present a method to calculate the distance between neutrosophic sets (NS) on the basis of the Hausdorff distance. Then we will use this distance to generate a new similarity measure to calculate the degree of similarity between NS. Finally we will prove some properties of the (...) proposed similarity measures. (shrink)

On entend généralement par « théorie des modèles » autant la métamathématique (ou sémantique formelle) que la sémantique des modèles des sciences non formelles. Cet article a pour objet la théorie des modèles scientifiques que Mario Bunge a développée dans Method, Models and Matter (1973). J’y analyse l’intégration théorique qu’opère Bunge des sciences formelles et des sciences expérimentales ou observationnelles, laquelle prend appui sur sa philosophie des sciences. Je la compare sommairement à la théorie des modèles de Gilles-Gaston Granger dans (...) le but évident d’en dégager les ressemblances et les dissimilitudes, mais aussi leur commun point d’achoppement : l’une comme l’autre usent en effet d’un concept non analysé dont la fonction épistémologique est pourtant capitale et produit les mêmes effets. Au centre de la théorie des modèles de Bunge se trouve le concept de simulation que je comparerai à celui qui est en usage dans les sciences de l’ordinateur et qui est de nos jours largement appliqué à diverses sciences, tant sociales que naturelles. Je conclurai sur les conséquences méthodologiques et métaphysiques de la théorie bungéenne des modèles. (shrink)

Récemment savamment rééditée, la contribution qu’Alexandre Kojève offrit à Alexandre Koyré pour son septantième anniversaire s’attache à soutenir, de manière « beaucoup moins canularesque qu’elle ne paraît l’être à première vue », une affirmation que les «procédures historiennes» ne permettraient pas d’énoncer : si les Grecs n’ont pas développé la physique mathématique alors que les savants du XVIe siècle, au premier rang desquels Nicolas Copernic, ont réussi à la faire émerger, c’est parce que les premiers étaient païens alors que les (...) seconds étaient spécifiquement chrétiens ! Seuls ces derniers, grâce au dogme de l’Incarnation, ont en effet été aptes à réussir l’universalisation de l’approche mathématique du monde. N’hésitant pas à lire cette contribution tel qu’il s’avère qu’elle a été lue, c’est-à-dire indépendamment de l’œuvre kojévienne et de sa mise en œuvre d’une «histoire raisonnée», cet article analyse les deux principales sources d’inspiration de ladite thèse, à savoir Pierre Duhem et Alexandre Koyré ; retrace la réception historique de cette contribution ; relève toutes les objections qui, à cette occasion, lui furent adressées ; et, finalement, formule quelques objections supplémentaires. Les lecteurs qui souhaiteront bénéficier de la réédition de ce texte kojévien pour le moins provocateur devraient ainsi être à même de déterminer le degré de crédibilité qu’il convient de lui accorder. * * * Having recently been expertly republished, the contribution that Alexandre Kojève offered to Alexandre Koyré for his seventieth birthday served to support, in a manner that was in fact “much less playful than it initially appeared to be”, a claim that “historical procedures” had suppressed: if the Greeks failed to develop mathematical physics where the scholars of the 16th century, the foremost of whom being Nicolas Copernicus, succeeded, then it must be due to the fact that the former were pagans while the latter were specifically Christian! Only the latter, by virtue of the doctrine of Incarnation, were deemed capable of achieving the universalisation of the mathematical approach to the world. Focussed on interpreting this contribution as it was intended to be read, in other words independently of Kojève’s work and its implementation of a “rational history”, this article endeavours to: analyse the two main sources of inspiration for the aforementioned theory, namely Pierre Duhem and Alexandre Koyré; trace the historical reception of this contribution; highlight all of the objections that it was subject to at the time; and, lastly, formulate a few additional objections. Those readers wishing to make the most of the reissue of this rather provocative Kojèvian text should thus be in a position to determine the degree of credibility that it should be afforded. (shrink)

Many results have been obtained on isolated graphs and complete graphs. In this paper, a necessary and sufficient condition will be proved for a single valued neutrosophic graph to be an isolated single valued neutrosophic graph.

This Paper combines interval- valued neutrouphic sets and rough sets. It studies roughness in interval- valued neutrosophic sets and some of its properties. Finally we propose a Hamming distance between lower and upper approximations of interval valued neutrosophic sets.

The goal of this note is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the foundations of physics published in the late 1920s. In particular, we emphasize how the book The Analysis of Matter can be considered the earliest systematic attempt to unify the modern quantum theory, just emerging by that time, with general relativity. More importantly, it is argued that the idea of what I call Russell space, introduced in Part III of that (...) book, is more fundamental than quantum theory, general relativity, and quantum gravity since the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell would naturally incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, and not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. (shrink)

We develop a new understanding of the historical horizon of event ontology. Within the general area of the philosophy of nature, event ontology is a still emerging field of investigation in search for the ultimate materialist ontology of the world. While event ontology itself will not be explicated in full mathematical details here, our focus is on its conceptual interrelation with the dominant current of Idealism in Western thought approached by us as a problem in the history of ideas. Our (...) presentation is designed to be accessible to a wider audience. We especially highlight the deep connection between event ontology and postmodernism in general, and the post-war French philosophers Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari in particular, who are viewed as main sources for current and future programs of abstract materialism. (shrink)

A prominent version of emotional cognitivism is the view that emotions are preceded by awareness of value. In a recent paper, Jonathan Mitchell (2019) has attacked this view (which he calls the content-priority view). According to him, extant suggestions for the relevant type of pre-emotional evaluative awareness are all problematic. Unless these problems can be overcome, he argues, the view does not represent a plausible competitor to rivaling cognitivist views. As Mitchell supposes, the view is not mandatory since its core (...) motivations can be accommodated by competing views, too. I argue that Mitchell's case against the content-priority view is unconvincing as it misconceives the principal motivation for the view. As I show, properly reconstructed, this motivation provides a strong case for the indispensability of the view to any adequate cognitivist treatment of emotion. Moreover, Mitchell's survey of candidates for pre-emotional value awareness can be seen to rest on problematic phenomenological assumptions. (shrink)

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

A perspective is provided on how to move beyond postmodernism while struggling to do philosophy in the twenty-first century. The ontological structures of time, history, and mathematics are analyzed from the vantagepoint of the Heideggerian theory of nonspatial Fold.

A study is reported testing two hypotheses about a close parallel relation between indicative conditionals, if A then B , and conditional bets, I bet you that if A then B . The first is that both the indicative conditional and the conditional bet are related to the conditional probability, P(B|A). The second is that de Finetti's three-valued truth table has psychological reality for both types of conditional— true , false , or void for indicative conditionals and win , lose (...) , or void for conditional bets. The participants were presented with an array of chips in two different colours and two different shapes, and an indicative conditional or a conditional bet about a random chip. They had to make judgements in two conditions: either about the chances of making the indicative conditional true or false or about the chances of winning or losing the conditional bet. The observed distributions of responses in the two conditions were generally related to the conditional probability, supporting the first hypothesis. In addition, a majority of participants in further conditions chose the third option, “void”, when the antecedent of the conditional was false, supporting the second hypothesis. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary (...) access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion. (shrink)

Both neutrosophic sets theory and rough sets theory are emerging as powerful tool for managing uncertainty, indeterminate, incomplete and imprecise information .In this paper we develop an hybrid structure called “ rough neutrosophic sets” and studied their properties.

Currently, there is a dearth of research, examining how project managers’ leadership styles influence the performance of construction company workers in Cape Town. Other research has discussed this subject on a national or international level. Still, comprehensive data on Cape Town construction firms is lacking. This has prevented local enterprises from understanding the role of their project managers’ leadership styles on employee performance outcomes. This article sought to ascertain how leadership styles influence employee performance in construction firms and to develop (...) a conceptual framework for improving leadership and performance. Through quantitative techniques, 456 questionnaires were distributed at construction sites across Cape Town. Responses were then analysed using an ANOVA test (with the descriptive and regressive methods) and a posthoc test (using the Bonferroni Method) and correlation analysis. The results reveal a statistically significant positive relationship between project managers’ leadership styles and the performance of subordinate employees. These findings have subsequently been used to develop a conceptual framework of leadership quality development tools, including training, empowerment, coaching, participation, and delegation. The research contributes to new knowledge that will promote local project managers’ leadership development, improve employee performance, and in doing so, increase successful project outcomes across the city. (shrink)

The interval neutrosophic uncertain linguistic variables can easily express the indeterminate and inconsistent information in real world, and TOPSIS is a very effective decision making method more and more extensive applications. In this paper, we will extend the TOPSIS method to deal with the interval neutrosophic uncertain linguistic information, and propose an extended TOPSIS method to solve the multiple attribute decision making problems in which the attribute value takes the form of the interval neutrosophic uncertain linguistic variables and attribute weight (...) is unknown. Firstly, the operational rules and properties for the interval neutrosophic variables are introduced. Then the distance between two interval neutrosophic uncertain linguistic variables is proposed and the attribute weight is calculated by the maximizing deviation method, and the closeness coefficients to the ideal solution for each alternatives. Finally, an illustrative example is given to illustrate the decision making steps and the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

This piece seeks to theoretically explore the concept of ‘the silent majority’ in relation to our contemporary context and the promulgation of the phenomenon of self-censoring which seem to have permeated its way through to all corners of present-day public civil and political life.

There is a wide range of things we do out of emotion. For example, we smile with pleasure, our voices drop when we are sad, we recoil in shock or jump for joy, we apologize to others out of remorse. It is uncontroversial that some of these behaviors are actions. Clearly, apologizing is an action if anything is. Things seem less clear in the case of other emotional behaviors. Intuitively, the drop in a sad person’s voice is something that happens (...) to her, rather than something she actively performs. Perhaps more interestingly, even jumping for joy can seem a problematic case: although its execution involves the active performance of certain movements, it has been argued to contrast, e.g., with an act of apology, in that it is not performed in order to achieve some end, such as repairing a relationship. This can make this behavior seem considerably different from paradigm actions. Our central concern in this paper is with which emotional behaviors should be classed as actions and why... (shrink)

State-dependent utility is a problem for the behavioural branch of decision theory under uncertainty. It questions the very possibility that beliefs be revealed by choice data. According to the current literature, all models of beliefs are equally exposed to the problem. Moreover, the problem is solvable only when the decision-maker can influence the resolution of uncertainty. This article gives grounds to reject these two views. The various models of beliefs can be shown to be unequally exposed to the problem of (...) state-dependent utility. The problem can be argued to be solved even when the decision-maker has no influence over the resolution of uncertainty. The implications of such reappraisal for a philosophical appreciation of the revealed preference methodology are discussed. (shrink)

Compared to the existing bibliographies devoted to Paul Mansion, this list of his written and spoken words increases the number of items pertaining to the Annales de la Société scientifique de Bruxelles from 123 to 208, and from 32 to 142 for those pertaining to the Revue des questions scientifiques, thus representing an increase of 40% and 77%, respectively. Based directly on an analysis of these two journals themselves, it makes the relevant bibliographical information — contained both in these earlier (...) bibliographies and in the analytical indexes devoted to these journals — accessible to researchers in a more accurate, convenient and comprehensive manner. (shrink)

The paper challenges the assumption, common amongst philosophers, that the reality described in the fundamental theories of microphysics is all the reality we have. It will be argued that this assumption is in fact incompatible with the nature of such theories. It will be shown further that the macro-world of three-dimensional bodies and of such qualitative structures as colour and sound can be treated scientifically on its own terms, which is to say not only from the perspective of psychology but (...) also ontologically. A new sort of emergentist position will be defended, one which yields the basis of a method for describing the perceptually salient macroscopic world in mathematical terms. Broadly, it will be argued that the macroscopic world exists in virtue of certain specific sorts of boundary-patterns in the field of what is captured by the theories of microphysics. (shrink)

For the OK, there is in fact no opposition between the logical and the material or the spiritual: reality is a formless logical substance. Representation is morphogenesis and the terms 'material' and 'spiritual' only denote categories of morphogenesis. Our constant experience shows us that spiritual and material interact. The border between understanding and becoming, between meaning and act, which seems trivial to us, is elusive when we try to approach it. For example: when the subject follows the object of his (...) attention with his gaze, where to draw the line between material and spiritual ? Representation is morphogenesis and the OK uses the term 'horizon', not to separate the material from the spiritual, but to distinguish the formless from the representable, the unspeakable from the speakable. For the OK the speakable is not 'something else' than the unspeakable, it is a mode of order: The rainbow is not 'an other thing' than rain, light, sun, the walk that brought me here and now, my sense of vision, my culture etc ... all this unspeakable set of logical interdependencies from which emerges, for me subject, the meaning of the rainbow. And above all, this horizon is not 'in my mind'. The ordaining of the unspeakable is not carried out 'by my understanding'. The emergence of the meaning from the unspeakable logic is not happening 'in' and 'by' my mind. On the contrary, it is a process of pure logic*, a progressive aglomeration of interdependance, which makes the subject emerge as a representation of the world and of his own existence. The logical transcends the Existing. This is the key to understanding this article: We have not left the Garden of Eden. The representation is not 'overhanging' the world, it is 'the' world. Representation is not "grasping form" but "morphogenesis", not as "attribution of form" but as "necessary ordering mode of logical reality". Common sense (including science and logic) does not represent reality, it emerges from it in the form of modes of order of reality, of logic. My representation of this white stone is not 'something else' than the unspeakable logic from which the meaning of 'white stone' emerges for me, it is only a mode of order. There are no "other things" than the things which represent themselves in me and which are modes of order. The Existing is representation. Existence is a mode of order *. The amorphous logical "substance" precedes (transcends) its representation. The logical transcends logic. (shrink)