Wang Xuanlan criticized the view of time defined by Xin (心) through the way of Chongxuan xue (Twofold Mystery) in Xuanzhulu, and advocated a view of time from the perspective of Dao (道). The core proposition of the time of Xin is expressed as “in the pure Xin, all of the past and the present are included”. The whole content of the time of Xin is the “three periods” constituted by the past, present and future. Wang's criticism of the time (...) of Xin is consistent with that of worldly law such as Xin, words and knowledge. However, the criticism cannot be completed in one step. The result of criticism is not clinging to no-Xin, no-words and non-knowledge, but completely denying all worldly law. In this way, the Dao in the basic position could manifest itself. The view of the time of Dao is expressed as ”the Dao has no birth and death, and the time in it is infinite“. (shrink)

This sixth volume of Collected Papers includes 74 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2015-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 121 co-authors from 19 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Abduallah Gamal, Amir Abdullah, Firoz Ahmad, Nadeem Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed Aboelfetouh, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Shariful Alam, W. Alharbi, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Amira S. Ashour, Asmaa Atef, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, A. A. Azzam, Willem K.M. Brauers, Bui (...) Cong Cuong, Fausto Cavallaro, Ahmet Çevik, Robby I. Chandra, Kalaivani Chandran, Victor Chang, Chang Su Kim, Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Mihaela Colhon, Shyamal Dalapati, Arindam Dey, Dunqian Cao, Fahad Alsharari, Faruk Karaaslan, Aleksandra Fedajev, Daniela Gîfu, Hina Gulzar, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Hewayda El-Ghawalby, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Branislav Ivanov, S. Jafari, Jeong Gon Lee, Milena Jevtić, Sudan Jha, Junhui Kim, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Songül Karabatak, Abdullah Kargın, M. Karthika, Ieva Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, Madad Khan, Majid Khan, Manju Khari, Kifayat Ullah, K. Kishore, Kul Hur, Santanu Kumar Patro, Prem Kumar Singh, Raghvendra Kumar, Tapan Kumar Roy, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luu Quoc Dat, T. Madhumathi, Tahir Mahmood, Mladjan Maksimovic, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Nivetha Martin, M. Kasi Mayan, Mai Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Raja Muhammad Hashim, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Nada A. Nabeeh, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Xenia Negrea, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Jagan M. Obbineni, Angelo de Oliveira, M. Parimala, Gabrijela Popovic, Ishaani Priyadarshini, Yaser Saber, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, M. Saleh, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Dönüș Șengür, Shio Gai Quek, Songtao Shao, Dragiša Stanujkić, Surapati Pramanik, Swathi Sundari Sundaramoorthy, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Muhammed Turhan, Alptekin Ulutaș, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Volkan Duran, Navneet Yadav, Yanhui Guo, Naveed Yaqoob, Yongquan Zhou, Young Bae Jun, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiao Long Xin, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

This seventh volume of Collected Papers includes 70 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2013-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 122 co-authors from 22 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel-Nasser Hussian, C. Alexander, Mumtaz Ali, Yaman Akbulut, Amir Abdullah, Amira S. Ashour, Assia Bakali, Kousik Bhattacharya, Kainat Bibi, R. N. Boyd, Ümit Budak, Lulu Cai, Cenap Özel, Chang Su Kim, Victor Christianto, Chunlai Du, Chunxin Bo, Rituparna Chutia, Cu Nguyen Giap, Dao The (...) Son, Vinayak Devvrat, Arindam Dey, Partha Pratim Dey, Fahad Alsharari, Feng Yongfei, S. Ganesan, Shivam Ghildiyal, Bibhas C. Giri, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Ahmed Refaat Hawas, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, Hongbo Wang, Hongnian Yu, Mihaiela Iliescu, Saeid Jafari, Temitope Gbolahan Jaiyeola, Naeem Jan, R. Jeevitha, Jun Ye, Anup Khan, Madad Khan, Salma Khan, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Kifayat Ullah, Kishore Kumar P.K., Sujit Kumar De, Prasun Kumar Nayak, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luong Thi Hong Lan, Anam Luqman, Luu Quoc Dat, Tahir Mahmood, Hafsa M. Malik, Nivetha Martin, Mai Mohamed, Parimala Mani, Mingcong Deng, Mohammed A. Al Shumrani, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohamed Talea, Kalyan Mondal, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Farshid Mofidnakhaei, Muhammad Shoaib, Muhammad Riaz, Karthika Muthusamy, Nabeela Ishfaq, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Sumera Naz, Nguyen Dinh Hoa, Nguyen Tho Thong, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Noor ul Amin, Dragan Pamučar, Gabrijela Popović, S. Krishna Prabha, Surapati Pramanik, Priya R, Qiaoyan Li, Yaser Saber, Said Broumi, Saima Anis, Saleem Abdullah, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Abdulkadir Sengür, Seyed Ahmad Edalatpanah, Shahbaz Ali, Shahzaib Ashraf, Shouzhen Zeng, Shio Gai Quek, Shuangwu Zhu, Shumaiza, Sidra Sayed, Sohail Iqbal, Songtao Shao, Sundas Shahzadi, Dragiša Stanujkić, Željko Stević, Udhayakumar Ramalingam, Zunaira Rashid, Hossein Rashmanlou, Rajkumar Verma, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Desmond Jun Yi Tey, Selçuk Topal, Naveed Yaqoob, Yanhui Guo, Yee Fei Gan, Yingcang Ma, Young Bae Jun, Yuping Lai, Hafiz Abdul Wahab, Wei Yang, Xiaohong Zhang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Lemnaouar Zedam. (shrink)

Xuan-Hung Doan, Phuong-Tram T. Nguyen, Viet-Phuong La, Hong-Kong T. Nguyen (2019). Chapter 5. Researchers who lead the trends. In Quan-Hoang Vuong, Trung Tran (Eds.), The Vietnamese Social Sciences at a Fork in the Road (pp. 98–120). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter. DOI:10.2478/9783110686081-010 -/- Online ISBN: 9783110686081 © 2019 Sciendo.

The Evaluative Judgment Theories of Emotion mainly suggest that emotions can be reduced to evaluative beliefs or judgments. Specifically, evaluative beliefs are necessary but not sufficient conditions for evaluative judgments. And reducing emotions to evaluative judgments requires the subject’s conceptualizing ability. However, the Evaluative Judgment Theories of Emotion has many problems, including that evaluative beliefs are neither sufficient nor necessary for emotions; the evaluative judgment theory of emotion presupposes the subject’s conceptual content, but conceptual content is not a necessary and (...) sufficient condition for emotions; the requirement of conceptualization ability for evaluative judgments is too high, which makes emotions overintellectualize; and the add-on strategy of emotions cannot save the evaluative judgment theory of emotions as well. (shrink)

Truth pluralism is the view that there is more than one truth property. The strong version of it (i.e. strong pluralism) further contends that no truth property is shared by all true propositions. In this paper, I help strong pluralism solve two pressing problems concerning mixed discourse: the problem of mixed inferences (PI) and the problem of mixed compounds (PC). According to PI, strong pluralism is incompatible with the truth- preservation notion of validity; according to PC, strong pluralists cannot find (...) any appropriate truth property for mixed compound propositions, whose atomic constituents are from different domains of discourse (e.g., <sky is blue and chocolate is tasty>). I argue that the strong pluralist is motivated to take the truth predicate in truth-involving universal statements to be deflationary to avoid the two pressing problems. Such a move entails that the truth predicate in the platitude of validity (V) for any argument, it is valid if and only if necessarily its conclusion is true when its premises are all true does not denote any substantive truth property. Instead, it is merely an expressive device to help people generalize instances of (V) to (V). Analogous stories hold for the truth predicate in the platitudes of compound (e.g., conjunction). The upshot is that, the strong pluralist can solve PI and PC by further conceding that mixed compounds are true/false in a deflationary way. (shrink)

Meritocracy claims to reward the meritorious with more resources, thereby achieving social efficiency and justice in a level playground. This article argues that the rise of meritocracy in a society is the institutional consequence of adopting progressive humanism, an ideal-type worldview that advocates the harmonious co-realization of individual achievement and social contribution. However, meritocracy is a self-defeating illusion because, even in a level playground, it only rewards conspicuous and wasteful display of ‘merit’ rather than genuine contributions to society. Similar to (...) the promise of an afterlife to Catholicism, the illusion of meritocracy constitutes an indispensable theodicy to progressive humanism. For societies holding such worldviews, meritocracy is a necessary illusion that cannot be dispelled by institutional reforms or political movements. (shrink)

Deep self views of moral responsibility suggest that an agent fully satisfies the freedom condition for responsibility if and only if her actions or omissions issue from, and so express, her deep self. This analysis generates both false negatives and false positives regarding people's responsibility, and counterexamples proliferate. I defend a novel version of the deep self view by offering a necessary condition for accountability while retaining the core of deep self views. Indeed, an agent may be blameworthy for her (...) wrongdoing without it issuing from, and so expressing, her deep self. And yet, I argue that she must have a deep self for which she is responsible. This is achieved by paying closer attention to history than standard views have. Focusing on history then reveals a less discussed problem for standard views: the ahistorical features of them make them less equipped to explain cases of blameworthiness that is undermined. (shrink)

The author argues that consciousness and its meaning may only be defined and explained within an ontological system. Such a system is proposed in this article, with matter, energy, and life as its components, and with all its components defined as changes. The systematic relations between matter and energy and the semantic relations among all its components together may define and explain what and how consciousness is, why there is consciousness, where and when it may occur, and what is its (...) significance or meaning. (shrink)

Kripke distinguishes necessity and priority as two different categories: priority is a notion of epistemology, while necessity is a notion of metaphysics. Based on this fundamental argument, Kripke objects to Descriptivism, which takes certain properties as the criteria of identity across all possible worlds, and he argues for the legitimacy of a posteriori necessary truths. Kripke also criticizes Russell’s methods for dealing with empty descriptions, and he puts forward a modal world to explain the rigidity of proper names. However, the (...) concept of rigid designation faces some challenges, including Kripke admitting to weak essentialism when he rejects transworld identification, and the fact that the truth value of a sentence containing a rigid designator may change. (shrink)

Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: (...) truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint. (shrink)

From Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals and Critique of practical reason, we can deduce Kant's interpretation of the concept of freedom, which has undergone a change from practical freedom to transcendental freedom, and the deduction of freedom has been perfected, the rational facts have been put forward to provide the basis of free deduction. The reason for the change is that freedom as the basis of theoretical practice is assumed and predetermined, how the cause and effect of freedom as (...) will may not be explained, and the nature of freedom is not defined clearly, the legitimacy and authority of the moral law is not established. After the transformation, the problem was solved. Although rigour raises questions about the universality of Kant’s moral law, Onora Sylvia O’Neill and others argue that Kant’s moral law is a product of virtue ethics, not a normative ethic, Kant's moral law still can instruct us in ethical life. (shrink)

Bằng cách vận dụng mô hình lý thuyết S-O-R, nghiên cứu kiểm định ảnh hưởng của TikTok đến hành vi mua hàng của khách hàng Gen Z tại TP. Hồ Chí Minh. Mẫu nghiên cứu thu thập từ khảo sát trực tuyến có kích cỡ là 300. Kết quả thực nghiệm đã khẳng định rằng, Sự đồng hiện diện và Niềm tin của người tiêu dùng có ảnh hưởng đến Hành vi mua hàng trên nền tảng TikTok. Trên cơ sở (...) kết quả nghiên cứu, một số hàm ý quản trị đã được đề xuất. (shrink)

The findings reveal that e-commerce serendipity is an artificially facilitated unplanned experience, jointly shaped by consumers and online platforms along with their designers. Being an artificial serendipity, e-commerce serendipity is characterised by its expectedness, thrillingness, and varied outcomes. Three routes were presented for consumers to experience e-commerce serendipity: coincidence, unexpected discovery, encountering. These routes differed via the varying interaction patterns between serendipitists and third parties under different conditions. The findings regarding ecommerce serendipity as a form of artificial serendipity have significant (...) implications for both research and practice. (shrink)

In this paper, we first propose the concept of divergence measure on neutrosophic sets. We also provide some formulas for the divergence measure for neutrosophic sets. After that, we investigate the properties of proposed neutrosophic divergence measure. Finally, we also apply these formulas in medical problem and the classification problem.

The author argues that consciousness, just like matter and energy, space and time, life and self, knowledge and intelligence, and language and meaning, may never be defined or explained fundamentally or comprehensively as entities or their properties. As an alternative, the author created a theoretical mind with matter, energy, and lives as its components, and with all its components defined as changes. Based on the relationships among these three components, a triple definition or explanation of consciousness is reached: • Ontologically, (...) consciousness is universal, since it is the distinction between matter and energy. • Epistemologically, consciousness is unique, since it is the energy formalized, qualified, or diversified by the matter. • Semantically, consciousness is a meaningless language with lives as its only meaning. Many theories of consciousness have neglected this universality or uniqueness and have even ignored that life is the only cause or effect of consciousness. No consciousness may ever be consciousness in the absence of life. -/- . (shrink)

A rough fuzzy set is the result of the approximation of a fuzzy set with respect to a crisp approximation space. It is a mathematical tool for the knowledge discovery in the fuzzy information systems. In this paper, we introduce the concepts of rough standard neutrosophic sets and standard neutrosophic information system, and give some results of the knowledge discovery on standard neutrosophic information system based on rough standard neutrosophic sets.

Ngành dầu khí là tiền đề quan trọng hỗ trợ phát triển nền kinh tế, vì thế, nhiều doanh nghiệp dầu khí đang từng bước phát triển mạnh. Nghiên cứu tìm hiểu và đo lường hiệu quả quản lý tài sản của 8 doanh nghiệp dầu khí tại Việt Nam từ năm 2019 tới năm 2023 dựa theo mô hình hiệu quả cao (Super Slacked-based mearesure - SBM) sử dụng phương pháp phân tích bao hàm dữ liệu (Data envelopment analysis (...) - DEA). Kết quả nghiên cứu đã tìm ra được điểm số hiệu quả về quản lý tài sản đối với từng doanh nghiệp trong từng năm và gợi ý ra giải pháp nâng cao hiệu quả trong tương lai. (shrink)

Sora from Open AI has shown exceptional performance, yet it faces scrutiny over whether its technological prowess equates to an authentic comprehension of reality. Critics contend that it lacks a foundational grasp of the world, a deficiency V-JEPA from Meta aims to amend with its joint embedding approach. This debate is vital for steering the future direction of Artificial General Intelligence(AGI). We enrich this debate by developing a theory of productive imagination that generates a coherent world model based on Kantian (...) philosophy. We identify three indispensable components in the coherent world model that enable genuine world understanding: latent representations of isolated objects, an a priori law of change across space and time, and Kantian categories. Our analysis reveals that Sora is limited because of its oversight of the a priori law of change and Kantian categories, flaws that are not rectifiable through scaling up the training. V-JEPA learns the context-dependent aspect of the a priori law of change. Yet it fails to fully comprehend Kantian categories and incorporate experience, leading us to conclude that neither system currently achieves a comprehensive world understanding. Nevertheless, each system has developed components essential to advancing an integrated AI productive imagination-understanding engine. Finally, we propose an innovative training framework for an AI productive imagination-understanding engine, centered around a joint embedding system designed to transform disordered perceptual input into a structured, coherent world model. Our philosophical analysis pinpoints critical challenges within contemporary video AI technologies and a pathway toward achieving an AI system capable of genuine world understanding, such that it can be applied for reasoning and planning in the future. (shrink)

Complexity may not be defined or explained with entities and properties. Instead, a system is proposed ontologically, epistemologically, and semantically as the definition or explanation in this paper, with matter, energy and lives as its components, and with all its components defined as changes, which might improve upon our prediction in/with complexity. -/- .

Today, soft computing is a field that is used a lot in solving real-world problems, such as problems in economics, finance, banking... With the aim to serve for solving the real problem, many new theories and/or tools which were proposed, improved to help soft computing used more efficiently. We can mention some theories as fuzzy sets theory (L. Zadeh, 1965), intuitionistic fuzzy set (K Atanasov, 1986), neutrosophic set (F. Smarandache 1999). In this paper, we introduce a new notion of sup (...) port-neutrosophic set (SNS), which is the combination a neutrosophic set with a fuzzy set. So, SNS set is a direct extension of fuzzy set and neutrosophic sets (F. Smarandache). Then, we define some operators on the support-neutrosophic sets, and investigate some properties of these operators. (shrink)

In this paper, we defined (I,T) − standard neutrosophic rough sets based on an implicator I and a t-norm T on I; lower and upper approximations of standard neutrosophic sets in a standard neutrosophic approximation are defined. Some properties of (I,T) − standard neutrosophic rough sets are investigated. We consider the case when the neutrosophic components (truth, indeterminacy, and falsehood) are totally dependent, single-valued, and hence their sum is ≤ 1.

People attribute purposes in both mundane and profound ways—such as when thinking about the purpose of a knife and the purpose of a life. In three studies (total N = 13,720 observations from N = 3,430 participants), we tested whether these seemingly very different forms of purpose attributions might actually involve the same cognitive processes. We examined the impacts of four factors on purpose attributions in six domains (artifacts, social institutions, animals, body parts, sacred objects, and human lives). Study 1 (...) manipulated what items in each domain were originally created for (original design) and how people currently use them (present practice). Study 2 manipulated whether items are good at achieving a goal (effectiveness) and whether the goal itself is good (morality). We found effects of each factor in every domain. However, whereas morality and effectiveness had remarkably similar effects across domains, the effects of original design and present practice differed substantially. Finally, Study 3 revealed that, within domains, the effects of original design and present practice depend on which entities design and use items. These results reveal striking similarities in purpose attributions across domains and suggest that certain entities are treated as authorities over the purposes of particular items. (shrink)

The results revealed that students who remained in China experienced challenges which included anxiety, closure of campuses, lockdown, their parents’ concern regarding health issues, and not being able to meet with friends. On the other hand, students who had left China during the pandemic were confined to their home countries. This group of students experienced more severe problems than the students who remained in China. Since the transition to home countries was “unplanned,” they were not ready to readjust to their (...) native culture and were vulnerable to severe reverse culture shock. Upon returning to their home countries, international students faced a number of challenges, including readjustment to their home countries and changes in their lives in host and home countries. In addition, they lost social and academic resources, such as the disruption of study environment, losing important group memberships, financial constraints, visa expiry, graduation delay, and academic suspension. (shrink)

Thông qua kết quả khảo sát đối với 148 người đang hoạt động tại các doanh nghiệp kiểm toán (DNKT), chi nhánh DNKT trên địa bàn TP. Hồ Chí Minh, bài viết nhằm kiểm định và đánh giá các nhân tố ảnh hưởng đến việc ra quyết định đạo đức của kiểm toán viên (KTV) tại các DNKT. Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy, có 3 nhân tố có ảnh hưởng đến việc ra quyết định đạo đức của KTV tại (...) các DNKT với thứ tự tầm quan trọng là: (i) Nhận thức của KTV; (ii) Luật và quy định nghề nghiệp kiểm toán; (iii) Môi trường làm việc tại DNKT. (shrink)

Can AI systems such as ChatGPT think? We present an argument from rationality for the negative answer to this question. The argument is founded on two central ideas. The first is that if ChatGPT thinks, it is not rational, in the sense that it does not respond correctly to its evidence. The second idea, which appears in several different forms in philosophical literature, is that thinkers are by their nature rational. Putting the two ideas together yields the result that ChatGPT (...) is not a thinker. The paper sets out the argument in detail and shows how it can withstand numerous objections. We end the paper by contrasting the argument from rationality with a more well-known argument often taken to show that ChatGPT doesn’t think, due to Bender and Koller. (shrink)

Mục tiêu của nghiên cứu này là tìm ra các giải pháp nhằm huy động nguồn tài chính cho các doanh nghiệp khởi nghiệp đổi mới sáng tạo tại vùng kinh tế trọng điểm miền Trung. Kết quả phân tích thống kê và điều tra khảo sát thực tế cho thấy các doanh nghiệp này đang phát triển nhanh chóng cả về số lượng và chất lượng. Tuy nhiên, việc huy động nguồn tài chính cho loại hình doanh nghiệp này (...) vẫn gặp nhiều khó khăn và thách thức. Do đó, cần có các giải pháp hữu hiệu và đồng bộ cho cả doanh nghiệp và cơ quan quản lý nhà nước để tháo gỡ những nút thắt trong việc huy động nguồn tài chính. Nghiên cứu này cung cấp một tài liệu tham khảo hữu ích cho các bên liên quan tại vùng Kinh tế trọng điểm miền Trung trong việc huy động nguồn tài chính cho các doanh nghiệp khởi nghiệp đổi mới sáng tạo trong tương lai. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. We report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals, based on a context in which a light is controlled by two switches. Our main finding is that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) "switch A or switch B is down" and (ii) "switch A and switch B are not both up" make different semantic contributions when embedded in a conditional antecedent. (...) Assuming compositionality, this means that (i) and (ii) differ in meaning, which implies that the meaning of a sentential clause cannot be identified with its truth conditions. We show that our data have a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: in a conditional antecedent, (i) introduces two distinct assumptions, while (ii) introduces only one. Independently of the complications stemming from disjunctive antecedents, our results also challenge analyses of counterfactuals in terms of minimal change from the actual state of affairs: we show that such analyses cannot account for our findings, regardless of what changes are considered minimal. (shrink)

Đất đai cần được nhận diện như một đối tượng của tham nhũng để có biện pháp phòng chống tương xứng. Ai được hỏi tính hợp lý của dự án? Ai được hỏi giá đất đền bù bao nhiêu là hợp lý, rồi việc thu hồi, mua bán có làm lợi cho quan chức nào? Khi từng thông tin trên phải được công bố, cơ chế giám sát rõ thì nguồn lực của nhà nước được bảo toàn và người dân (...) cũng được lợi. (shrink)

Mystical experiences are often regarded as potential sources of epistemic justification for religious beliefs. However, the ‘disanalogy objection’ maintains that, in contrast to sense perceptions, mystical experiences lack social verifiability and are thus merely subjective states that cannot substantiate objective truths. This article explores a novel externalist response that involves the concept of angels. As spiritual beings, angels can directly perceive God and verify these perceptions in their celestial community. Thus, the ‘direct perception of God’ is not inherently incapable of (...) social verification. While invoking angels might appear contentious, it coheres with the externalist approach of conceptualising cognitive states under hypothetical settings. Despite the differences between humans and angels and their lack of interaction for verification purposes, our approach remains valid because mystics not only exemplify the same general type of ‘direct perception of God’ as angels but can also be preliminary members of a wider celestial community. (shrink)

Mystical religious experiences typically purport to engage with the transcendent and often claim to involve encounters with spiritual entities or a detachment from the material world. Daoism diverges from this paradigm. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences of bodily transformations and explores their epistemological implications. Specifically, we defend the justificatory power of Daoist somatic experiences against the disanalogy objection. The disanalogy objection posits that mystical experiences, in contrast to sense perceptions, are not socially verifiable and thereby lack prima facie epistemic (...) value. We argue that some Daoist mystical bodily states, being essentially spatiotemporal, are exempt from this challenge. This leads to a broader understanding of mysticism and offers a partial resolution to the disanalogy objection. (shrink)

In Appearance and Explanation, McCain and Moretti propose a novel internalist account of epistemic justification called phenomenal explanationism, which combines phenomenal conservatism and explanationism. I argue that the current version of phenomenal explanationism faces a dilemma: either it omits the awareness requirement but implies an implausible form of logical-mathematical omniscience, or it preserves the requirement but leads to a vicious regress. I suggest how phenomenal explanationism might be revised to avoid this dilemma.

Critical realism, championed by its proponents as the most promising post-positivist social science paradigm, has gained significant influence in the last few decades. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the critical realism movement in the hope of facilitating more fruitful dialogues between its proponents and rivalling schools of sociologists. Two concerns are raised about contemporary critical realism. First, critical realism is not the only philosophical school against positivism and not necessarily the best. Second, critical realists exaggerate the importance of (...) critical realism to social science and conflate philosophy of science with sociological theories. (shrink)

Stephen Yablo’s notion of proportionality, despite controversies surrounding it, has played a significant role in philosophical discussions of mental causation and of high-level causation more generally. In particular, it is invoked in James Woodward’s interventionist account of high-level causation and explanation, and is implicit in a novel approach to constructing variables for causal modeling in the machine learning literature, known as causal feature learning (CFL). In this article, we articulate an account of proportionality inspired by both Yablo’s account of proportionality (...) and the CFL account of variable construction. The resulting account has at least three merits. First, it illuminates an important feature of the notion of proportionality, when it is adapted to a probabilistic and interventionist framework. The feature is that at the center of the notion of proportionality lies the concept of “determinate intervention effects.” Second, it makes manifest a virtue of (common types of) high-level causal/explanatory statements over low-level ones, when relevant intervention effects are determinate. Third, it overcomes a limitation of the CFL framework and thereby also addresses a challenge to interventionist accounts of high-level causation. (shrink)

How do essentialist beliefs about categories arise? We hypothesize that such beliefs are transmitted via language. We subject large language models (LLMs) to vignettes from the literature on essentialist categorization and find that they align well with people when the studies manipulated teleological information -- information about what something is for. We examine whether in a classic test of essentialist categorization -- the transformation task -- LLMs prioritize teleological properties over information about what something looks like, or is made of. (...) Experiments 1 and 2 find that telos and what something is made of matter more than appearance. Experiment 3 manipulates all three factors and finds that what something is for matters more than what it's made of. Overall, these studies suggest that language alone may be sufficient to give rise to essentialist beliefs, and that information about what something is for matters more. (shrink)

This study explores the polysemy of the word “bitter” in English and ku in Chinese. It examines the similarities and differences between their semantics and identifies the cognitive mechanisms that motivate their semantic expansion. The study attempts to answer two questions: (1) What are the similarities and differences between Chinese ku and English “bitter” in terms of meaning? (2) What cognitive mechanisms motivate meaning extensions of these two words? To this end, 汉语大词典 (Chinese Dictionary), 英汉大词典 (English-Chinese Dictionary), the British National (...) Corpus (BNC) and BLCU Corpus Center (BCC) were employed. The two dictionaries were utilised to investigate the multiple meanings of the two terms, while the BNC and the BCC were employed to identify metaphors and metonymies in sentences. Theoretically, the study is informed by Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy. The results showed that half of the meanings of “bitter” and ku overlapped, but there were still some differences. Their semantic expansion is motivated by both conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. In addition, the words under investigation differ in the emotions expressed. English “bitter” is more negative, while Chinese ku is more positive. The present findings have important implications for education and cross-cultural communication in language. (shrink)

Weber's 'science as a vocation' has often been viewed as a therapeutic concept with no functional significance in the fully bureaucratized and professionalized modern science. However, development in the philosophy of science in the last century, especially the Kuhn thesis of the discontinuity of scientific progress and the Duhem-Quine thesis of underdetermination, shows that Weber's distinction between science as a vocation and science as a profession (career) can potentially answer one of the oldest questions in science studies: What makes scientific (...) breakthroughs possible? (shrink)

Ratio, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 303-311, December 2021.

This is a study of the treatment of library patron privacy in licenses for electronic journals in academic libraries. We begin by distinguishing four facets of privacy and intellectual freedom based on the LIS and philosophical literature. Next, we perform a content analysis of 42 license agreements for electronic journals, focusing on terms for enforcing authorized use and collection and sharing of user data. We compare our findings to model licenses, to recommendations proposed in a recent treatise on licenses, and (...) to our account of the four facets of intellectual freedom. We find important conflicts with each. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard recently proposed a Wittgensteinian solution to closure-based skepticism. According to Wittgenstein, all epistemic systems assume certain truths. The notions that we are not disembodied brains, that the Earth has existed for a long time and that one’s name is such-and-such all function as “hinge commitments.” Pritchard views a hinge commitment as a positive propositional attitude that is not a belief. Because closure principles concern only knowledge-apt beliefs, they do not apply to hinge commitments. Thus, from the fact that (...) a subject knows that he is sitting in a room, and the fact that the subject’s sitting in a room entails his bodily existence, it does not follow that the subject also knows that he is not an envatted brain. This paper rejects Pritchard’s non-belief reading of hinge commitments. I start by showing that the non-belief reading fails to solve the skeptical paradox because the reasons that Pritchard uses to support the non-belief reading do not exempt hinge propositions from closure principles. I then proceed to argue that the non-belief reading is false as it claims that hinge commitments, unlike ordinary beliefs, are rationally unresponsive—with the help of a scenario in which a subject’s experience is internally chaotic, we can safely conclude that the hinge commitment that one is not systematically mistaken about the world is equally responsive to one’s evidential situations. (shrink)

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer an opportunity for computational social science research at scale. Building upon prior explorations of LLM agent design, our work introduces a simulated agent society where complex social relationships dynamically form and evolve over time. Agents are imbued with psychological drives and placed in a sandbox survival environment. We conduct an evaluation of the agent society through the lens of Thomas Hobbes's seminal Social Contract Theory (SCT). We (...) analyze whether, as the theory postulates, agents seek to escape a brutish "state of nature" by surrendering rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order and security. Our experiments unveil an alignment: Initially, agents engage in unrestrained conflict, mirroring Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. However, as the simulation progresses, social contracts emerge, leading to the authorization of an absolute sovereign and the establishment of a peaceful commonwealth founded on mutual cooperation. This congruence between our LLM agent society's evolutionary trajectory and Hobbes's theoretical account indicates LLMs' capability to model intricate social dynamics and potentially replicate forces that shape human societies. By enabling such insights into group behavior and emergent societal phenomena, LLM-driven multi-agent simulations, while unable to simulate all the nuances of human behavior, may hold potential for advancing our understanding of social structures, group dynamics, and complex human systems. (shrink)

Valuing something is complicated. Philosophers have offered different stories about what we do when we value something. However, we have not paid enough attention to the thought that, sometimes, valuing something is what makes us the kind of practical agents we are. In this paper, I offer a novel account of valuing, which I call thick valuing, to capture this special phenomenon in which our valuing makes us who we are. This requires us to recognize that the cognitive, motivational, and (...) affective components of thick valuing do not merely co-occur. More importantly, it is key to focusing on how thickly valuing something partially constitutes, and indeed crucially expresses, our practical identities. Beyond that, the account sheds new light on how we can better understand inauthenticity—to act without authenticity is to act from what one thickly values but where that which one thickly values are not values of one’s own. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

The gradation of know-how is a prominent challenge to intellectualism. Know-how is prima facie gradable, whereas know-that is not, so the former is unlikely to be a species of the latter. Recently, Pavese refuted this challenge by explaining the gradation of know-how as concerning either the quantity or the quality of practical answers one knows to a question. Know-how per se remains absolute. This paper argues, however, that in addition to the quantity and quality of practical answers, know-how also differs (...) in how reliably the agent is supposed to fulfil the task given her default constitution. Intellectualism is still troubled by the gradability challenge. (shrink)

Plato's view on time, a key aspect of his doctrine of forms, is influenced by his reception of Parmenides, but the way in which Plato takes up and modifies Parmenides' view is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. In this article, the author analyzes Plato's revision of Parmenidean time by exploring four temporalities: the eternal present, timeless eternity, the enduring present, and the instant between time and eternity. Through this examination, she uncovers the common origin of both the eternal present (...) of Parmenides' fragment B8 and the flowing present of the phenomenal realm in the instant (ἐξαίφνης) in Plato's Parmenides. This perspective on time offers a promising solution to Plato's problem of participation, bridging the gap between the eternal being of the form and the being in time of the particulars. (shrink)

E. Husserl’s reflections in Logical Investigations on “intentional feelings” and “non-intentional feelings” are significant in both his later ethical explorations and M. Scheler’s thought on ethics. Through the incorporation of the views of Husserl and Scheler, we find that the phenomenology of the intentional feeling-acts is not only the foundation of the non-formal ethics of values in Scheler’s phenomenology, but also at least the constitutive foundation of the ethics of Husserl’s first orientation.

The topics approached in the 52 papers included in this book are: neutrosophic sets; neutrosophic logic; generalized neutrosophic set; neutrosophic rough set; multigranulation neutrosophic rough set (MNRS); neutrosophic cubic sets; triangular fuzzy neutrosophic sets (TFNSs); probabilistic single-valued (interval) neutrosophic hesitant fuzzy set; neutro-homomorphism; neutrosophic computation; quantum computation; neutrosophic association rule; data mining; big data; oracle Turing machines; recursive enumerability; oracle computation; interval number; dependent degree; possibility degree; power aggregation operators; multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM); expert set; soft sets; LA-semihypergroups; single valued (...) trapezoidal neutrosophic number; inclusion relation; Q-linguistic neutrosophic variable set; vector similarity measure; fundamental neutro-homomorphism theorem; neutro-isomorphism theorem; quasi neutrosophic triplet loop; quasi neutrosophic triplet group; BE-algebra; cloud model; Maclaurin symmetric mean; pseudo-BCI algebra; hesitant fuzzy set; photovoltaic plan; decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL); Choquet integral; fuzzy measure; clustering algorithm; and many more. (shrink)