Results for 'structure'

942 found
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  1.  96
    Teleosemantics, Structural Resemblance and Predictive Processing.Ross Alexander Pain & Stephen Francis Mann - 2024 - Erkenntnis:1-25.
    We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism combines Millikan's teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The paper has two goals. First, we outline how a teleosemantic treatment of signal passing in predictive processing systems would work, and how it integrates with structural resemblance accounts. We show that the core explanatory motivations and conceptual machinery of teleosemantics and predictive processing mesh together well. Second, we argue this pluralist approach expands the range of empirical cases to (...)
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  2. Representational Structures in Consciousness.Manuel Bremer - manuscript
    This essay tries to elucidate structural elements of consciousness by drawing on phenomenological descriptions of consciousness and employing representationalist models of consciousness. The aim is not to explain the genesis of self-awareness, but to outline different aspects of its structure.
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  3. Part Structures, Integrity, and the Mass-Count Distinction.Friederike Moltmann - 1998 - Synthese 116 (1):75 - 111.
    The notions of part and whole play an important role for ontology and in many areas of the semantics of natural language. Both in philosophy and linguistic semantics, usually a particular notion of part structure is used, that of extensional mereology. This paper argues that such a notion is insufficient for ontology and, especially, for the semantic analysis of the relevant constructions of natural language. What is needed for the notion of part structure, in addition to an ordering (...)
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  4. Equilibrium explanation as structural non-mechanistic explanation: The case long-term bacterial persistence in human hosts.Javier Suárez & Roger Deulofeu - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 3 (38):95-120.
    Philippe Huneman has recently questioned the widespread application of mechanistic models of scientific explanation based on the existence of structural explanations, i.e. explanations that account for the phenomenon to be explained in virtue of the mathematical properties of the system where the phenomenon obtains, rather than in terms of the mechanisms that causally produce the phenomenon. Structural explanations are very diverse, including cases like explanations in terms of bowtie structures, in terms of the topological properties of the system, or in (...)
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  5. Linguistic Structures and Economic Outcomes.Clas Weber & Astghik Mavisakalyan - 2017 - Journal of Economics Surveys 32 (3):916-939.
    Linguistic structures have recently started to attract attention from economists as determinants of economic phenomena. This paper provides the first comprehensive review of this nascent literature and its achievements so far. First, we explore the complex connections between language, culture, thought and behaviour. Then, we summarize the empirical evidence on the relationship between linguistic structures and economic and social outcomes. We follow up with a discussion of data, empirical design and identification. The paper concludes by discussing implications for future research (...)
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  6. The structures of the common-sense world.Barry Smith - 1995 - Acta Philosophica Fennica 58:290–317.
    While contemporary philosophers have devoted vast amounts of attention to the language we use in describing and finding our way about the world of everyday experience, they have, with few exceptions, refused to see this world itself as a fitting object of theoretical concern. In what follows I shall seek to show how the commonsensical world might be treated ontologically as an object of investigation in its own right. At the same time I shall seek to establish how such a (...)
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  7. Structural Realism or Modal Empiricism?Quentin Ruyant - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):1051-1072.
    Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However, it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are too strongly qualified, then it is no longer SR. A way to overcome this difficulty is to (...)
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  8. Substitution Structures.Andrew Bacon - 2019 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 48 (6):1017-1075.
    An increasing amount of twenty-first century metaphysics is couched in explicitly hyperintensional terms. A prerequisite of hyperintensional metaphysics is that reality itself be hyperintensional: at the metaphysical level, propositions, properties, operators, and other elements of the type hierarchy, must be more fine-grained than functions from possible worlds to extensions. In this paper I develop, in the setting of type theory, a general framework for reasoning about the granularity of propositions and properties. The theory takes as primitive the notion of a (...)
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  9. Swap structures semantics for Ivlev-like modal logics.Marcelo E. Coniglio & Ana Claudia Golzio - 2019 - Soft Computing 23 (7):2243-2254.
    In 1988, J. Ivlev proposed some (non-normal) modal systems which are semantically characterized by four-valued non-deterministic matrices in the sense of A. Avron and I. Lev. Swap structures are multialgebras (a.k.a. hyperalgebras) of a special kind, which were introduced in 2016 by W. Carnielli and M. Coniglio in order to give a non-deterministic semantical account for several paraconsistent logics known as logics of formal inconsistency, which are not algebraizable by means of the standard techniques. Each swap structure induces naturally (...)
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  10. Structural Rationality and the Property of Coherence.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (1):170-194.
    What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...)
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  11. The Structure of Essentialist Explanations of Necessity.Michael Wallner - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):4-13.
    Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch (...)
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  12. The Structure of Analog Representation.Andrew Y. Lee, Joshua Myers & Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):209-237.
    This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in (...)
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  13. A Structural Explanation of Injustice in Conversations: It's about Norms.Saray Ayala-López - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):726-748.
    In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural (...)
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  14. (1 other version)Structural realism: Continuity and its limits.Ioannis Votsis - 2011 - In Alisa Bokulich & Peter Bokulich (eds.), Scientific Structuralism. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 105--117.
    Structural realists of nearly all stripes endorse the structural continuity claim. Roughly speaking, this is the claim that the structure of successful scientific theories survives theory change because it has latched on to the structure of the world. In this paper I elaborate, elucidate and modify the structural continuity claim and its associated argument. I do so without presupposing a particular conception of structure that favours this or that kind of structural realism. Instead I focus on how (...)
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  15. Structural representations do not meet the job description challenge.Marco Facchin - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5479-5508.
    Structural representations are increasingly popular in philosophy of cognitive science. A key virtue they seemingly boast is that of meeting Ramsey's job description challenge. For this reason, structural representations appear tailored to play a clear representational role within cognitive architectures. Here, however, I claim that structural representations do not meet the job description challenge. This is because even our most demanding account of their functional profile is satisfied by at least some receptors, which paradigmatically fail the job description challenge. Hence, (...)
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  16. Truth, Structure and Object.Rodrigues André - manuscript
    : To address the question “on what there is” raised by Quine, and to accomplish the task of comprehending exhaustively the many ontological units that populate the great province of Being, we propose as an alternative to Puntel’s ontology a new ontology designated as “Structural Ontology” (SO). Such ontology is based on systematic-structural theoretical foundations, but leads to a diverse view in which structured factual units, structural configurations (dynamics), as well as apparent ontological units (objects), all encompassed by the temporal (...)
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  17. Structural Injustice and Massively Shared Obligations.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2021 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (1):1-16.
    It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of people are (...)
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  18. Beyond Structure: New Frontiers of the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn.Vincenzo Politi & Yafeng Shan - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (2):81-86.
    Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn (...)
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  19. Ontic Structural Realism and Modality.Nora Berenstain & James Ladyman - 2012 - In Elaine Landry & Dean Rickles (eds.), Structural Realism: Structure, Object, and Causality. Springer.
    There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world. Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider whether scientific (...)
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  20. A Theory of Structured Propositions.Andrew Bacon - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (2):173-238.
    This paper argues that the theory of structured propositions is not undermined by the Russell-Myhill paradox. I develop a theory of structured propositions in which the Russell-Myhill paradox doesn't arise: the theory does not involve ramification or compromises to the underlying logic, but rather rejects common assumptions, encoded in the notation of the $\lambda$-calculus, about what properties and relations can be built. I argue that the structuralist had independent reasons to reject these underlying assumptions. The theory is given both a (...)
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  21.  6
    Structural encroachment.Aliosha Barranco Lopez - forthcoming - Philosophical Issues.
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  22. What Structural Injustice Theory Leaves Out.Daniel Butt - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (5):1161-1175.
    Alasia Nuti’s recent book Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress puts forward a compelling vision of contemporary duties to redress past wrongdoing, grounded in the idea of “historical-structural-injustice”, constituted by the “structural reproduction of an unjust history over time and through changes”. Such an approach promises to transcend the familiar scholarly divide between “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” models, and allow for a reparative approach that focuses specifically on those past wrongs that impact the present, while retaining (...)
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  23. Mental Structures.Kevin Lande - 2020 - Noûs (3):649-677.
    An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle (...)
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  24. Structure.Tuomas Tahko - 2020 - In Michael J. Raven (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding. New York: Routledge. pp. 387-395.
    An exploration of ground’s connections to structure (joint-carving, naturalness). The notion of structure is often invoked in connection to ground, because grounding is understood to impose constraints on the ‘structure of reality’. There is another, technical sense of structure, sometimes captured with reference to the notion of ‘joint-carving’. Both of these senses of structure as well as their potential connections are discussed.
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  25. A Structural Equation Model on Pro-Social Skills and Expectancy-Value of STEM Students.Starr Clyde Sebial & Joy Mirasol - 2023 - European Journal of Educational Research 12 (2):967-976.
    The objective of the study was to develop a structural model that explores the relationship between Mathematics Performance and students’ self-regulated learning skills, grit, and expectancy-value towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The research collected survey data from 664 senior high school students from 17 STEM high schools, and conducted a covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. The results of the SEM analysis indicate that the Re-specified Self-Regulated Learning Skill – Expectancy-Value towards STEM – Grit – Mathematics Performance (Re-specified (...)
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  26. Structural equations and beyond.Franz Huber - 2013 - Review of Symbolic Logic 6 (4):709-732.
    Recent accounts of actual causation are stated in terms of extended causal models. These extended causal models contain two elements representing two seemingly distinct modalities. The first element are structural equations which represent the or mechanisms of the model, just as ordinary causal models do. The second element are ranking functions which represent normality or typicality. The aim of this paper is to show that these two modalities can be unified. I do so by formulating two constraints under which extended (...)
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  27. Structure-preserving Representations, Constitution and the Relative A priori.Thomas Mormann - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Supplement 21):1-24.
    The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the 20th century. More precisely, it is argued that the accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz may be taken as prototypes of representational accounts in which structure preservation plays an essential role. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date (...)
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  28. Contributing to Historical-Structural Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts.Jennifer M. Https://Orcidorg Page - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (5):1197-1211.
    Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. (...)
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  29. Structure and Categoricity: Determinacy of Reference and Truth Value in the Philosophy of Mathematics.Tim Button & Sean Walsh - 2016 - Philosophia Mathematica 24 (3):283-307.
    This article surveys recent literature by Parsons, McGee, Shapiro and others on the significance of categoricity arguments in the philosophy of mathematics. After discussing whether categoricity arguments are sufficient to secure reference to mathematical structures up to isomorphism, we assess what exactly is achieved by recent ‘internal’ renditions of the famous categoricity arguments for arithmetic and set theory.
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  30. Structural fixed-point theorems.Brian Rabern & Landon Rabern - manuscript
    The semantic paradoxes are associated with self-reference or referential circularity. However, there are infinitary versions of the paradoxes, such as Yablo's paradox, that do not involve this form of circularity. It remains an open question what relations of reference between collections of sentences afford the structure necessary for paradoxicality -- these are the so-called "dangerous" directed graphs. Building on Rabern, et. al (2013) we reformulate this problem in terms of fixed points of certain functions, thereby boiling it down to (...)
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  31. Structure of perceptual objects: introduction to the Synthese topical collection.Alfredo Vernazzani, Błażej Skrzypulec & Tobias Schlicht - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1819-1830.
    Introduction to the topical collection "The Structure of Perceptual Objects"—with contributions by Mohan Matthen, EJ Green, Alisa Mandrigin, Blazej Skrzypulec, and Anna Drożdżowicz.
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  32. Must Structural Realism Cover the Special Sciences?Holger Lyre - 2013 - In Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 383--390.
    Structural Realism (SR) is typically rated as a moderate realist doctrine about the ultimate entities of nature described by fundamental physics. Whether it must be extended to the higher-level special sciences is not so clear. In this short paper I argue that there is no need to ‘structuralize’ the special sciences. By mounting concrete examples I show that structural descriptions and structural laws certainly play a role in the special sciences, but that they don’t play any exclusive role nor that (...)
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  33. The Structure of Spatial Localization.Roberto Casati & Achille Varzi - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 82 (2):205 - 239.
    What are the relationships between an entity and the space at which it is located? And between a region of space and the events that take place there? What is the metaphysical structure of localization? What its modal status? This paper addresses some of these questions in an attempt to work out at least the main coordinates of the logical structure of localization. Our task is mostly taxonomic. But we also highlight some of the underlying structural features and (...)
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  34. Metaphysical structures and holism: Reply to Schaffer.Milos Bogdanovic - manuscript
    This paper deals with Schaffer’s distinction between metaphysical structures, as well as his appeal for revival of neo-Aristotelian approaches that imply ordered structure, based on the criticism of Quine’s method that, in his view, implies flat metaphysical structure. However, although we believe that Schaffer’s distinction between metaphysical structures is an interesting and, basically, acceptable view, we will try to show that Schaffer’s arguments are not convincing enough to persuade us to abandon Quine’s method and adopt the Aristotelian metaphysical (...)
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  35. Conceptual structure of classical logic.John Corcoran - 1972 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 33 (1):25-47.
    One innovation in this paper is its identification, analysis, and description of a troubling ambiguity in the word ‘argument’. In one sense ‘argument’ denotes a premise-conclusion argument: a two-part system composed of a set of sentences—the premises—and a single sentence—the conclusion. In another sense it denotes a premise-conclusion-mediation argument—later called an argumentation: a three-part system composed of a set of sentences—the premises—a single sentence—the conclusion—and complex of sentences—the mediation. The latter is often intended to show that the conclusion follows from (...)
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  36. The structure of propositions and cross-linguistic syntactic variability.Vasilis Tsompanidis - 2013 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy (39):399-419.
    In Jeffrey King’s theory of structured propositions, propositional structure mirrors the syntactic structure of natural language sentences that express it. I provide cases where this claim individuates propositions too finely across languages. Crucially, King’s paradigmatic proposition-fact ^that Dara swims^ cannot be believed by a monolingual Greek speaker, due to Greek syntax requiring an obligatory article in front of proper names. King’s two possible replies are: (i) to try to streamline the syntax of Greek and English; or (ii) to (...)
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  37. Structural realism versus deployment realism: A comparative evaluation.Timothy D. Lyons - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 59:95-105.
    In this paper I challenge and adjudicate between the two positions that have come to prominence in the scientific realism debate: deployment realism and structural realism. I discuss a set of cases from the history of celestial mechanics, including some of the most important successes in the history of science. To the surprise of the deployment realist, these are novel predictive successes toward which theoretical constituents that are now seen to be patently false were genuinely deployed. Exploring the implications for (...)
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  38. Structural Injustice and the Place of Attachment.Lea Ypi - 2017 - Journal of Practical Ethics 5 (1):1-21.
    Reflection on the historical injustice suffered by many formerly colonized groups has left us with a peculiar account of their claims to material objects. One important upshot of that account, relevant to present day justice, is that many people seem to think that members of indigenous groups have special claims to the use of particular external objects by virtue of their attachment to them. In the first part of this paper I argue against that attachment-based claim. In the second part (...)
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  39. (1 other version)Structural Injustice, Shared Obligations, and Global Civil Society.Jelena Belić & Zlata Božac - 2022 - Social Theory and Practice 48 (4):607-628.
    It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations, but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. Thus, we do (...)
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  40. Structural transformation, agriculture and livestock in Vietnam (1970-2015).Nguyen Mai Huong - 2017 - Journées de Recherches En Sciences Sociales 11:1-35.
    Vietnam has exhibited rapid economic growth over thirty years of comprehensive economic reforms. However, about half of the country’s active population remains in agriculture. In order to characterize the role of agriculture and livestock in Vietnam’s structural transformation, we assess ongoing dynamics at three complementary scales: national, sectoral (agriculture and livestock) and local (district of Bavi). We show that the transition since Doi Moi (Renovation) has given rise to a political economy that provides incentives to industries and services. However, labor (...)
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  41. Organizational Structure and its Relation to the Prevailing Pattern of Communication in Palestinian Universities.Suliman A. El Talla, Mazen J. Al Shobaki, Samy S. Abu-Naser & Youssef M. Abu Amuna - 2018 - International Journal of Engineering and Information Systems (IJEAIS) 2 (5):22-43.
    The aim of the study was to identify the organizational structure and its relation to the prevailing pattern of communication in the Palestinian universities. The researchers used the analytical descriptive method through a questionnaire randomly distributed among Palestinian university workers in the Gaza Strip. The study was conducted on a sample of (274) administrative staff from the three universities, and the response rate was (81.87%). The study found that there is a high satisfaction with the nature of the organizational (...)
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  42. Structural Gaslighting.Nora Berenstain - forthcoming - In Hanna Gunn, Holly Longair & Kelly Oliver (eds.), Gaslighting: Philosophical Approaches. New York: SUNY Press.
    Structures of oppression and administrative systems in white supremacist settler colonial societies rely on epistemological foundations to orient them toward their goals of containment and land dispossession. Structural gaslighting refers to the justifying stories and mythologies produced in these societies to normalize, obscure, and uphold structures of oppression. Such epistemic legwork often works by naturalizing socially produced inequalities through positing biological or cultural deficiencies in the target populations. This paper develops the concept of structural gaslighting introduced in Berenstain (2020) as (...)
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  43. Minimal structure explanations, scientific understanding and explanatory depth.Daniel Kostić - 2018 - Perspectives on Science (1):48-67.
    In this paper, I outline a heuristic for thinking about the relation between explanation and understanding that can be used to capture various levels of “intimacy”, between them. I argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation is inversely proportional to the level of intimacy between explanation and understanding, i.e. the more complexity the less intimacy. I further argue that the level of complexity in the structure of explanation also affects the explanatory depth in a (...)
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  44. A theory of structural determination.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (1):159-186.
    While structural equations modeling is increasingly used in philosophical theorizing about causation, it remains unclear what it takes for a particular structural equations model to be correct. To the extent that this issue has been addressed, the consensus appears to be that it takes a certain family of causal counterfactuals being true. I argue that this account faces difficulties in securing the independent manipulability of the structural determination relations represented in a correct structural equations model. I then offer an alternate (...)
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  45. Structural Chaos.Conor Mayo-Wilson - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):1236-1247.
    A dynamical system is called chaotic if small changes to its initial conditions can create large changes in its behavior. By analogy, we call a dynamical system structurally chaotic if small changes to the equations describing the evolution of the system produce large changes in its behavior. Although there are many definitions of “chaos,” there are few mathematically precise candidate definitions of “structural chaos.” I propose a definition, and I explain two new theorems that show that a set of models (...)
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  46. Structural universals.A. R. J. Fisher - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (10):e12518.
    Structural universals are a kind of complex universal. They have been put to work in a variety of philosophical theories but are plagued with problems concerning their compositional nature. In this article, we will discuss the following questions. What are structural universals? Why believe in them? Can we give a consistent account of their compositional nature? What are the costs of doing so?
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  47. Structural Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter & Alex Worsnip - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality – including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, synchronic or diachronic, and whether they govern processes (...)
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  48. A structural approach to defining units of selection.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 1989 - Philosophy of Science 56 (3):395-418.
    The conflation of two fundamentally distinct issues has generated serious confusion in the philosophical and biological literature concerning the units of selection. The question of how a unit of selection of defined, theoretically, is rarely distinguished from the question of how to determine the empirical accuracy of claims--either specific or general--concerning which unit(s) is undergoing selection processes. In this paper, I begin by refining a definition of the unit of selection, first presented in the philosophical literature by William Wimsatt, which (...)
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  49. On structural accounts of model-explanations.Martin King - 2016 - Synthese 193 (9):2761-2778.
    The focus in the literature on scientific explanation has shifted in recent years towards model-based approaches. In recent work, Alisa Bokulich has argued that idealization has a central role to play in explanation. Bokulich claims that certain highly-idealized, structural models can be explanatory, even though they are not considered explanatory by causal, mechanistic, or covering law accounts of explanation. This paper focuses on Bokulich’s account in order to make the more general claim that there are problems with maintaining that a (...)
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  50. The structure of epistemic probabilities.Nevin Climenhaga - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3213-3242.
    The epistemic probability of A given B is the degree to which B evidentially supports A, or makes A plausible. This paper is a first step in answering the question of what determines the values of epistemic probabilities. I break this question into two parts: the structural question and the substantive question. Just as an object’s weight is determined by its mass and gravitational acceleration, some probabilities are determined by other, more basic ones. The structural question asks what probabilities are (...)
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