Turing Completeness of Finite, Epistemic Programs

In this note, we show the class of finite, epistemic programs to be Turing complete. Epistemic programs is a widely used update mechanism used in epistemic logic, where it such are a special type of action models: One which does not contain postconditions

On Pre- and Post-Disciplinarity in (Cultural) Political Economy

For some time now we have been working both individually and together on a new approach to political economy that does not fit neatly into the standard ways of thinking about political economy as a discipline. Instead, we describe our shared approach as pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and post-disciplinary in its current intellectual implications. Of course, we are not alone in refusing disciplinary boundaries and decrying some of their effects. Indeed, there are many signs of increasing commitment among social scientists to transcending such boundaries to better understand the complex interconnections within and across the natural and social worlds. We advocate the idea of a 'cultural political economy' and suggest how it might transform understandings of recent developments in political economy. Before doing so, however, we will situate our proposals for cultural political economy in the broader context of exciting recent developments in political economy

Against the Virtual: Kleinherenbrink’s Externality Thesis and Deleuze’s Machine Ontology

Drawing from Arjen Kleinherenbrink's recent book, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism (2019), this paper undertakes a detailed review of Kleinherenbrink's fourfold "externality thesis" vis-à-vis Deleuze's machine ontology. Reading Deleuze as a philosopher of the actual, this paper renders Deleuzean syntheses as passive contemplations, pulling other (passive) entities into an (active) experience and designating relations as expressed through contraction. In addition to reviewing Kleinherenbrink's book (which argues that the machine ontology is a guiding current that emerges in Deleuze's work after Difference and Repetition) alongside much of Deleuze's oeuvre, we relate and juxtapose Deleuze's machine ontology to positions concerning externality held by a host of speculative realists. Arguing that the machine ontology has its own account of interaction, change, and novelty, we ultimately set to prove that positing an ontological "cut" on behalf of the virtual realm is unwarranted because, unlike the realm of actualities, it is extraneous to the structure of becoming-that is, because it cannot be homogenous, any theory of change vis-à-vis the virtual makes it impossible to explain how and why qualitatively different actualities are produced

AN INTIMATE INSIGHT ON PSYCHOPATHY AND A NOVEL HERMENEUTIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Abstract This paper is rather a profound hermeneutic enunciation putting into question our present understanding of psychopathy. It further articulates, in complement, a novel theoretical and methodological conceptualisation for a hermeneutic psychological science. Methodology-wise, it puts into question a traditional more or less categorical and mechanical approach to the social and behavioural sciences as it strives to introduce a creative and insightful approach for the articulation of ideas. It rather seeks to construe the scientific method as being more about falsifiability and validation but driven by a sense of creative understanding and insight of notions laid out as open-ended conceptualisations. Theory-wise, it sees continuity between anthropology and psychology as anthropopsychology behind an entropic construct of human psychology based on a recurrent re-institutionalisation mechanism for intemporal-preservation-entropy-or-contiguity–or–ontological-preservation

Modal Logics and Group Polarization

Under embargo until: 2022-10-22This paper proposes different ways of modally defining properties related to the concept of balance in signed social networks where relations can be either positive or negative. The motivation is to be able to formally reason about the social phenomenon of group polarization based on balance theory. The starting point is a recently developed basic modal logic that axiomatizes the class of social networks that are balanced up to a certain degree. This property is not modally definable but can be captured using a deduction rule. In this work, we examine different possibilities for extending this basic language to define frame properties such as balance and related properties such as non-overlapping positive and negative relations and collective connectedness as axioms. Furthermore, we define the property of full balance rather than balanced-up-to-a-degree. We look into the complexity of the model checking problem and show a non-compactness result of the extended language. Along the way, we provide axioms for weak balance. We also look at a full hybrid extension and reason about network changes with dynamic modalities. Then, to explore the measures of how far a network is from polarization, we consider variations of measures in relation to balance.acceptedVersio

Tsunami Hazard Assessment: Best Modeling Practices and State-of-the-Art Technology

NUREG/CR-722

Tsunami Hazard Assessment: Best Modeling Practices and State-of-the-Art Technology

NUREG/CR-722