49 research outputs found

    Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies - Part 2

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    Modern technology has eliminated barriers posed by geographic distances between people around the globe, making the world more interdependent. However, in spite of global collaboration within research domains, fragmentation among research fields persists and even escalates. Disintegrated knowledge has become subservient to the competition in the technological and economic race, leading in the direction chosen not by reason and intellect but rather by the preferences of politics and markets. To restore the authority of knowledge in guiding humanity, we have to reconnect its scattered isolated parts and offer an evolving and diverse but shared vision of objective reality connecting the sciences and other knowledge domains and informed by and in communication with ethical and esthetic thinking and being. This collection of articles responds to the second call from the journal Philosophies to build a new, networked world of knowledge with domain specialists from different disciplines interacting and connecting with the rest of the knowledge-producing and knowledge-consuming communities in an inclusive, extended natural-philosophic, human-centric manner. In this process of reconnection, scientific and philosophical investigations enrich each other, with sciences informing philosophies about the best current knowledge of the world, both natural and human-made, while philosophies scrutinize the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of sciences

    Sui Generis-ness, Parsimony and Innocence: The (Meta)2physics of Parthood

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    A metaphysical naturalist could find the following combination of claims attractive. First, part-whole and composition in physics are sui generis and lack some of the ‘core’ features we ascribe to these concepts and their worldly satisfiers in first-order metaphysics. Second, having agreed that some physical objects of interest satisfy sui generis concepts and/or relate by sui generis relations, none among these objects satisfies a classical concept or relate by a classical part-whole relation (e.g. the concept or relation of mereological part). The first claim I read as one of ‘appropriation’: the structural relations between physical objects of interest are sui generis and yet they pertain to the mereological kind. The second I read as one of ‘elimination’: metaphysically abstracted part-whole (or composition) has no instances in well- regarded physical domains. The dissertation argues for appropriation and against elimination. For appropriation, because current physics sanctions relata of part-whole relations (or at least satisfiers of part-whole concepts) that clash with intuitive, seemingly analytic principles for part-whole, e.g. the Antisymmetry postulate (x and y are mutual parts only if identical). Against elimination, because whether these objects of interest to physics also relate by ‘canonical’ part-whole (with the intuitive principles) is largely a question of parsimony. One removes instances of the canonical relations because these are not needed to account for the composition of objects that already relate by the non-canonical ones. But some of these relations at least (such as mereological part-whole) resist the pressure from parsimony, for they come at no cost once the objects already relate non-canonically (e.g. in opposition to the Antisymmetry postulate). The latter we can argue for in (at least) two ways: 1. canonical and non-canonical part-whole are members of a single kind, 2. canonical part-whole is of a kind with identity. Given either view and a preference for theories with minimal kinds, instances of the canonical relation do not increase a theory’s profligacy, because their kind is already instanced in a theory of objects that relate non-canonically. My preference is for the latter view

    Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies—Part 2

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    This is a short presentation by the Guest Editors of the series of Special Issues of the journal Philosophies under the common title "Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies" in which we present Part 2. The series will continue, and the call for contributions to the next Special Issue will appear shortly

    Metaontology, emergence and theory choice: in defence of Mereological Nihilism.

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    This thesis offers detailed remarks on debates in metametaphysics, the question of ontological emergence and the merits of extra-empirical theory choice criteria, such as ontological and ideological parsimony, in the course of defending Mereological Nihilism (nihilism). Part I is primarily a discussion of the metaontology of the composition debate and how nihilism begins to look like a more attractive theory once a certain metaontological framework is adopted. §0. provides an overview of the background assumptions of my thesis and outlines the dialectical strategy I will be employing. §1. Explains why a strategy is needed to reconcile revisionary ontological claims, such as nihilism, with common sense: I argue for the Ontologese Strategy (OS) over the more established neo-Quinean paraphrase strategy. §2. Elucidates OS and defends it from objections, while §3. discusses the status of non-fundamental existential claims on OS and responds to further objections. §4. Employs OS to defend nihilism from epistemic dismissivism, which threatens to undercut the prima facie theoretical advantages of nihilism— demonstrating the utility of OS in advancing the first order debate. In Part II I defend nihilism from what I take to be the major challenge to the theory once certain metaontological assumptions are in place: the epistemic possibility of ontological emergence. §5. sets out the main line of defence – a strategy employing plural instantiation. §6. explores alternative strategies such as entanglement relations, fundamental indeterminacy and extended simples. §7. Looks at arguments for monism vs. pluralism in light of putative emergence from quantum mechanics and argues there is conceptual room for a third way – Local Holism. §8. Tries to bolster the assumption of this thesis that parsimony considerations are relevant to the composition debate. In §9. I make some concluding remarks for the thesis as a whole

    Parsing dialogue and argumentative structures

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    Le présent manuscrit présente de nouvelles techniques d'extraction des structures : du dialogue de groupe, d'une part; de textes argumentatifs, d'autre part. Déceler la structure de longs textes et de conversations est une étape cruciale afin de reconstruire leur signification sous-jacente. La difficulté de cette tâche est largement reconnue, sachant que le discours est une description de haut niveau du langage, et que le dialogue de groupe inclut de nombreux phénomènes linguistiques complexes. Historiquement, la représentation du discours a fortement évolué, partant de relations locales, formant des collections non-structurées, vers des arbres, puis des graphes contraints. Nos travaux utilisent ce dernier paradigme, via la Théorie de Représentation du Discours Segmenté. Notre recherche se base sur un corpus annoté de discussions en ligne en anglais, issues du jeu de société Les Colons de Catane. De par la nature stratégique des conversations, et la liberté que permet le format électronique des discussions, ces dialogues contiennent des Unités Discursives Complexes, des fils de discussion intriqués, parmi d'autres propriétés que la littérature actuelle sur l'analyse du discours ignore en général. Nous discutons de deux investigations liées à notre corpus. La première étend la définition de la contrainte de la frontière droite, une formalisation de certains principes de cohérence de la structure du discours, pour l'adapter au dialogue de groupe. La seconde fait la démonstration d'un processus d'extraction de données permettant à un joueur artificiel des Colons d'obtenir un avantage stratégique en déduisant les possessions de ses adversaires à partir de leurs négociations. Nous proposons de nouvelles méthodes d'analyse du dialogue, utilisant conjointement apprentissage automatisé, algorithmes de graphes et optimisation linéaire afin de produire des structures riches et expressives, avec une précision supérieure comparée aux efforts existants. Nous décrivons notre méthode d'analyse du discours par contraintes, d'abord sur des arbres en employant la construction d'un arbre couvrant maximal, puis sur des graphes orientés acycliques en utilisant la programmation linéaire par entiers avec une collection de contraintes originales. Nous appliquons enfin ces méthodes sur les structures de l'argumentation, avec un corpus de textes en anglais et en allemand, parallèlement annotés avec deux structures du discours et une argumentative. Nous comparons les trois couches d'annotation et expérimentons sur l'analyse de l'argumentation, obtenant de meilleurs résultats, relativement à des travaux similaires.This work presents novel techniques for parsing the structures of multi-party dialogue and argumentative texts. Finding the structure of extended texts and conversations is a critical step towards the extraction of their underlying meaning. The task is notoriously hard, as discourse is a high-level description of language, and multi-party dialogue involves many complex linguistic phenomena. Historically, representation of discourse moved from local relationships, forming unstructured collections, towards trees, then constrained graphs. Our work uses the latter framework, through Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. We base our research on a annotated corpus of English chats from the board game The Settlers of Catan. Per the strategic nature of the conversation and the freedom of online chat, these dialogues exhibit complex discourse units, interwoven threads, among other features which are mostly overlooked by the current parsing literature. We discuss two corpus-related experiments. The first expands the definition of the Right Frontier Constraint, a formalization of discourse coherence principles, to adapt it to multi-party dialogue. The second demonstrates a data extraction process giving a strategic advantage to an artificial player of Settlers by inferring its opponents' assets from chat negotiations. We propose new methods to parse dialogue, using jointly machine learning, graph algorithms and linear optimization, to produce rich and expressive structures with greater accuracy than previous attempts. We describe our method of constrained discourse parsing, first on trees using the Maximum Spanning Tree algorithm, then on directed acyclic graphs using Integer Linear Programming with a number of original constraints. We finally apply these methods to argumentative structures, on a corpus of English and German texts, jointly annotated in two discourse representation frameworks and one argumentative. We compare the three annotation layers, and experiment on argumentative parsing, achieving better performance than similar works

    Daļas un veselumi Aristoteļa substances koncepcijās

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    Disertācijā "Daļas un veselumi Aristoteļa substances koncepcijā" autore parāda, ka vairāku 'daļas' un 'veseluma' nozīmju nošķīrums atrisina substances (οὐσία) vienības problēmu. Lai gan problēma un arī risinājums ir Aristoteļa, viņš šim jautājumam nevelta atsevišķu izklāstu. Disertācija piedāvā detalizētu substances vienības problēmas analīzi, izmantojot instrumentus, kas darināti, ņemot vērā Aristoteļa piezīmes par daļām un veselumiem, t. i., mereoloģiju (no μέρος – 'daļa'). Izpētes centrā ir salikta (sajūtama vai vieliska) substance. Autore aizstāv vairākus Aristoteļa pētniecībā strīdīgus apgalvojumus (uzskatu, ka daļas–veseluma attiecībai (part–whole relation) ir vairākas nozīmes, priekšstatu par veidolu un vielu kā par īstenām (proper) un reālām (real) daļām, veidola saliktību), kuri tiek pamatoti, aplūkojot Aristoteļa darbu korpusa fragmentus un iztirzājot dažādu komentētāju viedokļus. Atslēgas vārdi: Aristotelis, daļa, veselums, substanceThe dissertation "Parts and Wholes in Aristotle's Conception of Substance" shows that the distinction of several senses of 'part' and 'whole' solves the problem of unity of substance (οὐσία). Although both the problem and the solution are Aristotle's, he himself has not provided a separate exposition devoted specifically to this topic. The dissertation offers a dissection of the problem of unity of substance with instruments shaped by Aristotle's remarks on parts and wholes, i.e. mereology (from μέρος, 'part'). The investigation pertains to the composite (sensible or material) substance. The author has defended various claims that are controversial in Aristotelian scholarship (the plurality of the senses of the part–whole relation; the idea that form and matter are proper and real parts; the complexity of form), which have been unfolded by providing evidence in Aristotle's corpus and by discussing the views of various commentators. Keywords: Aristotle, part, whole, substanc
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