The return of faith and reason to laïcité; Régis Debray and 'le fait religieux'

In 1985, Marcel Gauchet wrote of the ‘retour du religieux’ as an end to the social role of religion and the beginning of its privatisation. However, far from an indication of the withering of religion on the vine of modernity, the return of a religious discourse was resurrected by the democratisation of the ‘croyant’ in the mid-1980s. The ‘âge égalitaire’, coupled with the specificity of the ‘croyant’, created a platform on which to challenge the model of laïcité in contemporary France. This discourse sought to re-appropriate reason from the logic of secular objectivity and postmodern self-reliance, and re-signify it within a Catholic theological language of belief and faith. The transmission of religious ‘knowledge’ would also be seen to compete for intellectual equality with the forms and transmission of knowledge approved by laïcité in the republican school. Régis Debray's report to the Ministry of Education in 2002 on the teaching of the ‘fait religieux’ in French schools advances this debate by defending the introduction of the study of religion in school from the perspectives of theological rigour, the indivisibility of knowledge (the coexistence of ‘témoin’ and ‘savant’), and the inextricable links between faith and reason in their production of knowledge with a valid claim for public consumption

Enabling Explainable Fusion in Deep Learning with Fuzzy Integral Neural Networks

Information fusion is an essential part of numerous engineering systems and biological functions, e.g., human cognition. Fusion occurs at many levels, ranging from the low-level combination of signals to the high-level aggregation of heterogeneous decision-making processes. While the last decade has witnessed an explosion of research in deep learning, fusion in neural networks has not observed the same revolution. Specifically, most neural fusion approaches are ad hoc, are not understood, are distributed versus localized, and/or explainability is low (if present at all). Herein, we prove that the fuzzy Choquet integral (ChI), a powerful nonlinear aggregation function, can be represented as a multi-layer network, referred to hereafter as ChIMP. We also put forth an improved ChIMP (iChIMP) that leads to a stochastic gradient descent-based optimization in light of the exponential number of ChI inequality constraints. An additional benefit of ChIMP/iChIMP is that it enables eXplainable AI (XAI). Synthetic validation experiments are provided and iChIMP is applied to the fusion of a set of heterogeneous architecture deep models in remote sensing. We show an improvement in model accuracy and our previously established XAI indices shed light on the quality of our data, model, and its decisions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System

Sales Promotion and Consumer Loyalty: A Study of Nigerian Tecommunication Industry

In today’s competitive business world customers are considered to be kings. Customers have several choices to make among alternative products, and they exercise a high level of influence in the market with respect to product size, quality and price. Hence, it is important for producers to meet the needs of customers in order to stay competitive. One of the marketing communication tools that is used in attracting the attention of the customer and build their loyalty is sales promotion. The aim of this paper therefore is to determine the effect of sales promotion on customer loyalty in the telecommunication industry. In this study, the survey method was used in gathering information from the respondents. Simple random sampling was used to select a sample size of 310, while descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were conducted with the aid of SPSS software. Producers spend a large part of their total marketing communication expenses on sales promotion. Hence, this paper attempts to find the effect of sales promotion on customer loyalty using a sample of customers of mobile telecommunication services. The paper found that, there is positive relationship between sales promotion and customer loyalty. More importantly, it was discovered that non-loyal customers are more prone to switch to competing products as a result of sales promotion than loyal customer

Rationalism and Empiricism in Modern Medicine

The roots of rationalism and empiricism in the Hippocratic tradition are explored. The triumph of the rationalists in the founding of modern medicine is emphasized. The development of clinical epidemiology and the evidence-based medicine over the last 30 years is described. The tension illuminates fundamental clinical and policy questions that doctors, the health care system, and the legal system confront today

The Problem Of The Exegesis In Creative Writing Higher Degree Programs

It has now become standard practice for there to be an exegetical component not only in creative writing PhDs, but also in Masters and even Honours dissertations. In this paper we will examine the main kinds of exegeses currently being submitted and discussed - including reflective/journal-based, 'theory' based, literary criticism, and historical or genre context - and attempt to evaluate their usefulness both for the student/writer and for the broader academic community. We will be exploring such questions as: does current learning theory support the reflective or self-critical approach? Are current exegetical models (particularly the literary criticism model) overly embedded in an English Department idea of writing and writing theory? Does creative writing need to establish its own critical discourse, particularly through the exegesis? What kinds of students are doing these exegeses and how does our understanding of their assumed knowledges impact on developing models for critical work? Does current exegetical practice contribute to a growing theory of creative writing