692 research outputs found
Ethics and Practical Reason
In this review of essays on the topic of practical reason, the neo-Humeanism of philosophers such as James Drier, according to whom reasons are instrumental, is shown to be susceptible to the objections of Kantian philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard: the fact that you desire to X can never entail that you ought to X. Kantianism, however, comes under attack from neo-Aristotelian philosophers such as Berys Gaut, who argues that it is a mistake to identify goodness with being the object of free rational choice
Reasoning about exceptions in ontologies: from the lexicographic closure to the skeptical closure
Reasoning about exceptions in ontologies is nowadays one of the challenges
the description logics community is facing. The paper describes a preferential
approach for dealing with exceptions in Description Logics, based on the
rational closure. The rational closure has the merit of providing a simple and
efficient approach for reasoning with exceptions, but it does not allow
independent handling of the inheritance of different defeasible properties of
concepts. In this work we outline a possible solution to this problem by
introducing a variant of the lexicographical closure, that we call skeptical
closure, which requires to construct a single base. We develop a bi-preference
semantics semantics for defining a characterization of the skeptical closure
Negotiating with a logical-linguistic protocol in a dialogical framework
This book is the result of years of reflection. Some time ago, while working in
commodities, the author felt how difficult it was to decide the order in which to
use arguments during a negotiation process. What would happen if we translated the arguments into cards and played them according to the rules of the
Bridge game? The results were impressive. There was potential for improvement in the negotiation process. The investigation went deeper, exploring players, cards, deals and the information concealed in the players´ announcements,
in the cards and in the deals. This new angle brought the research to NeuroLinguistic Patterns and cryptic languages, such as Russian Cards.
In the following pages, the author shares her discovery of a new application for
Logical Dialogues: Negotiations, tackled from basic linguistic structures placed
under a dialogue form as a cognitive system which ‘understands’ natural language, with the aim to solve conflicts and even to serve peace
A Description Logic Framework for Commonsense Conceptual Combination Integrating Typicality, Probabilities and Cognitive Heuristics
We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for
the phenomenon of concept combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed
logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC TR, whose semantics is based on the
notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of
probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic
used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality
ALC TR by typicality inclusions whose intuitive meaning is that "there is
probability p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds". As in the distributed
semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality
inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then focus on those
scenarios whose probabilities belong to a given and fixed range, and we exploit
such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained
as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in
the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying ALC.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure
Profit and Cost in "Modern" Post-Marxian Profit Theory: A Case Study from Varian's "Intermediate Microeconomics"
In this paper, I examine the treatment of competitive profit of professor Varian in his textbook on Microeconomics, as a representative of the “modern†post-Marxian view on competitive profit. I show how, on the one hand, Varian defines profit as the surplus of revenues over cost and, thus, as a part of the value of commodities that is not any cost. On the other hand, however, Varian defines profit as a cost, namely, as the opportunity cost of capital, so that, in competitive conditions, the profit or income of capital is determined by the opportunity cost of capital. I argue that this second definition contradicts the first and that it is based on an incoherent conception of opportunity cost.
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