39,478 research outputs found
What Is A Number? Re-Thinking Derrida's Concept of Infinity
Iterability, the repetition which alters the idealization it reproduces, is the engine of deconstructive movement. The fact that all experience is transformative-dissimulative in its essence does not, however, mean that the momentum of change is the same for all situations. Derrida adapts Husserl's distinction between a bound and a free ideality to draw up a contrast between mechanical mathematical
calculation, whose in-principle infinite enumerability is supposedly meaningless, empty
of content, and therefore not in itself subject to alteration through contextual change, and idealities such as spoken or written language which are directly animated by a meaning-to-say and are thus immediately affected by context. Derrida associates the dangers of cultural stagnation, paralysis and irresponsibility with the emptiness of programmatic, mechanical, formulaic thinking. This paper endeavors to show that enumerative calculation is not context-independent in itself but is instead
immediately infused with alteration, thereby making incoherent Derrida's claim to distinguish between a free and bound ideality. Along with the presumed formal basis of numeric infinitization,
Derrida's non-dialectical distinction between forms of mechanical or programmatic thinking (the Same) and truly inventive experience (the absolute Other) loses its justification. In the place of a distinction between bound and free idealities is proposed a distinction between two poles of novelty; the first form of novel experience would be characterized by affectivites of unintelligibility ,
confusion and vacuity, and the second by affectivities of anticipatory continuity and intimacy
Preference fusion and Condorcet's Paradox under uncertainty
Facing an unknown situation, a person may not be able to firmly elicit
his/her preferences over different alternatives, so he/she tends to express
uncertain preferences. Given a community of different persons expressing their
preferences over certain alternatives under uncertainty, to get a collective
representative opinion of the whole community, a preference fusion process is
required. The aim of this work is to propose a preference fusion method that
copes with uncertainty and escape from the Condorcet paradox. To model
preferences under uncertainty, we propose to develop a model of preferences
based on belief function theory that accurately describes and captures the
uncertainty associated with individual or collective preferences. This work
improves and extends the previous results. This work improves and extends the
contribution presented in a previous work. The benefits of our contribution are
twofold. On the one hand, we propose a qualitative and expressive preference
modeling strategy based on belief-function theory which scales better with the
number of sources. On the other hand, we propose an incremental distance-based
algorithm (using Jousselme distance) for the construction of the collective
preference order to avoid the Condorcet Paradox.Comment: International Conference on Information Fusion, Jul 2017, Xi'an,
Chin
Linear superposition as a core theorem of quantum empiricism
Clarifying the nature of the quantum state is at the root of
the problems with insight into (counterintuitive) quantum postulates. We
provide a direct-and math-axiom free-empirical derivation of this object as an
element of a vector space. Establishing the linearity of this structure-quantum
superposition-is based on a set-theoretic creation of ensemble formations and
invokes the following three principia: quantum statics,
doctrine of a number in the physical theory, and
mathematization of matching the two observations with each
other; quantum invariance.
All of the constructs rest upon a formalization of the minimal experimental
entity: observed micro-event, detector click. This is sufficient for producing
the -numbers, axioms of linear vector space (superposition
principle), statistical mixtures of states, eigenstates and their spectra, and
non-commutativity of observables. No use is required of the concept of time. As
a result, the foundations of theory are liberated to a significant extent from
the issues associated with physical interpretations, philosophical exegeses,
and mathematical reconstruction of the entire quantum edifice.Comment: No figures. 64 pages; 68 pages(+4), overall substantial improvements;
70 pages(+2), further improvement
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