Sociality and uncertainty : between avowing and disavowing concepts in Anthropology

Postprin

Relations and Folds in Leibniz: Monadological Intimacy

My goal is to provide a clear explanation of Leibniz’s notoriously difficult system of relations. Relations among ‘windowless’ substances that exert no causal power over one another seems like a pipe dream that should be abandoned. However, I demonstrate that each substance expresses its relations only through the unique representation of all other substances. That is, any relation a substance expresses is due to this unique, perspectival, non-causal, representation of others. Because this is the case for all substances, this means that this relation of representation is an ongoing process of interconnection for all substances. This representation is not merely a cognitive copy of the universe (i.e. all other substances); it is the expression of all other substances from a distinct perspective. By taking a holistic approach, I show that Leibniz is not contradicting himself when he claims that substances are windowless, relations are ideal, all substances are interconnected, and there are no such things as purely extrinsic denominations

Second-order propositional modal logic: expressiveness and completeness results

In this paper we advance the state-of-the-art on the application of second-order propositional modal logic (SOPML) in the representation of individual and group knowledge, as well as temporal and spatial reasoning. The main theoretical contributions of the paper can be summarised as follows. Firstly, we introduce the language of (multi-modal) SOPML and interpret it on a variety of different classes of Kripke frames according to the features of the accessibility relations and of the algebraic structure of the quantification domain of propositions. We provide axiomatisations for some of these classes, and show that SOPML is unaxiomatisable on the remaining classes. Secondly, we introduce novel notions of (bi)simulations and prove that they indeed preserve the interpretation of formulas in (the universal fragment of) SOPML. Then, we apply this formal machinery to study the expressiveness of Second-order Propositional Epistemic Logic (SOPEL) in representing higher-order knowledge, i.e., the knowledge agents have about other agents’ knowledge, as well as graph-theoretic notions (e.g., 3-colorability, Hamiltonian paths, etc.). The final outcome is a rich formalism to represent and reason about relevant concepts in artificial intelligence, while still having a model checking problem that is no more computationally expensive than that of the less expressive quantified boolean logic

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 28th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019

Embalmed|Unembalmed: the problems of the lived event within media studies 2.0

Media Studies 2.0 seeks to rewire the discipline of media studies from prevailing notions of aggregate third-person, top-down or imposed identities (as found within the domain of industrial mass communications media) toward what it sees as the communication of new bottom-up, first-person or singular reflexive identities favored within the post-fordist, post-industrial spaces of the internet, social networking sites, second life-like domains and computer game spaces. This article will point toward many of the hidden, though still important, intersections between these two supposedly separate conceptions through the use of a case study that throws notions of clean “communication” into question. From this it will go on to argue for a recognition of such new media spaces as better conceptualized through Batailleʼs notion of ʻGeneral Economyʼ and Derridaʼs notion of ʻUndecidabilityʼ, as dually taken forward in the work of Arkady Plotnitsky. The conclusion? Far from modern teletechnologies offering a new sense of micro-community or as channels of individual self-expression (a new Rousseauian or McLuhanesque global village of intimate contact), these emergent teletechnologies serve to further displace or undecide the locus of any signature context of communication, which this article takes as a cause for celebration

Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models

In this thesis, we aim at contributing to the theory of conceptual modeling and ontology representation. Our main objective here is to provide ontological foundations for the most fundamental concepts in conceptual modeling. These foundations comprise a number of ontological theories, which are built on established work on philosophical ontology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of language and linguistics. Together these theories amount to a system of categories and formal relations known as a foundational ontolog