On the Inferential Zigzag and Its Activation Towards Clarifying What It Is Commonsense Reasoning

This paper has a twofold goal: The first is to study how the inferential zigzag can be activated, even computationally, trying to analyse what kind of reasoning consists of, where its ’mechanism’ is rooted, how it can be activated since without all this it can just seem a metaphysical idea. The second, not so deeply different - as it can be presumed at a first view - but complementary, is to explore the subject’s link with the old thought on conjectures of the 15th Century Theologist and Philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus who was the first thinker consciously and extensively using conjectures

‎On the Inferential Zigzag and Its Activation Towards Clarifying What It Is Commonsense Reasoning

This paper has a twofold goal‎: ‎The first is to study how the inferential zigzag can be activated‎, ‎even computationally‎, ‎trying to analyse what kind of reasoning consists of‎, ‎where its 'mechanism' is rooted‎, ‎how it can be activated since without all this it can just seem a metaphysical idea‎. ‎The second‎, ‎not so deeply different‎ - ‎as it can be presumed at a first view‎ - ‎but complementary‎, ‎is to explore the subject's link with the old thought on conjectures of the 15th Century Theologist and Philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus‎ ‎who was the first thinker consciously and extensively using conjectures‎

Qohelet and the nature of morality: A meta-ethical framework for future research

Abstract The book of Ecclesiastes (here 'Qohelet'), like many other books of the Hebrew Bible, is often discussed with reference to its supposed 'ethics'. Within biblical scholarship, such research is often characterized by a meta-language filled with philosophically vague and fuzzy descriptive jargon, largely bereft of technical distinctions and nuance. One possible reason for this state of affairs may be the fact that Qohelet's assumptions about the nature of morality have never been studied against the backdrop of issues and theories in contemporary analytic meta-ethics. In response to this gap in the research, and with proposals for conceptual refinement in mind, this article offers the first ever meta-theoretical introduction to some of the semantic, ontological, epistemological and other related meta-ethical concerns and categories which may be of use in future analyses of the foundations of Qohelet's 'ethics'

Gender Matters : Materialcultural theory of sexgender in mortuary archaeology

The sex/gender model used in biological archaeologies to investigate human remains and past lives is one that relies on the epistemological and ontological separation of sex and gender. Despite this separation the model ends up treating these concepts synonymously due to the taken-for-granted binary nature of sex which in a deterministic manner eventuates into an equally binary gender. This thesis develops a theoretical framework for an archaeological concept of gender that operates without the division, binarism and determinism implicit in the sex/gender model. Pursuing answers to the questions whether it is possible to approach both sex and gender in archaeology in a nonbinary way, and if so, what is an archaeologically feasible alternative, it seeks to devise a method to approach sex and gender in mortuary archaeology beyond the deterministic binary. This thesis is firmly theory-oriented and the writings of various authors within the discipline of archaeology, feminism and queer studies comprise the necessary material. The theories pertaining to the field of feminism are intersectionality and queer theory, which eschew normativity and essentialism and call for gender diversity. Respective to archaeology, the theories influencing this thesis derive from new materialisms to whom the rejection of divisions and dichotomies is characteristic. In this regard, of particular note are the writings of new materialist and feminist theorist Karen Barad. Applying her theories concerning the relational, entangled and mutually constitutive nature of matter and meaning to the topic of sex and gender is central in devising a nonbinary new materialist perspective to be used for the purpose of a more open and inclusive mortuary archaeology. This thesis reveals that the dualistic division between nature and culture has resulted in a separate conceptual development and different strategies of engagement concerning sex and gender. The reason why sex is seen as a biological fact and gender as a cultural meaning proves false when both are affected equally by nature and culture, with the body serving as a nexus-point in which these two forces converge. Applying Barad’s insight reveals that binary sex is not an inherent quality of the body, but one that is produced through a scientific biomedical apparatus. Sex and gender exist in a state of inseparability when undetermined, but when subjected to a determination process, they become mutually exclusive phenomena, thereby disrupting sex-to-gender determinism. In their separate state, both are constitutive of matter and meaning, which is why gender made determined through intersectionality can be used to study gendered understandings through the materiality of the body, exempt from binary views. Analysing a topical bioarchaeological publication concerning a female Viking warrior through the approach that does not depend on the sex binary reveals that a scientific biomedical apparatus is subject to criticism on multiple fronts. Though the case study should be credited with rejecting gender role stereotypes, it demonstrates determinism and binarism as well as homogeneity and universalism in terms of categories. Failing to imagine possibilities beyond a fixed binary also results in the exclusion of alternate ways of knowing and being. The open-ended approach proposed in this thesis not only seeks to grant these possibilities opportunities to exist, but counsels cognisance towards the exclusions apparatuses enact. Embracing speculation, it also holds ambiguity and vagueness to be meaningful qualities pertaining to gendered archaeology. Regarding the mortuary setting, binary sex determinations need not be abandoned, but they should be used alongside this nonbinary approach

Data quality issues in electronic health records for large-scale databases

Data Quality (DQ) in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is one of the core functions that play a decisive role to improve the healthcare service quality. The DQ issues in EHRs are a noticeable trend to improve the introduction of an adaptive framework for interoperability and standards in Large-Scale Databases (LSDB) management systems. Therefore, large data communications are challenging in the traditional approaches to satisfy the needs of the consumers, as data is often not capture directly into the Database Management Systems (DBMS) in a seasonably enough fashion to enable their subsequent uses. In addition, large data plays a vital role in containing plenty of treasures for all the fields in the DBMS. EHRs technology provides portfolio management systems that allow HealthCare Organisations (HCOs) to deliver a higher quality of care to their patients than that which is possible with paper-based records. EHRs are in high demand for HCOs to run their daily services as increasing numbers of huge datasets occur every day. Efficient EHR systems reduce the data redundancy as well as the system application failure and increase the possibility to draw all necessary reports. However, one of the main challenges in developing efficient EHR systems is the inherent difficulty to coherently manage data from diverse heterogeneous sources. It is practically challenging to integrate diverse data into a global schema, which satisfies the need of users. The efficient management of EHR systems using an existing DBMS present challenges because of incompatibility and sometimes inconsistency of data structures. As a result, no common methodological approach is currently in existence to effectively solve every data integration problem. The challenges of the DQ issue raised the need to find an efficient way to integrate large EHRs from diverse heterogeneous sources. To handle and align a large dataset efficiently, the hybrid algorithm method with the logical combination of Fuzzy-Ontology along with a large-scale EHRs analysis platform has shown the results in term of improved accuracy. This study investigated and addressed the raised DQ issues to interventions to overcome these barriers and challenges, including the provision of EHRs as they pertain to DQ and has combined features to search, extract, filter, clean and integrate data to ensure that users can coherently create new consistent data sets. The study researched the design of a hybrid method based on Fuzzy-Ontology with performed mathematical simulations based on the Markov Chain Probability Model. The similarity measurement based on dynamic Hungarian algorithm was followed by the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, which will increase the quality of service over HCOs in adaptive frameworks

Too Many Cats: The Problem of the Many and the Metaphysics of Vagueness

Unger’s Problem of the Many seems to show that the familiar macroscopic world is much stranger than it appears. From plausible theses about the boundaries of or- dinary objects, Unger drew the conclusion that wherever there seems to be just one cat, cloud, table, human, or thinker, really there are many millions; and likewise for any other familiar kind of individual. In Lewis’s hands, this puzzle was subtly altered by an appeal to vagueness or indeterminacy about the the boundaries of ordinary objects. This thesis examines the relation between these puzzles, and also to the phenomenon of vagueness. Chapter 1 begins by distinguishing Unger’s puzzle of too many candidates from Lewis’s puzzle of borderline, or vague, candidates. We show that, contra Unger, the question of whether this is a genuine, as opposed to merely apparent, distinction cannot be settled without investigation into the nature of vagueness. Chapter 2 begins this investigation by developing a broadly supervaluationist account of vague- ness that is immune to the standard objections. This account is applied to Unger’s and Lewis’s puzzles in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 shows that, despite its popularity, Lewis’s own approach to the puzzles is unsatisfactory: it does not so much solve the puzzle, as prevent us from expressing them; it cannot be extended to objects that self-refer; it is committed to objectionable theses about temporal and modal metaphysics and semantics. Chapter 4 develops a conception of ordinary objects that emphasises the role of identity conditions and change, and uses it to resolve both Problems of the Many. This allows us to diagnose the source of the puzzles: an overemphasis on mereology in contemporary material ontology

Glossarium BITri 2016 : Interdisciplinary Elucidation of Concepts, Metaphors, Theories and Problems Concerning Information

222 p.Terms included in this glossary recap some of the main concepts, theories, problems and metaphors concerning INFORMATION in all spheres of knowledge. This is the first edition of an ambitious enterprise covering at its completion all relevant notions relating to INFORMATION in any scientific context. As such, this glossariumBITri is part of the broader project BITrum, which is committed to the mutual understanding of all disciplines devoted to information across fields of knowledge and practic

The Unbearable Lightness of International Relations : Technological Innovations, Creative Destruction and Assemblages

How could one oversee the monumental modern landscape that has been created by over 250 years of continuous technological innovations? Notwithstanding a few students of international relations who have insisted in taking notice, technology has remained an exotic subject matter in International Relations theory (IR). While the interest in technologies is recently growing most IR scholarship remains silent: the fact that we live in a fully integrated and interconnected technological world is absent from textbooks and introductions to IR. Neither exists theoretical approaches and paradigmatic debates that are concerned with technologies; nor a specific intra-disciplinary subfield. Against this background, this book explores how technological innovations could be theorized and integrated into IR theories. Revisiting the inroads of theoretical approaches to technologies, it highlights the lightness of IR scholarship. I argue that the general framework of IR is untenable because it looks at the world as if there were no materials or rather, as if the pervasive presence of artifacts and infrastructures would have no theoretical relevance for conceptualizing and examining world politics. Drawing on ontological and epistemological understandings from anthropology, innovation economics, and science and technology studies, I take issue with the philosophical foundations of the discipline. The notions, concepts and practices, which ultimately sustain and legitimize this lightness, are interrogated. It is shown that the neglect of technological innovation does not merely result from coincidental intellectual moves. It is rather the result of the “Cartesian complex” – the foundational commitment that renders IR a purely social science that deliberately excludes non-humans and hybrid material modes of agency. A radical refashioning is therefore required to the extent to which IR theory aims to accommodate the highly complex and elusive subject matter of technological innovations. This conceptual catharsis does not primarily touch upon epistemological concerns. What is at stake is the limitation of ontological parameters that sustain IR theories. To make sense of the messy technological landscapes, the material agency, and the technologically mediated practices, the prevailing logocentric wisdom needs to be transcended. Against premature metaphysical closure, this book thus contributes to the task of ontological expansion. Firstly, it develops an alternative meta-theoretical foundation coined “explorative realism”. A new meta-theoretical matrix is proposed that renders wider ontological parameters intelligible. Especially, the “double-mixed” zone encourages ontological expansion via notions of heterogeneous agency and process philosophy. This implies that IR scholars avoid treating time, space, knowledge, artificial objects, and built environments as constants but as always croproduced. A coproductive commitment opens up new empirical issues and concerns as well as radically different theoretical puzzles. It also implies overcoming Cartesian dualism, abandoning intentionality-based notions of agency, and forgetting the “level of analysis” assumption. Secondly, this book advances a theoretical toolbox consisting of the interrelated concepts of “assemblages” and “creative destruction”. The former term signifies actor-networks entailing both humans and non-humans. The latter captures the ways in which technological innovations alter or destabilize assemblages across all levels through a process of translation. This theoretical vocabulary also reconceptualizes the meaning of “power”, “authority” with reference to technological innovations. Three open-ended classifications and three models of creative destruction enable the mapping of magnitudes of translations, the changing size and topologies of assemblages and the shifting power and authority. These efforts to theorize technological innovations, then, support empirical research on global transformations and processes of emergence with a set of conceptual tools that allows locating and systematizing cases, puzzles, and scales in relation to assemblages. The study of technological innovations is productive and challenging. It leads to the discovery of novel empirical landscapes and inspires a creative questioning of IR’s foundations. As such, while responding to the stunning absence of theoretical approaches in IR that make sense of technological innovations, this study contributes to the articulation of both a post-international and post-Cartesian version of IR

Metasemantics and fuzzy mathematics

The present thesis is an inquiry into the metasemantics of natural languages, with a particular focus on the philosophical motivations for countenancing degreed formal frameworks for both psychosemantics and truth-conditional semantics. Chapter 1 sets out to offer a bird's eye view of our overall research project and the key questions that we set out to address. Chapter 2 provides a self-contained overview of the main empirical findings in the cognitive science of concepts and categorisation. This scientific background is offered in light of the fact that most variants of psychologically-informed semantics see our network of concepts as providing the raw materials on which lexical and sentential meanings supervene. Consequently, the metaphysical study of internalistically-construed meanings and the empirical study of our mental categories are overlapping research projects. Chapter 3 closely investigates a selection of species of conceptual semantics, together with reasons for adopting or disavowing them. We note that our ultimate aim is not to defend these perspectives on the study of meaning, but to argue that the project of making them formally precise naturally invites the adoption of degreed mathematical frameworks (e.g. probabilistic or fuzzy). In Chapter 4, we switch to the orthodox framework of truth-conditional semantics, and we present the limitations of a philosophical position that we call "classicism about vagueness". In the process, we come up with an empirical hypothesis for the psychological pull of the inductive soritical premiss and we make an original objection against the epistemicist position, based on computability theory. Chapter 5 makes a different case for the adoption of degreed semantic frameworks, based on their (quasi-)superior treatments of the paradoxes of vagueness. Hence, the adoption of tools that allow for graded membership are well-motivated under both semantic internalism and semantic externalism. At the end of this chapter, we defend an unexplored view of vagueness that we call "practical fuzzicism". Chapter 6, viz. the final chapter, is a metamathematical enquiry into both the fuzzy model-theoretic semantics and the fuzzy Davidsonian semantics for formal languages of type-free truth in which precise truth-predications can be expressed