389 research outputs found
Religious Truth and Religious Diversity
When interpreting religion one faces a dilemma. Realist interpretations of religion face the philosophical problem of religious diversity and irrealist interpretations of religion are revisionary. There are two fundamentally different forms of religious irrealism. One, religious anti-realism, describes those who deny that the objective truth conditions by which a given instance of religious language would be true obtain. The other, religious non-realism, describes those who hold that for a given instance of religious language there are no objective truth conditions; that is, a given instance of religious language does not express a proposition. Taking this distinction into account clarifies much of the confusion involved in discussions of religious realism. Providing such clarity with respect to the issues associated with religious realism and religious irrealism is a theme throughout the dissertation. The other goals of the dissertation involve examining the issues raised by the aforementioned dilemma. Realist interpretations of religion are those that maintain for a particular instance of religious language to be true, that which is described by that language must obtain independently of what we do, say or believe. For realism, only that p objectively obtains can make "p" true. It is for this reason that realist interpretations face the philosophical problem of religious diversity. The world's religious landscape is marked by similarly credible but conflicting truth claims. On a realist conception one religion's claim to ultimate truth necessarily conflicts with that of another if these claims diverge. An examination of the epistemological issues raised by these similarly credible but conflicting claims to religious truth constitutes the first portion of the dissertation. For religious irrealism, the truth conditions of a given instance of religious language are dependent on what we do, say or believe. On this view, "God exists" can be considered true even if by "God exists" we mean something other than that God exists. The truth of "God exists" thus depends on something other than that God exists and as such exemplifies the revisionary character of religious irrealism. The second portion of the dissertation examines these issues as they concern irrealist interpretations of religion
Entropy and Long range correlations in literary English
Recently long range correlations were detected in nucleotide sequences and in
human writings by several authors. We undertake here a systematic investigation
of two books, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales, with respect to the
existence of long range correlations. The analysis is based on the calculation
of entropy like quantities as the mutual information for pairs of letters and
the entropy, the mean uncertainty, per letter. We further estimate the number
of different subwords of a given length . Filtering out the contributions
due to the effects of the finite length of the texts, we find correlations
ranging to a few hundred letters. Scaling laws for the mutual information
(decay with a power law), for the entropy per letter (decay with the inverse
square root of ) and for the word numbers (stretched exponential growth with
and with a power law of the text length) were found.Comment: 8 page
Validation of the King's Brief Interstitial Lung Disease questionnaire in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
Error threshold in optimal coding, numerical criteria and classes of universalities for complexity
The free energy of the Random Energy Model at the transition point between
ferromagnetic and spin glass phases is calculated. At this point, equivalent to
the decoding error threshold in optimal codes, free energy has finite size
corrections proportional to the square root of the number of degrees. The
response of the magnetization to the ferromagnetic couplings is maximal at the
values of magnetization equal to half. We give several criteria of complexity
and define different universality classes. According to our classification, at
the lowest class of complexity are random graph, Markov Models and Hidden
Markov Models. At the next level is Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin glass,
connected with neuron-network models. On a higher level are critical theories,
spin glass phase of Random Energy Model, percolation, self organized
criticality (SOC). The top level class involves HOT design, error threshold in
optimal coding, language, and, maybe, financial market. Alive systems are also
related with the last class. A concept of anti-resonance is suggested for the
complex systems.Comment: 17 page
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