Is there any such thing as a social or behavioural science? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy at Massey University

The type of explanation characteristic of science is causal, and it is natural to think that this type of explanation is appropriate for all events, no matter what their nature. It is this global assumption that is questioned in this thesis. Chapter One presents a historical exposition of the development of causal explanation since the time of David Hume. The perennial theme has been the conceptual separability of causally related events and the need to insert an empirical law to deduce one from the other. Karl Popper (the subject of Chapter Two) has also used this deductive feature of causal explanation, and even argues for the unity of science, social and natural, on the strength of it. Throughout this tradition social behaviour is supposedly caused and requires the same kind of explanatory apparatus as any other behaviour. The Wittgensteinian tradition (Chapter Three) opposes any such tradition by emphasizing the importance of normative rules governing human action, as opposed to any causal relations. In particular, the conceptual notion of a 'criterion of identity' is investigated in relation to both the natural and social sciences, and it is concluded that the logic of explanation works very differently in these two disciplines. This is so for two reasons. First, because the criteria of identity for any concept are logically, not contingently, related to that concept; and as the criteria for any action are the surrounding contexts, then those surrounding contexts cannot be the causes of the behaviour concerned in any Humean sense. Second, the criteria of identity are not imposed upon social phenomena from 'without', as is the case in the natural sciences; they are constituted from within, and thus a social science must base the rules it uses upon the criteria belonging to the group being studied rather than the group of researchers studying it. Social scientists cannot then give a causal explanation of human behaviour. But they can explain it by giving reasons; that is, by showing how the behaviour is conceptually related to the context by classifying it under the appropriate logical category. This point is emphasized in an investigation of the so-called 'Rationality Principle' in Chapter Four. Popper asserts that 'rational' behaviour is an 'appropriate' (causal) response to a particular problem situation; 'appropriate' being in accordance with the objective or brute facts. But the Wittgensteinian point remains however, i.e. that the problem which any agent is responding to is conceptually linked to that action and cannot therefore the cause of it. Furthermore, rationality cannot be measured against any Popperian 'objective' or 'brute' facts; rather, rational behaviour is so according to certain human conventions, and these conventions are normative rather than objective in the Popperian sense. Rational behaviour is not then behaviour in accordance with the 'facts', but behaviour in accordance with relative normative criteria of rationality. In conclusion, it is wholly inappropriate to explain human behaviour in terms of 'causes' and 'objective facts'

Geometric Analysis of Bifurcation and Symmetry Breaking in a Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Gross-Pitaevskii and nonlinear Hartree equations are equations of nonlinear Schroedinger type, which play an important role in the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation. Recent results of Aschenbacher et. al. [AFGST] demonstrate, for a class of 3- dimensional models, that for large boson number (squared L^2 norm), N, the ground state does not have the symmetry properties as the ground state at small N. We present a detailed global study of the symmetry breaking bifurcation for a 1-dimensional model Gross-Pitaevskii equation, in which the external potential (boson trap) is an attractive double-well, consisting of two attractive Dirac delta functions concentrated at distinct points. Using dynamical systems methods, we present a geometric analysis of the symmetry breaking bifurcation of an asymmetric ground state and the exchange of dynamical stability from the symmetric branch to the asymmetric branch at the bifurcation point.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Attention and empirical studies of grammar

How is the generation of a grammatical sentence implemented by the human brain? A starting place for such an inquiry lies in linguistic theory. Unfortunately, linguistic theories illuminate only abstract knowledge representations and do not indicate how these representations interact with cognitive architecture to produce discourse. We examine tightly constrained empirical methods to study how grammar interacts with one part of the cognitive architecture, namely attention. Finally, we show that understanding attention as a neural network can link grammatical choice to underlying brain systems. Overall, our commentary supports a multilevel empirical approach that clarifies and expands the connections between cognitive science and linguistics thus advancing the interdisciplinary agenda outlined by Jackendoff

Deep-learned Top Tagging with a Lorentz Layer

We introduce a new and highly efficient tagger for hadronically decaying top quarks, based on a deep neural network working with Lorentz vectors and the Minkowski metric. With its novel machine learning setup and architecture it allows us to identify boosted top quarks not only from calorimeter towers, but also including tracking information. We show how the performance of our tagger compares with QCD-inspired and image-recognition approaches and find that it significantly increases the performance for strongly boosted top quarks.Comment: v3: minor revisions following SciPost referee report

The Impact of Warrant Introduction Australian Experience

The impact that derivative trading has on the underlying security is essential to our understanding of security market behaviour, and important in the fields of market efficiency and pricing of such derivatives. This paper examines the impact that the introduction of exchange traded derivative warrants has on the underlying securities’ price, volume and volatility in the Australian market. The major findings of significant negative abnormal returns, reduction in skewness, no change in beta and small changes in variance are consistent with recent research findings in the US, UK and Hong Kong. However findings of derivative warrant listing resulting in decreased trading volume in contrast with most prior research in the field.Derivatives, Warrants, Market Efficiency, Event Study.

Ages and metallicities of faint red galaxies in the Shapley Supercluster

We present results on the stellar populations of 232 quiescent galaxies in the Shapley Supercluster, based on spectroscopy from the AAOmega spectrograph at the AAT. The key characteristic of this survey is its coverage of many low-luminosity objects (sigma ~ 50 km/s), with high signal-to-noise (~45 per Angstrom). Balmer-line age estimates are recovered with ~25% precision even for the faintest sample members. We summarize the observations and absorption line data, and present correlations of derived ages and metallicities with mass and luminosity. We highlight the strong correlation between age and alpha-element abundance ratio, and the anti-correlation of age and metallicity at fixed mass, which is shown to extend into the low-luminosity regime.Comment: Four pages, three figures; To appear in Proceedings of IAU Symp. 245 "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Bulges", (Oxford, July 16-20 2007), Eds. Martin Bureau, Lia Athanassoula, and Beatriz Barbu

Optimal land cover mapping and change analysis in northeastern oregon using landsat imagery.

Abstract The necessity for the development of repeatable, efficient, and accurate monitoring of land cover change is paramount to successful management of our planet’s natural resources. This study evaluated a number of remote sensing methods for classifying land cover and land cover change throughout a two-county area in northeastern Oregon (1986 to 2011). In the past three decades, this region has seen significant changes in forest management that have affected land use and land cover. This study employed an accuracy assessment-based empirical approach to test the optimality of a number of advanced digital image processing techniques that have recently emerged in the field of remote sensing. The accuracies are assessed using traditional error matrices, calculated using reference data obtained in the field. We found that, for single-time land cover classification, Bayes pixel-based classification using samples created with scale and shape segmentation parameters of 8 and 0.3, respectively, resulted in the highest overall accuracy. For land cover change detection, using Landsat-5 TM band 7 with a change threshold of 1.75 standard deviations resulted in the highest accuracy for forest harvesting and regeneration mapping