10,774 research outputs found
Logical Semantics and Norms: A Kantian Perspective
It’s widely accepted that normativity is not subject to truth values. The underlying reasoning is that truth values can only be predicated of descriptive statements; normative statements are prescriptive, not descriptive; thus truth value predicates cannot be assigned to normative statements. Hence, deonticity lacks logical semantics. This semantic monism has been challenged over the last decades from a series of perspectives that open the way for legal logics with imperative semantics. In the present paper I will go back to Kant and review his understanding of practical judgments, presenting it as supported by a pluralistic semantics. From this perspective a norm of Law is a logical expression that includes as content a generic description of a possible behavior by a generality of juridical agents, and assigns to that content the assertion of its obligatory character, accompanied by a disincentive for non-compliance. From this perspective legal norms can be syntactically formalized and assigned appropriate semantic values in such terms that they can be incorporated into valid inferential schemes. The consequence is that we can put together legal logics that handle both the phenomenal and the deontic dimensions of legality
The Population Problem: A Third World Reaction
Dr. Mascarenhas is Consultant in Community Health and Family Planning at the Family Welfare Center in Bangalore, India. Until April, 1975, she was Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at St. John\u27s Medical College in Bangalore and was actively involved in the first Village Health Cooperative program sponsored by the College. She is the author of a recently published book entitled Population Education for Quality of Life. The following article is the text of a paper presented at the XI General Assembly of the International Federation of Catholic Universities
The divergence of the BFGS and Gauss Newton Methods
We present examples of divergence for the BFGS and Gauss Newton methods.
These examples have objective functions with bounded level sets and other
properties concerning the examples published recently in this journal, like
unit steps and convexity along the search lines. As these other examples, the
iterates, function values and gradients in the new examples fit into the
general formulation in our previous work {\it On the divergence of line search
methods, Comput. Appl. Math. vol.26 no.1 (2007)}, which also presents an
example of divergence for Newton's method.Comment: This article was accepted by Mathematical programmin
Quantum Critical Probing and Simulation of Colored Quantum Noise
We propose a protocol to simulate the evolution of a non-Markovian open
quantum system by considering a collisional process with a many-body system,
which plays the role of an environment. As a result of our protocol the
environment spatial correlations are mapped into the time correlations of a
noise that drives the dynamics of the open system. Considering the weak
coupling limit the open system can also be considered as a probe of the
environment properties. In this regard, when preparing the environment in its
ground state, a measurement of the dynamics of the open system allows to
determine the length of the environment spatial correlations and therefore its
critical properties. To illustrate our proposal we simulate the full system
dynamics with matrix-product-states and compare this with the reduced dynamics
obtained with an approximated variational master equation
On the Relation between Context-Free Grammars and Parsing Expression Grammars
Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) and Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) have
several similarities and a few differences in both their syntax and semantics,
but they are usually presented through formalisms that hinder a proper
comparison. In this paper we present a new formalism for CFGs that highlights
the similarities and differences between them. The new formalism borrows from
PEGs the use of parsing expressions and the recognition-based semantics. We
show how one way of removing non-determinism from this formalism yields a
formalism with the semantics of PEGs. We also prove, based on these new
formalisms, how LL(1) grammars define the same language whether interpreted as
CFGs or as PEGs, and also show how strong-LL(k), right-linear, and LL-regular
grammars have simple language-preserving translations from CFGs to PEGs
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