Justice, fairness and juridical perfectibility

Aristotle had already underlined the importance of the relationship between justice and equity (a term I interpret as synonomous to fairness), which he analysed in great detail. Equity is the term which in the English translation of Aristotle's works corresponds to epiekes (Greek). A starting point for my paper will be Aristotle's considerations on the relationship between equity and justice. In English we have "equity," "impartiality," "fairness," "equitableness". Do we distinguish between these terms? is there any difference? In what follows I discuss equity, or better the relation between equity and justice, treating equity and fairness as the same thing. According to Aristotle equity and justice are neither completely the same nor generically different. If they are different either the just or the equitable is not good; or, if they are both good, they are the same (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V, Ch. 9, 10, p. 1019). Briefly, we could make the claim that equity (fairness) corrects the tendency that characterizes justice towards abstraction, impartiality and indifference, which in fact constitute the condition of possibility for justice to obtain. Equity opens to singularity, to unreplaceability, to uniqueness, shifting justice from the relation of indifference to the other, to the relation of unindifference to the other, to each and every other considered in his or her absolute unrepeatability

Sign, Meaning, and Understanding in Victoria Welby and Charles S. Peirce

Like Peirce, recognized as the "father-founder" of modern semiotics, Welby too, although just recently (despite her influence on important contemporary scholars),is acclaimed as the "mother-founder," thus entering the pantheon of the "fathers" of language and sign sciences. These great figures share a common approach to sign and language as exponents of what today is recognized as the major tradition in semiotic studies, "interpretation semiotics." Meaning, understanding, signs, signifiers, utterers, and listeners are described as evolving in live communication, as part of signifying processes in becoming. Signs develop in ongoing interpretive/translative processes with other signs, signifiers, and signifying processes. Signs are interrelated with values, consequently sense and significance emerge as major investigation areas for studies on meaning. Moreover, both Welby and Peirce evidence the public, social, and intersubjective dimensions of signifying and understanding, and hence also the importance of intercorporeality, dialogism, otherness, ambiguity for healthy communication, and interpersonal relations

Mother Sense, Language and Logic. On Victoria Welby, Inventor of Significs

Victoria Welby conceived a special approach to the theory of meaning which she designated with the expression Significs. A central concept in her works is what she names “mother sense” which she discusses in her correspondence with such figures as the English philosopher Ferdinand C. S. Schiller and the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, among others. Beyond her contribution to questions of the linguistic, semiotic, practical-ethical and pedagogical orders, the implications of her theory of meaning are particularly interesting for the “woman question” and for feminist discourse generally

Semioethics and literary writing. Between Peirce and Bakhtin

In the early phase of its development, semiotics was understood as “semeiotics” and studied symptoms. Today we propose to recover this ancient dimension of semiotics focussed on health, care and the quality of life, and reorganise it in semioethical terms. In fact, as interference increases in communication between the historico-social sphere and the biological, between culture and nature, between the semiosphere and the biosphere, the need for a “semioethical turn” in the study of signs with an understanding of the relation of signs to values has become ever more urgent. Literary writing is particularly interesting from this perspective thanks to its extraordinary capacity to stage values that animate life to the best in terms of the properly human. These values are characterized by high degrees of opening to the other, by responsiveness/answerability toward the other, by a propensity for listening to the other, for giving time to the other. Construed on relations of distancing and at once of affinity among signs, metaphor— or more broadly imagery, figurative language—is emblematic of literary writing, though not limited to it. As amply demonstrated by Victoria Welby, far from serving as a mere decorative supplement, the figurative dimension of expression is structural to signifying processes, to the acquisition itself of knowledge and understanding. Welby’s work may be read as prefiguring recent trends in language studies as represented by cognitive linguistics today. Mikhail Bakhtin has also made an important contribution in this sense. He has developed the study of signs in terms of moral philosophy and, in fact, his approach to semiotics is easily oriented in the sense of semioethics. In such a framework he evidences the close relationship between sign studies and literary writing. For a full understanding of the sense of Bakhtin’s approach to studies on verbal language, it is important to highlight his insistence on the inexorable interconnection—which he describes as direct and dialectical—between literary language and life. Bakhtin deals with questions of literary writing from the perspective of literature itself. His excursions outside the field of literature do not imply recourse to an external viewpoint with claims to offering a description that is totalizing and systemic. On the contrary, Bakhtin remains inside literature and never leaves it; literature is his observation post, the perspective from which he conducts his critique, which is anti-systemic and detotalizing. Bakhtin reveals the internal threads that connect literature to the extra-literary, thematizing the condition of structural intertextuality in the connection between literary texts and extra-literary texts. In Bakhtin’s view, the literary text subsists and develops in its specificity as a literary text thanks to its implication with the external universe. Such implication is also understood in an ethical sense. Charles Peirce’s semiotics as well has a focus on the relation between cognition, the interpersonal relation, communication and moral value. He evidences the development of signifying pathways (the open-ended chain of interpretants) which he describes as potentially infinite, the role of the imagination and musement in abductive inferential processes, of similarity (in particular the agapastic) in metaphor, and of metaphor in abduction with its capacity for invention and innovation. All this makes Peirce’s Collected Papers another precious source for reflection, together with Bakhtin’s texts, on the relation between semioethics and literary writin

Modelling, dialogism and the functional cycle: biosemiotic and philosophical insights

Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin and Thomas Sebeok all develop original research itineraries around the sign and, despite terminological differences, can be related with reference to the concept of dialogism and modelling. Jakob von Uexküll's biosemiosic "functional cycle", a model for semiosic processes, is also implied in the relation between dialogue and communication. Biological models which describe communication as a self-referential, autopoietic and semiotically closed system (e.g., the models proposed by Maturana, Varela, and Thure von Uexküll) contrast with both the linear (Shannon and Weaver) and the circular (Saussure) paradigms. The theory of autopoietic systems is only incompatible with dialogism if reference is to a linear causal model which describes communication as developing from source to destination, or to the conversation model governed by the turning around together rule. Dialogism understood in biosemiotic terms overlaps with the concepts of interconnectivity, interrelation, intercorporeity and presupposes the otherness relation. As Uexküll says, the relation with the umwelt in nonhuman living beings is stable and concerns the species; on the contrary, in human beings it is, changeable and concerns the single individual, which is at once an advantage and a disadvantage. Thanks to "syntactics", human beings can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct an infinite number of worlds from a finite number of elements. This distinguishes human beings from other animals and determines their capacity for posing problems and asking questions. The human being not only produces his or her own world, but can also endanger it, and even destroy it to the point of causing the extinction of all other life forms on Earth. The unique capacity for reflection on signs makes human beings responsible for life across the planet, both human and nonhuman. Such reflections shift semiotic research in the direction of semioethics

Search for new particles in events with energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A search is presented for new particles produced at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at root s = 13 TeV, using events with energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 101 fb(-1), collected in 2017-2018 with the CMS detector. Machine learning techniques are used to define separate categories for events with narrow jets from initial-state radiation and events with large-radius jets consistent with a hadronic decay of a W or Z boson. A statistical combination is made with an earlier search based on a data sample of 36 fb(-1), collected in 2016. No significant excess of events is observed with respect to the standard model background expectation determined from control samples in data. The results are interpreted in terms of limits on the branching fraction of an invisible decay of the Higgs boson, as well as constraints on simplified models of dark matter, on first-generation scalar leptoquarks decaying to quarks and neutrinos, and on models with large extra dimensions. Several of the new limits, specifically for spin-1 dark matter mediators, pseudoscalar mediators, colored mediators, and leptoquarks, are the most restrictive to date.Peer reviewe

MUSiC : a model-unspecific search for new physics in proton-proton collisions at root s=13TeV

Results of the Model Unspecific Search in CMS (MUSiC), using proton-proton collision data recorded at the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb(-1), are presented. The MUSiC analysis searches for anomalies that could be signatures of physics beyond the standard model. The analysis is based on the comparison of observed data with the standard model prediction, as determined from simulation, in several hundred final states and multiple kinematic distributions. Events containing at least one electron or muon are classified based on their final state topology, and an automated search algorithm surveys the observed data for deviations from the prediction. The sensitivity of the search is validated using multiple methods. No significant deviations from the predictions have been observed. For a wide range of final state topologies, agreement is found between the data and the standard model simulation. This analysis complements dedicated search analyses by significantly expanding the range of final states covered using a model independent approach with the largest data set to date to probe phase space regions beyond the reach of previous general searches.Peer reviewe

Measurement of prompt open-charm production cross sections in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

The production cross sections for prompt open-charm mesons in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13TeV are reported. The measurement is performed using a data sample collected by the CMS experiment corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 29 nb(-1). The differential production cross sections of the D*(+/-), D-+/-, and D-0 ((D) over bar (0)) mesons are presented in ranges of transverse momentum and pseudorapidity 4 < p(T) < 100 GeV and vertical bar eta vertical bar < 2.1, respectively. The results are compared to several theoretical calculations and to previous measurements.Peer reviewe

Combined searches for the production of supersymmetric top quark partners in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A combination of searches for top squark pair production using proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb(-1) collected by the CMS experiment, is presented. Signatures with at least 2 jets and large missing transverse momentum are categorized into events with 0, 1, or 2 leptons. New results for regions of parameter space where the kinematical properties of top squark pair production and top quark pair production are very similar are presented. Depending on themodel, the combined result excludes a top squarkmass up to 1325 GeV for amassless neutralino, and a neutralinomass up to 700 GeV for a top squarkmass of 1150 GeV. Top squarks with masses from 145 to 295 GeV, for neutralino masses from 0 to 100 GeV, with a mass difference between the top squark and the neutralino in a window of 30 GeV around the mass of the top quark, are excluded for the first time with CMS data. The results of theses searches are also interpreted in an alternative signal model of dark matter production via a spin-0 mediator in association with a top quark pair. Upper limits are set on the cross section for mediator particle masses of up to 420 GeV

Development and validation of HERWIG 7 tunes from CMS underlying-event measurements

This paper presents new sets of parameters (“tunes”) for the underlying-event model of the HERWIG7 event generator. These parameters control the description of multiple-parton interactions (MPI) and colour reconnection in HERWIG7, and are obtained from a fit to minimum-bias data collected by the CMS experiment at s=0.9, 7, and 13Te. The tunes are based on the NNPDF 3.1 next-to-next-to-leading-order parton distribution function (PDF) set for the parton shower, and either a leading-order or next-to-next-to-leading-order PDF set for the simulation of MPI and the beam remnants. Predictions utilizing the tunes are produced for event shape observables in electron-positron collisions, and for minimum-bias, inclusive jet, top quark pair, and Z and W boson events in proton-proton collisions, and are compared with data. Each of the new tunes describes the data at a reasonable level, and the tunes using a leading-order PDF for the simulation of MPI provide the best description of the dat