The Epistemological Contribution of the Transcendental Reduction

AbstractIn order to appreciate the rich implications of the transcendental reduction, one has to distinguish the different contexts where it acquires different meanings. The present paper focuses on a particular epistemological context and clarifies the contribution of the reduction within this context. The contribution consists in the formulation and solution of the problem of exhibiting the evidence supporting the belief in the world's existence. In a nutshell, world-experience grounds the world-belief and world-experience entails a bedrock of experience legitimizing the positing of others. I argue that this contribution is possibly an enduring achievement of Husserl's transcendental philosophy against common objections that are raised against it. I show that both the necessity and the viability of the transcendental reduction are a consequence of the general structure of critical examination. Overall, a picture of Husserl's philosophy emerges that emphasizes embodiment, intersubjectivity, and facticity without giving up the rigor of radical epistemological analysis, aiming at overcoming both naïve pseudo-problems and subtle forms of dogmatism

Analyzing Mappings and Properties in Data Warehouse Integration

The information inside the Data Warehouse (DW) is used to take strategic decisions inside the organization that is why data quality plays a crucial role in guaranteeing the correctness of the decisions. Data quality also becomes a major issue when integrating information from two or more heterogeneous DWs. In the present paper, we perform extensive analysis of a mapping-based DW integration methodology and of its properties. In particular, we will prove that the proposed methodology guarantees coherency, meanwhile in certain cases it is able to maintain soundness and consistency. Moreover, intra-schema homogeneity is discussed and analysed as a necessary condition for summarizability and for optimization by materializing views of dependent queries

The characterisation and identification of body fluid proteins for forensic purposes.

Advances in DNA technology have led to the extremely sensitive and rapid analysis methods used in forensic science. It can often be crucial to a criminal case to unequivocally identify the body fluid source of DNA. This is of particular importance in rape cases where the defence may argue that the source of a female DNA profile might be from a casual touch or from saliva. In this study, proteomics has been employed in an attempt to identify potential biomarkers that are specific to a range of body fluids. Many publications cite the use of proteomics to identify biomarkers of disease such as cancer. In these reports, diseased and healthy tissues or tissues that have been treated or not treated with a drug are compared and the expressed proteins are compared by 2D electrophoresis. Human body fluids differ in function, composition and protein expression. Proteomics therefore seemed an ideal application to isolate the proteins that are characteristic of and specific to, different fluid types. Both saliva and vaginal fluid proteomic methodologies were optimised for sample preparation, IPG strip pH range and protein load, and post-electrophoretic staining. Seventeen isolated protein spots from saliva and vaginal fluid samples were submitted for LC-MS/MS analysis. Nine saliva spots and eleven vaginal spots were identified as known proteins on the MASCOT database. Of those thought to be specific to saliva or vaginal fluid six candidate biomarkers were tested further against a panel of body fluids for specificity using ELISA or Dot Blot. Zinc-α-2 glycoprotein (ZA2G) was detected and present in all body fluid samples thus could be used as a human body fluid positive control in a future assay. SCC (Squamous cell carcinoma) ELISA was capable of distinguishing samples of vaginal origin by detection of SCCA (Squamous cell carcinoma antigen). This antigen could be used in conjunction with a menstrual blood marker to distinguish between vaginal fluid and menstrual blood. Antibody specificity was a limiting factor in the success of the dot blots performed and hence the analysis of Cystatin SA, Cystatin SN and SERPIN B1 was inconclusive

Gamma-convergence for one-dimensional nonlocal phase transition energies

We study the asymptotic behavior as ε goes to 0 of an appropriate scaling of the following nonlocal Allen-Cahn energy,where I is an interval in R, and W is a double-well potential. We provide a Γ-convergence result for any s ∈ (0,1), by extending the case when s=1/2 studied by Alberti, Bouchittè and Seppecher in [2]. We also investigate the convergence as s↗1 of the related optimal profile problem to the local counterpart

Developmental Phenomenology: Epistemic Grounding, Infant Imitation, and Pairing

The present dissertation is comprised of three chapters. While the first chapter confines itself to Husserlian phenomenology, the other two pull together phenomenology and cognitive science, especially developmental psychology. Each chapter is an autonomous paper. However, the second and the third chapters are clearly connected. The claim defended in the second chapter figures as a premise in the third.In the first chapter, I argue that the phenomenological reduction makes possible a viable solution to the epistemological problem of whether the belief in the world\u27s existence is justified. The chapter includes a relatively long exegetical session aimed at demonstrating that the problem of the epistemic ground for the world\u27s existence constitutes one of Husserl\u27s motivations for the phenomenological reduction. In the second chapter, I propose the association by similarity hypothesis for neonatal imitation. This phenomenon is at the center of heated debates involving psychologists and philosophers. In the third chapter, I claim that infants come to perceive others as minded beings on the basis of an association by similarity between the behavior of others and their own. This claim constitutes a significant application of the theory of pairing, which was endorsed in its core by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I examine action perception in infants and I argue that pairing occurs through infant-caregiver interaction

Foreword to the Special Issue: "Semantics for Big Data Integration"

In recent years, a great deal of interest has been shown toward big data. Much of the work on big data has focused on volume and velocity in order to consider dataset size. Indeed, the problems of variety, velocity, and veracity are equally important in dealing with the heterogeneity, diversity, and complexity of data, where semantic technologies can be explored to deal with these issues. This Special Issue aims at discussing emerging approaches from academic and industrial stakeholders for disseminating innovative solutions that explore how big data can leverage semantics, for example, by examining the challenges and opportunities arising from adapting and transferring semantic technologies to the big data context

Gamma-Convergence for one-dimensional nonlocal phase transition energies

We study the asymptotic behavior as epsilon goes to 0 of an appropriate scaling of the following nonlocal Allen-Cahn energy,E-epsilon(s)(u) = epsilon(2s) integral integral(IxI) vertical bar u(x) - u(y)vertical bar(2)/vertical bar x - y vertical bar(1+2s) dxdy + integral(I) W(u) dx,where I is an interval in R, and W is a double-well potential. We provide a Gamma-convergence result for any s is an element of (0, 1), by extending the case when s = 1/2 studied by Alberti, Bouchitte and Seppecher in [2]. We also investigate the convergence as s NE arrow 1 of the related optimal profile problem to the local counterpart

Taking the mystery away from shared intentionality: The straightforward view and its empirical implications

Ordinary language in Western and non-Western cultures individuates shared mental states or experiences as unitary interpersonal events that belong to more than one individual. However, a default assumption in modern Western thought is that, in this regard, ordinary language is either illusory or merely metaphorical: a mental state or experience can belong to only one person. This assumption is called Cartesian eliminativism and is often taken to be foundational in psychology. It follows that any view that contradicts Cartesian eliminativism is a priori suspected of being “mysterious,” i.e., of not meeting scientific standards. This paper suggests that the very opposite may be the case. The straightforward view explains how individuals assemble and experience a shared mental state as a unitary whole whose components are distributed among the participants. The naturalistic advantages of such a view are brought to light by focusing on developmental science. Since it explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention merely by relying on domain-general, associative processes, the straightforward view is more parsimonious than current psychological theories. Indeed, it abandons the cumbersome postulates of (i) multi-level recursive mindreading and (ii) a special, conceptually elusive phenomenal quality. I outline the distinctive developmental predictions of the view and discuss how it accounts for the functions of shared mental states. As a reductionist, non-eliminativist approach, the straightforward view promises to be viable also for cognitive scientists who have so far worked within the Cartesian framework due to a lack of a rigorous and sufficiently developed alternative

Supporting Image Search with Tag Clouds: A Preliminary Approach

Algorithms and techniques for searching in collections of data address a challenging task, since they have to bridge the gap between the ways in which users express their interests, through natural language expressions or keywords, and the ways in which data is represented and indexed.When the collections of data include images, the task becomes harder, mainly for two reasons. From one side the user expresses his needs through one medium (text) and he will obtain results via another medium (some images). From the other side, it can be difficult for a user to understand the results retrieved; that is why a particular image is part of the result set. In this case, some techniques for analyzing the query results and giving to the users some insight into the content retrieved are needed. In this paper, we propose to address this problem by coupling the image result set with a tag cloud of words describing it. Some techniques for building the tag cloud are introduced and two application scenarios are discussed

Semantic Integration of heterogeneous data sources in the MOMIS Data Transformation System

In the last twenty years, many data integration systems following a classical wrapper/mediator architecture and providing a Global Virtual Schema (a.k.a. Global Virtual View - GVV) have been proposed by the research community. The main issues faced by these approaches range from system-level heterogeneities, to structural syntax level heterogeneities at the semantic level. Despite the research effort, all the approaches proposed require a lot of user intervention for customizing and managing the data integration and reconciliation tasks. In some cases, the effort and the complexity of the task is huge, since it requires the development of specific programming codes. Unfortunately, due to the specificity to be addressed, application codes and solutions are not frequently reusable in other domains. For this reason, the Lowell Report 2005 has provided the guideline for the definition of a public benchmark for information integration problem. The proposal, called THALIA (Test Harness for the Assessment of Legacy information Integration Approaches), focuses on how the data integration systems manage syntactic and semantic heterogeneities, which definitely are the greatest technical challenges in the field. We developed a Data Transformation System (DTS) that supports data transformation functions and produces query translation in order to push down to the sources the execution. Our DTS is based on MOMIS, a mediator-based data integration system that our research group is developing and supporting since 1999. In this paper, we show how the DTS is able to solve all the twelve queries of the THALIA benchmark by using a simple combination of declarative translation functions already available in the standard SQL language. We think that this is a remarkable result, mainly for two reasons: firstly to the best of our knowledge there is no system that has provided a complete answer to the benchmark, secondly, our queries does not require any overhead of new code