512 research outputs found
Paradoxical Desires
I present a paradoxical combination of desires. I show why it's paradoxical, and consider ways of responding. The paradox saddles us with an unappealing trilemma: either we reject the possibility of the case by placing surprising restrictions on what we can desire, or we deny plausibly constitutive principles linking desires to the conditions under which they are satisfied, or we revise some bit of classical logic. I argue that denying the possibility of the case
is unmotivated on any reasonable way of thinking about mental content, and rejecting those desire-satisfaction principles leads to revenge paradoxes. So the best response is a non-classical one, according to which certain desires are neither determinately satisfied nor determinately not satisfied. Thus, theorizing about paradoxical propositional attitudes helps constrain the space of possibilities for adequate solutions to semantic paradoxes more generally
Two Ways to Want?
I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral
propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in
this way
Non‐Classical Knowledge
The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely-held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single-premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker-than-classical K3 logic.
I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to--whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non-classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities
Against Conventional Wisdom
Conventional wisdom has it that truth is always evaluated using our actual linguistic conventions, even when considering counterfactual scenarios in which different conventions are adopted. This principle has been invoked in a number of philosophical arguments, including Kripke’s defense of the necessity of identity and Lewy’s objection to modal conventionalism. But it is false. It fails in the presence of what Einheuser (2006) calls c-monsters, or convention-shifting expressions (on analogy with Kaplan’s monsters, or context-shifting expressions). We show that c-monsters naturally arise in contexts, such as metalinguistic negotiations, where speakers entertain alternative conventions. We develop an expressivist theory—inspired by Barker (2002) and MacFarlane (2016) on vague predications and Einheuser (2006) on counterconventionals—to model these shifts in convention. Using this framework, we reassess the philosophical arguments that invoked the conventional wisdom
‚White Charity‘ - Schwarzsein & Weißsein auf Spendenplakaten. Dokumentarfilm von Carolin Philipp und Timo Kiesel, 2012, 48 Minuten. [Rezension]
Rezension von: ‚White Charity‘ − Schwarzsein & Weißsein auf Spendenplakaten. Dokumentarfilm von Carolin Philipp und Timo Kiesel, 2012, 48 Minuten, www.whitecharity.d
Quality-Driven Disorder Handling for M-way Sliding Window Stream Joins
Sliding window join is one of the most important operators for stream
applications. To produce high quality join results, a stream processing system
must deal with the ubiquitous disorder within input streams which is caused by
network delay, asynchronous source clocks, etc. Disorder handling involves an
inevitable tradeoff between the latency and the quality of produced join
results. To meet different requirements of stream applications, it is desirable
to provide a user-configurable result-latency vs. result-quality tradeoff.
Existing disorder handling approaches either do not provide such
configurability, or support only user-specified latency constraints.
In this work, we advocate the idea of quality-driven disorder handling, and
propose a buffer-based disorder handling approach for sliding window joins,
which minimizes sizes of input-sorting buffers, thus the result latency, while
respecting user-specified result-quality requirements. The core of our approach
is an analytical model which directly captures the relationship between sizes
of input buffers and the produced result quality. Our approach is generic. It
supports m-way sliding window joins with arbitrary join conditions. Experiments
on real-world and synthetic datasets show that, compared to the state of the
art, our approach can reduce the result latency incurred by disorder handling
by up to 95% while providing the same level of result quality.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, IEEE ICDE 201
Experimental Studies and the Chemical Kinetics Modelling of Oxidation of Hydrogen Sulfide Contained in Biogas
AbstractThis paper presents the results of experimental and numerical research on the process of biogas air combustion. The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of biogas CO2 content on: (a) variations in SO2 concentrations in flue gas, (b) variations in the rates of the key reactions of oxidation of H2S to SO2.The subject of investigation were the gas mixtures: CH4/CO2 (of 25; 35 and 45 vol % CO2) with a varying hydrogen sulfide content. The experiments were conducted in a three-zone pipe furnace equipped with a swirl burner (Sg=1.26) with combustion substrate pre-mixing. It was noticed that the consumption of hydrogen sulfide was significantly reduced with the temperature decrease from 1223 K to 1023 K. The increase in the biogas carbon dioxide content inhibited the process of oxidation of H2S to SO2
CausalImages: An R Package for Causal Inference with Earth Observation, Bio-medical, and Social Science Images
The causalimages R package enables causal inference with image and image
sequence data, providing new tools for integrating novel data sources like
satellite and bio-medical imagery into the study of cause and effect. One set
of functions enables image-based causal inference analyses. For example, one
key function decomposes treatment effect heterogeneity by images using an
interpretable Bayesian framework. This allows for determining which types of
images or image sequences are most responsive to interventions. A second
modeling function allows researchers to control for confounding using images.
The package also allows investigators to produce embeddings that serve as
vector summaries of the image or video content. Finally, infrastructural
functions are also provided, such as tools for writing large-scale image and
image sequence data as sequentialized byte strings for more rapid image
analysis. causalimages therefore opens new capabilities for causal inference in
R, letting researchers use informative imagery in substantive analyses in a
fast and accessible manner.Comment: For accompanying software, see
https://github.com/AIandGlobalDevelopmentLab/causalimages-softwar
Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records
Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking
shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may
turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String
matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings
appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails
to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse,
many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and
"Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has
little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent
employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these
problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount
of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The
first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from
character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational
name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching
metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach
identifies relationships between organization names using network
representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and
second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in
applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software
("LinkOrgs")
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