The relationship between ethical ideology and job stress appears to be complex. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39:175, 1980), showing two dimensions (idealism and relativism) that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Based on a survey of 561 employees of hotel industry in India, ethical ideologies were found to be negatively associated with job stress. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlations and multiple regressions. The result (...) showed that relativism is negatively correlated with job stress. Further, it has been established that idealism and relativism interacted in such a way that there is a negative relationship between idealism and job stress when relativism is low and positive relationship when relativism is high. The findings imply that ethical ideology adversely influences the job stress in the organization. (shrink)

Observational discrepancies in galactic rotation curves and cluster dispersion data have been interpreted to imply the existence of dark matter. Numerous efforts at its detection, however, have failed to turn up any positive result. As a dynamical theory is always operative on the assumed mass distribution to predict kinematic observations, some scientists see the discrepancy as telling against General Relativity. Among the many theories that seek to modify gravity, those that are built on Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), or yield MOND (...) behaviour at appropriate scales, achieve remarkable empirical success without assuming dark matter. The continued non-detection of dark matter and the empirical success of MOND supports the claim that the current evidential and theoretical context underdetermines General Relativity. In this article, I clarify the kind of underdetermination that can be said to threaten General Relativity. Specifically, I argue that the present evidential and theoretical context increase the possibility of an unconceived alternative to GR which would be just as well supported by the available evidence. (shrink)

I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be beneficial for science as a whole. However, such a change can come at the cost of looking beyond the categories of the disciplines of logic, philosophy and physics. It is through self-inquiry that such a change is possible, along with the realization of the (...) essence of the middle that is otherwise excluded by choice. The logician, who generally holds a reverential attitude towards the physicist, can then actively contribute to the betterment of physics by improving the language through which the physicist expresses his experience. The philosopher, who otherwise chooses to follow the advancement of physics and gets stuck in the trap of sophistication of language, can then be of guidance to the physicist on intellectual grounds by having the physicist’s experience himself. In course of this commentary, I provide a glimpse of how a truthful conversion of verbal statements to physico-mathematical expressions unravels the hitherto unrealized connection between Heisenberg uncertainty relation and Cauchy’s definition of derivative that is used in physics. The commentary can be an essential reading if the reader is willing to look beyond the categories of logic, philosophy and physics by being ‘nobody’. (shrink)

Physical dimensions like “mass”, “length”, “charge”, represented by the symbols [M], [L], [Q], are not numbers, but used as numbers to perform dimensional analysis in particular, and to write the equations of physics in general, by the physicist. The law of excluded middle falls short of explaining the contradictory meanings of the same symbols. The statements like “m tends to 0”, “r tends to 0”, “q tends to 0”, used by the physicist, are inconsistent on dimensional grounds because “m”, “r”, (...) “q” represent quantities with physical dimensions of [M], [L], [Q] respectively and “0” represents just a number—devoid of physical dimension. Consequently, due to the involvement of the statement “q tends to 0'', where q is the test charge” in the definition of electric field leads to either circular reasoning or a contradiction regarding the experimental verification of the smallest charge in the Millikan–Fletcher oil drop experiment. Considering such issues as problematic, by choice, I make an inquiry regarding the basic language in terms of which physics is written, with an aim of exploring how truthfully the verbal statements can be converted to the corresponding physico-mathematical expressions, where “physico-mathematical” signifies the involvement of physical dimensions. Such investigation necessitates an explanation by demonstration of “self inquiry”, “middle way”, “dependent origination”, “emptiness/relational existence”, which are certain terms that signify the basic tenets of Buddhism. In light of such demonstration I explain my view of “definition”; the relations among quantity, physical dimension and number; meaninglessness of “zero quantity” and the associated logico-linguistic fallacy; difference between unit and unity. Considering the importance of the notion of electric field in physics, I present a critical analysis of the definitions of electric field due to Maxwell and Jackson, along with the physico-mathematical conversions of the verbal statements. The analysis of Jackson’s definition points towards an expression of the electric field as an infinite series due to the associated “limiting process” of the test charge. However, it brings out the necessity of a postulate regarding the existence of charges, which nevertheless follows from the definition of quantity. Consequently, I explain the notion of undecidable charges that act as the middle way to resolve the contradiction regarding the Millikan–Fletcher oil drop experiment. In passing, I provide a logico-linguistic analysis, in physico-mathematical terms, of two verbal statements of Maxwell in relation to his definition of electric field, which suggests Maxwell’s conception of dependent origination of distance and charge ) and that of emptiness in the context of relative vacuum. This work is an appeal for the dissociation of the categorical disciplines of logic and physics and on the large, a fruitful merger of Eastern philosophy and Western science. Nevertheless, it remains open to how the reader relates to this work, which is the essence of emptiness. (shrink)

Hierarchical cognitive mechanisms underlie sophisticated behaviors, including language, music, mathematics, tool-use, and theory of mind. The origins of hierarchical logical reasoning have long been, and continue to be, an important puzzle for cognitive science. Prior approaches to hierarchical logical reasoning have often failed to distinguish between observable hierarchical behavior and unobservable hierarchical cognitive mechanisms. Furthermore, past research has been largely methodologically restricted to passive recognition tasks as compared to active generation tasks that are stronger tests of hierarchical rules. We argue (...) that it is necessary to implement learning studies in humans, non-human species, and machines that are analyzed with formal models comparing the contribution of different cognitive mechanisms implicated in the generation of hierarchical behavior. These studies are critical to advance theories in the domains of recursion, rule-learning, symbolic reasoning, and the potentially uniquely human cognitive origins of hierarchical logical reasoning. (shrink)

The capacity to generate recursive sequences is a marker of rich, algorithmic cognition, and perhaps unique to humans. Yet, the precise processes driving recursive sequence generation remain mysterious. We investigated three potential cognitive mechanisms underlying recursive pattern processing: hierarchical reasoning, ordinal reasoning, and associative chaining. We developed a Bayesian mixture model to quantify the extent to which these three cognitive mechanisms contribute to adult humans’ performance in a sequence generation task. We further tested whether recursive rule discovery depends upon relational (...) information, either perceptual or semantic. We found that the presence of relational information facilitates hierarchical reasoning and drives the generation of recursive sequences across novel depths of center embedding. In the absence of relational information, the use of ordinal reasoning predominates. Our results suggest that hierarchical reasoning is an important cognitive mechanism underlying recursive pattern processing and can be deployed across embedding depths and relational domains. (shrink)

Dennett (_Synthese,_ _53_(2), 159–180, 1982, 1991, _Journal of Consciousness Studies,_ _10_(9–10), 19–30, 2003, _Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _6_, 247–270, 2007 ) proposes and defends a method called _heterophenomenology_. Heterophenomenology is a method to study consciousness _from a third-person objective point of view_ as opposed to a first-person subjective point of view or (auto)-phenomenology. The method of heterophenomenology serves a necessary role in Dennett’s schema of bridging the gap between the manifest and the scientific image of the world. In this (...) paper, I attempt to present a limited critique of the method of heterophenomenology. The objection raised in this paper is limited to one of the steps involved in the method, i.e., the interpretation of the heterophenomenological text as analogous to novelist fiction. I attempt to show that the assumptions made by Dennett about the interpretation of fiction are contradictory in nature and therefore the same cannot be applied to the interpretation of a heterophenomenological text. The assumptions fail in justifying the interpretation of fiction itself and hence exporting them by analogy to interpret a heterophenomenological text is a mistake. (shrink)

Education is presently required to create inclusive, supportive, and validating environments for education and experiences, while educational organizations continue to maintain students from many different kinds of cultural and socially diverse backgrounds. This research investigates how students engage and collaborate with diverse cultures and social environments to identify the key features influencing their social relationships and learning outcomes. To determine the possibilities and difficulties that students experience in a varied educational environment and make suggestions for the enhancements and assessment techniques (...) for fostering a multicultural and diverse classroom. In this research, the details gathered from 350 students, and utilize 15 questionnaires related to cultural and social diversity in education that were developed, based on five variables, such as students attitudes towards diversity (SATD), impact on the learning environment (ILE), cultural awareness (CA), perception of cultural and social diversity (PCSD), and social interactions (SI). The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test and inferential statistics analysis methods are evaluated through the SPSS software. From both analyses, the variable PCSD performance is higher than other four variables in the field of student perception of social and cultural diversity in education. (shrink)

Einsteinian gravity, of which Newtonian gravity is a part, is fraught with the problem of singularity that has been established as a theorem by Hawking and Penrose. The _hypothesis_ that founds the basis of both Einsteinian and Newtonian theories of gravity is that bodies with unequal magnitudes of masses fall with the same acceleration under the gravity of a source object. Since, the Einstein’s equations is one of the assumptions that underlies the proof of the singularity theorem, therefore, the above (...) hypothesis is implicitly one of the founding pillars of the same. In this work, I demonstrate how one can possibly write a non-singular theory of gravity which manifests that the above mentioned hypothesis is only valid in an approximate sense in the “large distance” scenario. To mention a specific instance, under the gravity of the earth, a 5 kg and a 500 kg fall with accelerations which differ by approximately \(113.148\times 10^{-32}\) meter/sec \(^2\) and the more massive object falls with less acceleration. Further, I demonstrate why the concept of gravitational field is not definable in the “small distance” regime which automatically justifies why the Einstein’s and Newton’s theories fail to provide any “small distance” analysis. In course of writing down this theory, I demonstrate why the continuum hypothesis as spelled out by Goedel, is undecidable. The theory has several aspects which provide the following realizations: (i) Descartes’ self-skepticism concerning exact representation of numbers by drawing lines (ii) Born’s wish of taking into account “natural uncertainty in all observations” while describing “a physical situation” by means of “real numbers” (iii) Klein’s vision of having “a fusion of arithmetic and geometry” where “a point is replaced by a small spot” (iv) Goedel’s assertion about “non-standard analysis, in some version” being “the analysis of the future”. (shrink)

Recent advances in genomic and imaging techniques have revealed the complex manner of organizing billions of base pairs of DNA necessary for maintaining their functionality and ensuring the proper expression of genetic information. The SMC proteins and cohesin complex primarily contribute to forming higher‐order chromatin structures, such as chromosomal territories, compartments, topologically associating domains (TADs) and chromatin loops anchored by CCCTC‐binding factor (CTCF) protein or other genome organizers. Cohesin plays a fundamental role in chromatin organization, gene expression and regulation. This (...) review aims to describe the current understanding of the dynamic nature of the cohesin‐DNA complex and its dependence on cohesin for genome maintenance. We discuss the current 3C technique and numerous bioinformatics pipelines used to comprehend structural genomics and epigenetics focusing on the analysis of Cohesin‐centred interactions. We also incorporate our present comprehension of Loop Extrusion (LE) and insights from stochastic modelling. (shrink)

Epistemologies and research methods are not free of metaphysics. This is to say that they are both, supported by (or presumed by), and support (or presume) fundamental ontologies. A discussion of the epistemological foundations of "multimethod" research in the social sciences—in as much as such research claims to unearth "causal" relations—therefore cannot avoid the ontological presuppositions or implications of such a discussion. But though there isn’t necessarily a perfect correspondence between ontology, epistemology, and methodology, they do constrain each other. As (...) such it is possible to make methodological choices that are at odds with one’s (implicit) ontology or argue from an ontology that is inconsistent one’s choice of methods.Yet lack of recognition of this fact has hampered methodological discussions in political science, especially with respect to the discussion on the merits of multimethod research. The ontology implicitly accepted in such discussions is "reductionist" and "regularist," that is, one that respectively defines causes in terms of noncausal relations and states of affair and affirms that such noncausal relations are regularities in nature. This article will argue that any attempt to fit "multimethod" research (where "multimethod" signifies some combination of inferential statistics and case studies) within this narrow ontology is destined to fail since such a metaphysics logically cannot accord case studies a necessary or sufficient role in the in the establishment of causal relations. However, there are metaphysical positions within the ambit of an empiricist philosophy of science that can accommodate multiple methods without contradiction. The article discusses two such ontologies and suggests ways in which they might allow the establishment of a coherent epistemological foundation for multimethod research, however, within a decidedly empiricist philosophy of science. (shrink)

SummaryExamining waiting time to birth among newlywed couples is likely to provide insights into the desire for spacing births among newlywed husbands and wives. Data from the Indian National Family Health Survey of 2005–06 are used to examine the desired waiting time to birth among newlywed couples. The dependent variable is spousal concordance on desired waiting times. Overall 65% of couples have concordant desired waiting times. Among discordant couples, wives were more likely to want to wait longer than their husbands. (...) Couples from richer wealth quintiles were more likely than couples from the poorest quintile to have concordant desired waiting times. Muslims were less likely than Hindus to have concordant desires. There is a need for spacing contraceptive methods among newlyweds in India. This may have implications for the Indian Family Planning Programme, which to date has largely focused on sterilization. Programmes need to include newlywed husbands to promote use of spacing methods. (shrink)

Durán et al argue in ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI’1 that traditionally proposed solutions to make black box machine learning models in medicine less opaque and more transparent are, though necessary, ultimately not sufficient to establish their overall trustworthiness. This is because transparency procedures currently employed, such as the use of an interpretable predictor,2 cannot fully overcome the opacity of such models. Computational reliabilism, an alternate approach to (...) adjudicating trustworthiness that goes beyond transparency solutions, is argued to be a more promising approach. CR can bring the benefits of traditional process reliabilism in epistemology to bear on this problem of model trustworthiness. Durán et al ’s explicitly reliabilist epistemology to assess the trustworthiness of black box models is a timely addition to current transparency-focused approaches in the literature. Their delineation of the epistemic from the ethical also serves the debate by clarifying the nature of the different problems. However, their overall account underestimates the epistemic value of certain transparency-enabling approaches by conflating different types of opacity and also oversimplifies transparency-advocating arguments in the literature. First, it is unclear why Durán et al consider transparency approaches as insufficient to overcome epistemic opacity, if heiraccount of opacity is the traditional one from the machine learning literature: opacity stemming from the mismatch between mathematical optimisation in high dimensionality that is characteristic of machine learning and the demands of human-scale reasoning and styles of semantic interpretation.3 …. (shrink)

There has been in recent decades very substantial work done on the concept of a nation, nationality and nationalism. In spite of the world coming together on many fronts—particularly, economy and a multicultural habitat formations especially in Europe and North America—these ideas remain politically volatile. In modern times, the idea of a nation has become powerfully associated with the idea of the state and the two notions are frequently used almost interchangeably. If among the emotional ties that form the basis (...) of the idea of a nation, we add a strong sense of belonging to a specific culture with its own history, traditions and the sharing of ethical and aesthetic values—it may quite naturally lead to the idea of one-nation, one-state and one culture. Such indeed has been a trend in the European concept of the idea of a nation of the 18th, 19th and partly of the twentieth century. However, same cannot be said about Indian nation. If we closely look at the growth of Indian nationalism in the backdrop of anti-colonial movement and formation of Indian state after gaining independence, we find lack of unanimity among thinkers. This paper explores the growth of Indian Nationalism and formation of Indian Nation through the eyes of one of the most seminal contemporary Indian thinkers Sri Aurobindo. (shrink)

On the philosophy of Ghāsīdāsa, b. 1756, Hindu religious leader and social worker.

We compute the model-theoretic Grothendieck ring, \\), of a dense linear order with or without end points, \\), as a structure of the signature \, and show that it is a quotient of the polynomial ring over \ generated by \\) by an ideal that encodes multiplicative relations of pairs of generators. This ring can be embedded in the polynomial ring over \ generated by \. As a corollary we obtain that a DLO satisfies the pigeon hole principle for definable (...) subsets and definable bijections between them—a property that is too strong for many structures. (shrink)

The present work, "Indian Philosophers of the Recent Past" , reflects and deliberates over recent Indian scholarship in philosophy. It is to get the present and future generations of philosopher-scholars acquainted with the rich Indian philosophical heritage. This is going to deepen our insights into the nature of philosophical consciousness and into the act of philosophizing. It makes an attempt to analyse the philosophies of outstanding philosophers such as K.C. Bhattacharyya, S. Radhakrishnan, R.D. Ranade, A.C. Mukerji, T.R.V. Murti, N.K. Devraja, (...) J.L. Mehta, J.N. Mohanty, Daya Krishna and S.L. Pandey. The post-Independent Indian philosophy is said to have unique tendencies and trends; some of them can be easily identified as existentialist and phenomenological, idealistic, realistic, humanistic, linguistic and analytico-philosophical comparative philosophy and Indian defence of metaphysics. The volume is unique in its conceptual clarity, lucid expression, systematic presentation and critical exposition of the subject matter. It is undoubtedly a valuable contribution for the seekers of Indian philosophical system which should evoke keen interest among scholars and students of philosophy. (shrink)

A reductionist view of mental health tends to give limited results. While some important benefits are still achieved, other key elements are left unaddressed. These gaps tend to wipe out the gains which were made by focusing on the dominant aspects of mental health that are promoted by a reductionist view. This paper explores such gaps by looking at those healing traditions which view health and wellness from a broader perspective. Through the live experience of such traditions the paper tries (...) to illustrate how the deeper aspects of mental health are also relevant. The paper attempts to argue that diverse cultures have inbuilt repositories of existential wisdom which can help in promoting and maintaining positive mental health through a conceptual exploratory analysis. (shrink)

Using an evidence-based model developed by Egbert and colleagues, editors Joy Egbert and Priya Panday-Shukla provide a comprehensive overview of task engagement for teachers and researchers. Research has positioned task engagement as central to student learning, and Egbert Panday-Shukla now collate this research into a resource teachers can utilize.The chapters address how task engagement theory, evidence, and instruction can be applied to increase learner achievement. The editors and contributors draw from backgrounds across STEAM education and other disciplines to (...) present task engagement and connect its importance to the success of today's students. Chapters include background information, resources, exercises, and ideas for teachers and researchers to extend the research behind individual elements of the task engagement model into practice. Each chapter focuses on one component of the model, and includes guiding questions and key points, a "how-to" section, and recommended tasks for K-12 classroom use. Though ideal for teacher education research scholars, students, and faculty, this book is useful for instructors at all levels interested in integrating task engagement principles into their practice. (shrink)