We study the topological models of a logic of knowledge for topological reasoning, introduced by Larry Moss and Rohit Parikh (1992). Among our results is the confirmation of a conjecture by Moss and Parikh, as well as the finite satisfiability property and decidability for the theory of topological models.

The purpose of this article is to introduce a class of distance-based iterated revision operators generated by minimizing the geodesic distance on a graph. Such operators correspond bijectively to metrics and have a simple finite presentation. As distance is generated by distinguishability, our framework is appropriate for modelling contexts where distance is generated by threshold, and therefore, when measurement is erroneous.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a form of update based on the minimization of the geodesic distance on a graph. We provide a characterization of this class using set- theoretic operators and show that such operators bijectively correspond to geodesic metrics. As distance is generated by distinguishability, our framework is appropriate in contexts where distance is generated by threshold, and therefore, when measurement is erroneous.

We provide a critique of the usual functionalist, cognition-first reading of Aristotle’s theory of emotion and then offer an alternative understanding of Aristotle's theory of cognition and emotion that brings to bear certain biological considerations evidenced in his arguments on the integration of form and matter (hylomorphism) and the hierarchical organization of the biological world. This, of course, does not suggest that we are critical of all varieties of functionalism, but only those which fail to utilize and incorporate findings in (...) neuroscience. One way to help bridge the gap between mind and the physical world is through empirical findings. Based upon our new reading of Aristotle, we identify affinities with contemporary research in the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and developmental research on emotion. (shrink)

The covid-19 pandemic has supposed a greater marginalization of sexual and gender minorities. This marginalization has been an effect both of the public management’s prioritization of the epidemiological situation, and of a generalized social backlash attributed to the unprecedented lockdown conditions. Within this framework, and among other vulnerable social collectivities, trans people have seen their testimonies particularly unaddressed and exempt of credibility. Group dynamics of reinforcement of categories, as well as the dissemination of fake news through the Internet and the (...) reactivation of outdated debates on legitimacy within the public sphere, have given rise to a generalized mistrust and polarization. The present text utilizes qualitative data obtained through a larger research project on accessibility of trans people to psychological services, to conflate barriers to health services, with infodemia on social media, social distancing, the uprising of conservative discourses, and minority stress. (shrink)

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Volume 24, Issue 03, December 2024. When k is a finite field, [J. Becker, J. Denef and L. Lipshitz, Further remarks on the elementary theory of formal power series rings, in Model Theory of Algebra and Arithmetic, Proceedings Karpacz, Poland, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 834 (Springer, Berlin, 1979)] observed that the total residue map [math], which picks out the constant term of the Laurent series, is definable in the language of rings with a parameter for (...) t. Driven by this observation, we study the theory [math] of valued fields equipped with a linear form [math] which restricts to the residue map on the valuation ring. We prove that [math] does not admit a model companion. In addition, we show that [math] is undecidable whenever k is an infinite field. As a consequence, we get that [math] is undecidable, where [math] maps f to its complex residue at 0. (shrink)

Terpsicles is neglected in all current Histories of Greek Literature and Dictionaries of Antiquity, except for a five-lines-long entry by E. Bux in Real-Encyclopädie V.A. 790. He is the author of a treatise Περί ἀΦροδισίων, which is only known from two references in Athenaeus—7.325d and 9.391e—and seems to have been a collection of sex-related marvels. In the first passage he provides a piece of information on the red mullet.

We give a characterization of extendibility in terms of embeddings between the structures H λ . By that means, we show that the GCH can be forced (by a class forcing) while preserving extendible cardinals. As a corollary, we argue that such cardinals cannot in general be made indestructible by (set) forcing, under a wide variety of forcing notions.

The resurrection axioms are forms of forcing axioms that were introduced recently by Hamkins and Johnstone, who developed on earlier ideas of Chalons and Veličković. In this note, we introduce a stronger form of resurrection and show that it gives rise to families of axioms which are consistent relative to extendible cardinals, and which imply the strongest known instances of forcing axioms, such as Martin’s Maximum++. In addition, we study the unbounded resurrection postulates in terms of consistency lower bounds, obtaining, (...) for example, failures of the weak square principle. (shrink)

In this study we explore the encounters emerging from the restructured categorizations of subjectivity in the context of an open system that constantly confronts the structures that create it. On the one hand, science formulates valid propositions through the ratio that ensures and confirms the acquisition of knowledge, but on the other hand, the truth of its propositions is related to those mental processes which seek the truth of deeper values than those discovered on the surface of reality. The question (...) arisen in this case is by what criteria we are able to go back to removing those antinomies (objectivism/perspectivism) in order to develop the interdisciplinary terms between the humanitarian field of science and sciences in a spirit of unification. In this way, we approach the potential of scientific reformulation in terms of the above interpretive perspectives in order to project the overcoming of divisions under the principles of diversity and critical thinking both in the field of philosophy and science as well. (shrink)

In this thesis we present two logical systems, $\bf MP$ and $\MP$, for the purpose of reasoning about knowledge and effort. These logical systems will be interpreted in a spatial context and therefore, the abstract concepts of knowledge and effort will be defined by concrete mathematical concepts.

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a governance framework promoted by influential policy makers such as the European Commission and academics from the fields of science and technology studies and management. This book is the first text to serve industry. Inspired by existing Corporate Responsibility standards and principles, it offers a selection of tools that can assist practitioners in implementing RRI in business and industry. -/- Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is integrative. It is a convergence of Technology Assessment (TA) (...) and Ethics, including corporate responsibility. The task of linking RRI to existing frameworks has only just begun. This book is a welcome example, showing how Corporate Responsibility tools can drive the implementation of RRI. Prof. Armin Grunwald, Head of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag and Head of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. -/- This is a simple, short, yet encyclopaedic work designed to help business implement RRI using the many tools of Corporate Responsibility (CR) already in place, everything from ISO9001 to the Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability. It makes clear the ways in which RRI is an extension of ideas already well-developed in CR. I learned a lot reading it. Prof. Michael Davis, Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence is making rapid and remarkable progress in the development of more sophisticated and powerful systems. However, the acknowledgement of several problems with modern machine learning approaches has prompted a shift in AI benchmarking away from task-oriented testing towards ability-oriented testing, in which AI systems are tested on their capacity to solve certain kinds of novel problems. The Animal-AI Environment is one such benchmark which aims to apply the ability-oriented testing used in comparative psychology to AI systems. Here, we (...) present the first direct human-AI comparison in the Animal-AI Environment, using children aged 6–10. We found that children of all ages were significantly better than a sample of 30 AIs across most of the tests we examined, as well as performing significantly better than the two top-scoring AIs, “ironbar” and “Trrrrr,” from the Animal-AI Olympics Competition 2019. While children and AIs performed similarly on basic navigational tasks, AIs performed significantly worse in more complex cognitive tests, including detour tasks, spatial elimination tasks, and object permanence tasks, indicating that AIs lack several cognitive abilities that children aged 6–10 possess. Both children and AIs performed poorly on tool-use tasks, suggesting that these tests are challenging for both biological and non-biological machines. (shrink)

We introduce a class of set-theoretic operators on a tolerance space that models the process of minimal belief contraction, and therefore a natural process of iterated contraction can be defined. We characterize the class of contraction operators and study the properties of the associated iterated belief contraction.

This paper proposes a formalization of conditional reasoning using Moss and Parikh’s logic of subsets so that a reasoner can express both conditional assertions about beliefs, as well as beliefs about conditional assertions. We present a complete axiomatization of the logic and show that it is decidable. A version of the Ramsey test is found to be compatible with this logic and provides a correspondence between conditionals and belief contraction.

Graphs are employed to define a variety of distance-based binary merging operators. We provide logical characterization results for each class of merging operators introduced and discuss the extension of this approach to the merging of sequences and multisets.

Research on bounded rationality has two cultures, which I call ‘idealistic’ and ‘pragmatic’. Technically, the cultures differ on whether they build models based on normative axioms or empirical facts, assume that people's goal is to optimize or to satisfice, do not or do model psychological processes, let parameters vary freely or fix them, aim at explanation or prediction and test models from one or both cultures. Each culture tells a story about people's rationality. The story of the idealistic culture is (...) frustrating, with people in principle being able to know what they should do, but in practice systematically failing to do it. This story makes one hide in books for intellectual solace or surrender to the designs of someone smarter. The story of the pragmatic culture is empowering: If people are educated to use the right tool in the right situation, they do well. (shrink)

Plato was a Socrates’ friend and disciple, but he wasn’t the only one. No doubt, Socrates had many followers, however, the majority of their work is lost. Was there any antagonism among his followers? Who succeeded in interpreting Socrates? Who could be considered as his successor? Of course, we don’t know if these questions emerged after the death of Socrates, but the Greek doxography suggests that there was a literary rivalry. As we underlined earlier, most unfortunately, we can’t examine all (...) of them thoroughly due to the lack of their work, but we can scrutinize Xenophon’s and Aristippus’ work. All of them, Plato, Xenophon and Aristippus, presented to a certain extent their ideas concerning education. Furthermore, they have not neglected the matter of gymnastikè, but what is exactly the role of physical education in their work? Are there any similarities or any differences between them? Since, Xenophon and Aristippus (as well as Plato) seem to be in favor of gymnastikè, it is necessary to understand its role. (shrink)

Over every and each sport event, a dark veil spreads and obfuscates the celebration: doping. Although anti-doping policies have been widely applied, controlling and diminishing this phenomenon has not been achieved yet and the use of doping is commonplace. In this article, I propose the concept of narcissistic civilization as a tool to interpret this phenomenon. I seek for a parallel reading between the Freudian idea of narcissism and its extension to social narcissism by Fromm, together with Heidegger’s analysis of (...) technology, keeping in mind that doping is a technological application. In this way I point out that both theories share a common view in that humans tend to fail in the distinction between the external reality as an object and their own self as the interpreter, that is between the ¨I¨ and the ¨not I¨. By making this fusion of the two theories that originate from different intellectual traditions, I aspire to provide an interpretation tool for the broad use of doping: I conclude that doping can be understood with the assumption of a narcissistic civilization, focused on technology, that calls for the use of PEDs. (shrink)

Digitization of every daily procedure requires trustworthy verification schemes. People tend to overlook the security of the passwords they use, i.e. they use the same password on different occasions, they neglect to change them periodically or they often forget them. This raises a major security issue, especially for elderly people who are not familiar with modern technology and its risks and challenges. To overcome these drawbacks, biometric factors were utilized, and nowadays, they have been widely adopted due to their convenience (...) of use and ease of hardware installation. Many biometric-based authentication schemes were proposed, but despite the advantages that they offer, recent research has shown that biometrics by itself cannot be considered as an inviolable technique. Recently, we have proposed StegoPass, a novel method that obtains the 68 facial points of a user and utilizes them as a stego message to an image. This produced stego image was the password. Although the experiments conducted showed maximum security, it would be challenging to enhance the robustness of the proposed model for even more attacks. This paper examines the utilization of multimodal biometrics as the secret message embedded in the image. More specifically, besides the extraction of the facial points, we extract the unique minutiae moments and combine them in a feature vector. This feature vector is then embedded in the image. Two different datasets were used, and the security of the method was tested against state-of-the-art deep learning models, i.e. generative adversarial networks, to test whether the image could be digitally synthesized and fool the proposed verification scheme. The results proved that the new enhanced version of StegoPass offers an extremely secure method as its predecessor. (shrink)

This paper presents an axiomatization of a class of set-theoretic conditional operators using minimization of the geodesic distance defined as the shortest path generated by the accessibility relation on a frame. The objective of this modeling is to define conditioning based on a notion of similarity generated by degrees of indistinguishability.

This paper analyses the role of external pressures, internal motivations and their interplay, with the intention of identifying whether they drive substantive or instead symbolic implementation of ISO 14001. The context is one of economic crisis. We focus on Greece, where the economic crisis has weakened the country’s institutional environment, and analyse qualitatively new interview data from 45 ISO 14001 certified firms. Our findings show that weak external pressures can lead to a symbolic implementation of ISO 14001, as firms can (...) defend their legitimacy without incurring the costs of internalization in the local market; weak external pressures can lead to substantive implementation of ISO 14001 when firms have strong internal motivations seeking to strategically differentiate from competitors in international markets. Firms internalize ISO 14001 so as to restore their legitimacy and reputation in foreign markets and stimulate their competitiveness; and strong internal motivations pave the way for companies to stimulate their competitiveness by enhancing their efficiency, as some companies might strengthen their position in the local market by implementing ISO 14001 substantively. The contribution of this paper to the literature on ISO 14001 internalization lies in refining existing theory on the importance of internal motivations for the substantive implementation of ISO 14001 in the context of economic crisis. In addition, this paper extends current theory by challenging studies that dismiss the importance of external pressures. We argue that the intensity of external pressures influences the internalization of ISO 14001, but propose that this relationship might not be linear. (shrink)

The article explores a particular mode of time synthesis as carried out in the field of Islamic micro-finance in Indonesia. It approaches this financial experiment through Deleuze's tripartite division of time and the concept of promise advanced here. I argue that the analytical promise the concept of promise holds is partly related to its ability to circumscribe a field of practice that is at once theological and economic and partly to its privileging of the time of the future. What the (...) study of Islamic micro-finance offers to studies of Deleuze is a timely reminder that this explicit privileging is not adequate in and of itself for ‘relativising’ the effects of habit and memory on time, thought and politics. This is primarily because promising has a dual, ‘schizoid’ and distressed constitution: it is motivated as much by the affirmative ‘will to power’ as by the negative ‘will to improve’. (shrink)

Paternalism is the restriction of a person's autonomy for the good of that person. It embodies a familiar conflict of intuitions: while we cherish individual freedom, we also want to protect/promote what we know to be good. So, every paternalist must meet two challenges: paternalism must be justifiable as a restriction of autonomy as well as effective in terms of well-being. In this essay, I argue that the ‘autonomy’ restricted by paternalism is a Razian brand of free self-authorship and that (...) the ‘good’ protected is captured by Martha Nussbaum's account of personal well-being. I then defend a mild welfare paternalism based on a dichotomy implicit in any defensible description of well-being. I argue that some aspects of the good life do not require endorsement and, therefore, can be justifiably and effectively promoted by autonomy-restricting means. Finally, I discuss why paternalism need not be hostile to ethical independence. (shrink)

Modelling consent is a process prior to any discussion about it, be it theoretical or practical. Here, after examining consent, I shall attempt to present a “logical generator” that produces all different cases of consent, so that afterwards we may articulate a two-dimensional model which will enable us to coherently demonstrate all possible types of consent. The resulting model will be combined with Aristotle’s square of opposition, offering us even greater insight. I shall claim that full informed consent is an (...) archetype, not realized in most cases; it is just one case out of hundreds more. I shall conclude with an educational model for consent, the principle of specificity, arguing that if we wish to both understanding consent and become more adept in exercising it, we need a targeted educational system – not just “better education” in general. (shrink)