Aversive autobiographical memories sometimes prompt maladaptive emotional responses and contribute to affective dysfunction in anxiety and depression. One way to regulate the impact of such memories is to create a downward counterfactual thought–a mental simulation of how the event could have been worse–to put what occurred in a more positive light. Despite its intuitive appeal, counterfactual thinking has not been systematically studied for its regulatory efficacy. In the current study, we compared the regulatory impact of downward counterfactual thinking, temporal distancing, (...) and memory rehearsal in 54 adult participants representing a spectrum of trait anxiety. Participants recalled regretful experiences and rated them on valence, arousal, regret, and episodic detail. Two to six days later, they created a downward counterfactual of the remembered event, thought of how they might feel about it 10 years from now, or simply rehearsed it. A day later, participants re-rated the phenomenological characteristics of the events. Across all participants, downward counterfactual thinking, temporal distancing, and memory rehearsal were equally effective at reducing negative affect associated with a memory. However, in individuals with higher trait anxiety, downward counterfactual thinking was more effective than rehearsal for reducing regret, and it was as effective as distancing in reducing arousal. We discuss these results in light of the functional theory of counterfactual thinking and suggest that they motivate further investigation into downward counterfactual thinking as a means to intentionally regulate emotional memories in affective disorders. (shrink)

We suggest that the issue of constructing andverifying social procedures, which we suggestively call socialsoftware, be pursued as systematically as computer software is pursued by computer scientists. Certain complications do arise withsocial software which do not arise with computer software, but thesimilarities are nonetheless strong, and tools already exist which wouldenable us to start work on this important project. We give a variety ofsuggestive examples and indicate some theoretical work which alreadyexists.

An examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French history indicates that the relationship between the Jesuits and Quietism was shaped by politics as well as by concerns of theological orthodoxy. During the late 1690s, the Jesuits championed François Fénelon accused of Quietism at the same time as they spearheaded an attack against Quietism in Burgundy, emphasizing crimes of spiritual incest or the abuse of clerical authority. Such ambiguity indicates that the Jesuits were motivated by a desire to consolidate political power in (...) Louis XIV... trades court. However, the fusion of Quietist heresy, charges of spiritual incest, and political gamesmanship would ultimately make the Jesuits themselves vulnerable to claims of heresy and abuse when the Girard/Cadière affair became a national scandal in 1731. This essay argues that this disquiet over clerical behavior and power was articulated in a changing political culture between the late seventeenth century and the 1730s. Growing dissatisfaction against the crown established a new political consciousness, one that regarded the politics of secrecy as problematic if not outright illegitimate. The secrecy of the confession, the emphasis on interiority seemingly at the expense of morality, and the enigmatic language of mysticism, all associated with Quietism played into fears of clerical (or “Jesuit”) cabal and conspiracy. When Jesuit opponents linked the order to Quietism, they presented the Jesuits as threats to an emerging set of political values in which legitimate authority was transparent and open while illegitimate power operated in the shadows. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking, or simulating alternative versions of occurred events, is a common psychological strategy people use to process events in their lives. However, CFT is also a core com...

We offer a probabilistic model of rational consequence relations (Lehmann and Magidor, 1990) by appealing to the extension of the classical Ramsey-Adams test proposed by Vann McGee in (McGee, 1994). Previous and influential models of nonmonotonic consequence relations have been produced in terms of the dynamics of expectations (Gärdenfors and Makinson, 1994; Gärdenfors, 1993).'Expectation' is a term of art in these models, which should not be confused with the notion of expected utility. The expectations of an agent are some form (...) of belief weaker than absolute certainty. Our model offers a modified and extended version of an account of qualitative belief in terms of conditional probability, first presented in (van Fraassen, 1995). We use this model to relate probabilistic and qualitative models of non-monotonic relations in terms of expectations. In doing so we propose a probabilistic model of the notion of expectation. We provide characterization results both for logically finite languages and for logically infinite, but countable, languages. The latter case shows the relevance of the axiom of countable additivity for our probability functions. We show that a rational logic defined over a logically infinite language can only be fully characterized in terms of finitely additive conditional probability. (shrink)

A novel piecewise water flow technique for text line extraction from multi-skewed document images of handwritten text of different scripts is presented here. The basic water flow technique assumes that the hypothetical water flows from both left and right sides of the image frame. This flow of water fills up the gaps between consecutive objects but faces obstruction if any object lies in the path of the flow. All unwetted regions in the document image are then labeled distinctly to extract (...) the text lines. However, the technique fails when two neighboring text lines touch each other, as water gets obstructed by the touching segment. To get rid of this difficulty, we have modified the basic water flow technique by iteratively applying the same over the vertically segmented document images. The main purpose of this vertical segmentation is to localize the text line segment where two text lines get joined. These segments are then horizontally fragmented, and each fragment is placed suitably to the text line in which it actually belongs to. This way, the probable data loss during isolation of the touching text line segment is minimized. Both the techniques have been tested on three different databases, viz., CMATERdb 1.1.1, CMATERdb 1.1.2, and ICDAR2009 handwritten segmentation contest pages, respectively. The test results show that the present technique outperforms the basic one for all three databases. (shrink)

We propose a model for belief which is free of presuppositions. Current models for belief suffer from two difficulties. One is the well known problem of logical omniscience which tends to follow from most models. But a more important one is the fact that most models do not even attempt to answer the question what it means for someone to believe something, and justwhatit is that is believed. We provide a flexible model which allows us to give meaning to beliefs (...) in general contexts, including the context of animal belief (where action is usually our only clue to a belief), and of human belief which is expressed in language. (shrink)

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic (...) change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. -/- The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

Each of us has a story which we can think of as a set of beliefs, hopefully consistent. We make our decisions in view of our beliefs which may be probabilistic, in the general case, but simple yes or no as in this paper. Our beliefs are our envelope just as the shell of a tortoise is its envelope. Decision theory—or single agent game theory tells us when to make the best choice in a game of us against nature. But (...) nature has no desire to further or frustrate our efforts. Nature is mysterious but not malign. Things change when there are other agents involved. Then the best thing for us to do will depend on what they do. And they will think the same. And we predict their actions in terms of what we think their beliefs are. But how do we coordinate with others whose beliefs are different? This paper addresses the issue of working together despite different beliefs. (shrink)

This article examines how the EU gender mainstreaming approach has addressed work and family reconciliation across Southern Italian regions, to foster a more egalitarian and socially inclusive development. Drawing upon a survey of women of different socioeconomic backgrounds and in-depth interviewing of regional policy-makers, this article assesses what gender equality policies do and don’t do for work–family reconciliation within the Italian Mezzogiorno. Findings show that while poor women may be stigmatized as inadequate mothers, middle-class women are pushed to join men (...) in employment and civic sphere at the expense of caring. As both public and private caring supply is underdeveloped and unevenly guaranteed between protected and unprotected workers, women may be constrained to reduce their participation in the labour market. Traditional gendered family roles and power relations within the household may further discourage women to work, form and maintain a family. (shrink)

This article descends into Plato’s representation of justice in The Republic, focusing on exploring a notion that has been fundamental to society since its inception. While justice was formed to ensure equality within a stratified society, it frequently results in inequity for particular sectors of society. This paradoxical element of justice makes it biased and sometimes fictitious for some groups of people. An unfortunate consequence of pursuing justice is that specific segments of society are regularly deprived. Therefore, this article discusses (...) the essence of social stratification in Plato’s concept of justice and how far this stratification does justice for each class. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#73-74; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2023 P 241-257. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel approach for word extraction and character segmentation from the handwritten Bangla document images is reported. At first, a modified Run Length Smoothing Algorithm, called Spiral Run Length Smearing Algorithm, is applied for the extraction of words from the text lines of unconstrained handwritten Bangla document images. This technique has helped to overcome some of the drawbacks of standard horizontal and vertical RLSA techniques. SRLSA technique has been applied on the Bangla handwritten document image database CMATERdb1.1.1 (...) and the success rate of the word extraction is found to be 86.01%. In the second part of the work, we have presented a useful solution to the problem on how best word images of handwritten Bangla script can be segmented into constituent characters. Moreover, the technique can segment the words having discontinuity in Matra, a prominent feature of Bangla script. It also optimizes the trade-off between under/over segmentation as Matra region and segmentation points are estimated more precisely. As a result, better word segmentation accuracy is achieved with minimal data loss. Here, a success rate of 92.48% is observed on a dataset of 750 handwritten Bangla words which is 3.35% higher than that of our earlier techniques. (shrink)

Resumen: Durante la década del sesenta, la revista Movie hereda de Cahiers du cinéma las preferencias por la politique des auteurs y por cierto cine norteamericano. No obstante, sin abandonar esa predilección por un “cine de directores”, a lo largo de su trayectoria la revista británica intentará desarrollar un riguroso método de análisis formal a través de detallados close readings de los films. Algunos de sus integrantes buscan aplicar al cine los planteos de F. R. Leavis y la revista Scrutiny (...) a propósito de la crítica literaria. Es esta modulación analítica la que será puesta en cuestión con el auge del estructuralismo y el posestructurailsmo a los que se asocia la revista Screen en los años 70.: During the sixties, the journal Movie inherits from Cahiers du cinéma the preferencies for a politique des auteurs and for certain american films. However, never abandoning this tendency towards a “cinema of directors”, the british journal develops a rigorous method of formal analysis and detailed close readings. Some of its members try to apply to cinema the concepts elaborated by F. R. Leavis and the journal Scrutiny in reference to literary criticism. It is precisely this analytic method that will be questioned during the boom of structuralism and post structuralism to which the journal Screen will be asociated in the 70s. (shrink)

Both the Beth definability theorem and Craig's lemma (interpolation theorem from now on) deal with the issue of the entanglement of one language L1 with another language L2, that is to say, information transfer—or the lack of such transfer—between the two languages. The notion of splitting we study below looks into this issue. We briefly relate our own results in this area as well as the results of other researchers like Kourousias and Makinson, and Peppas, Chopra and Foo.Section 3 does (...) contain one apparently new theorem. (shrink)

Written in honor of Dale K. Van Kley, leading specialist on religion and politics in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, these essays examine how Jansenist belief shaped enlightenment ideas, cultural identities, social relations and politics in France throughout the long eighteenth century. Van Kley's work has invited scholars to think beyond the traditional parameters of the Enlightenment and to consider how religious faith functioned in the broader context of Old Regime, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary France. In different ways, each (...) essay challenges the idea of an inherent opposition between faith and Enlightenment, which likewise equates modernity with secularization. The authors within this volume address two main questions. Firstly, how did religious belief continue to shape identities and experiences in the long eighteenth century? Secondly, how does this narrative of enduring religious belief in eighteenth-century France help historians rethink the Enlightenment and the French Revolution? The various methodologies used by the contributors illustrate how belief, Enlightenment, and Revolution coexisted and indeed co-mingled in different contexts: politics and political culture, the social and cultural history of ideas, and the history of material culture. (shrink)

In Language and Equilibrium, Prashant Parikh offers a new account of meaning for natural language. He argues that equilibrium, or balance among multiple interacting forces, is a key attribute of language and meaning and shows how to derive the meaning of an utterance from first principles by modeling it as a system of interdependent games.His account results in a novel view of semantics and pragmatics and describes how both may be integrated with syntax. It considers many aspects of meaning--including (...) literal meaning and implicature--and advances a detailed theory of definite descriptions as an application of the framework.Language and Equilibrium is intended for a wide readership in the cognitive sciences, including philosophers, linguists, and artificial intelligence researchers as well as neuroscientists, psychologists, and economists interested in language and communication. (shrink)

One hundred and fifty years ago, a hopeful young researcher reported a recent discovery he had made. Working in the bowels of a medieval castle in the German city of Tübingen, he had isolated a then entirely new type of molecule. This was the birth of a field that would fundamentally change the course of biology, medicine, and beyond. His discovery: DNA. His name: Friedrich Miescher. In this article, the authors try to find answers to the question why—despite the fact (...) that virtually everyone nowadays knows DNA—hardly anyone remembers the man who discovered it. In the history of science, the discovery of DNA was a seminal moment. Why then did it not enter into public memory? Ground‐breaking discoveries can occur in a historical context that is not ready to appreciate them. But that's not all that decides who is remembered and who is forgotten. Scientific pioneers sometimes fail to publicize their findings in a way that ensures that they receive the attention they merit. As discussed here, their personalities and habits may cause discoveries to be “overwritten” by more recent researchers, resulting in distorted cultural memories no longer reflecting the initial event. (shrink)

Editorial Rohit Parikh, Jeffrey Helzner, Episteme, FirstView Article.

Subset Spaces were introduced by L. Moss and R. Parikh in [8]. These spaces model the reasoning about knowledge of changing states.In [2] a kind of subset space called intersection space was considered and the question about the existence of a set of axioms that is complete for the logic of intersection spaces was addressed. In [9] the first author introduced the class of directed spaces and proved that any set of axioms for directed frames also characterizes intersection spaces.We (...) give here a complete axiomatization for directed spaces. We also show that it is not possible to reduce this set of axioms to a finite set. (shrink)

We introduce a generalization of Independence Friendly logic in which Eloise is restricted to a finite amount of information about Abelard’s moves. This logic is shown to be equivalent to a sublogic of first-order logic, to have the finite model property, and to be decidable. Moreover, it gives an exponential compression relative to logic.

We develop an analysis of discourse anaphora—the relationship between a pronoun and an antecedent earlier in the discourse —using games of partial information. The analysis is extended to include information from a variety of different sources, including lexical semantics, contrastive stress, grammatical relations, and decision theoretic aspects of the context.

We propose a new relevance sensitive model for representing and revising belief structures, which relies on a notion of partial language splitting and tolerates some amount of inconsistency while retaining classical logic. The model preserves an agent's ability to answer queries in a coherent way using Belnap's four-valued logic. Axioms analogous to the AGM axioms hold for this new model. The distinction between implicit and explicit beliefs is represented and psychologically plausible, computationally tractable procedures for query answering and belief..

We investigate the semantics of messages, and argue that the meaning ofa message is naturally and usefully given in terms of how it affects theknowledge of the agents involved in the communication. We note thatthis semantics depends on the protocol used by the agents, and thus not only the message itself, but also the protocol appears as a parameter in the meaning. Understanding this dependence allows us to give formal explanations of a wide variety of notions including language dependence, implicature, (...) and the amount of information in a message. (shrink)

Sustainability is normatively defined as the interconnectedness of policy goals and actions; the partnership among governments, civil society, and the private sector; and a transformational vision pursuing structural change against marginalization and environmental degradation. This article provides the conceptual basis for a meso policy analysis and evaluation framework to address the normative dimensions of sustainability-centered policies. Drawing on complexity, behavioral, and sustainability sciences, a meso interpretative lens contributes to articulating the ethical and techno-scientific norms underlying SDGs discourses. Through knowledge co-production, (...) and collaborative governance, a meso policy analysis and evaluation approach can help overcome centralized politics and techno-scientific rationalization. (shrink)

Philosophical debates on punishment mainly - and exhaustively - revolve around the traditional dipole “retribution - deterrence”; or, lately, seek for some alternative counterproposal (e. g. the contemporary topic of “restorative justice”). In all sides of the debates, Kant is standardly depicted as the advocate of a traditional, outmost punitive theory of justice; the kind of heritage modern-day “retributivists” seek to reassess, while “preventive” or “restorative” justice defenders aim to abandon. In the present paper, we intend to scrutinize Kant’s own (...) views on crime and punishment, as an integral part of his overall legal-practical philosophy; and, by doing so, to address that Kant is not at all the blind retributivist the above theorists perceive; what is more, he sets a philosophical framework that is able to overcome the flaws of all three, standard conceptions of criminal justice (retributive, preventive and restorative). Finally, in the light of the above, we bring forth the aspects of this Kantian framework, that are useful in assessing current legal systems and required legal reforms. (shrink)

Attempts to give a Logic or Semantics for vague predicates and to defuse the Sorites paradoxes have been largely a failure. We point out yet another problem with these predicates which has not been remarked on before,namely that different people do and must use these predicates in individually different ways. Thus even if there were a semantics for vague predicates, people would not be able to share it. To explain the occurrence nonetheless of these troublesome predicates in language, we propose (...) a different approach based on asking the question, “How do these vague predicates help people to communicate with each other?” We show that in general, even though different people assign different extensions to vague predicates, they usually benefit from receiving information framed in terms of them. (shrink)

In his deeply personal yet academically rigorous book, The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, Jeremy Engels takes up the task of describing and critiquing the quintessential U.S. American philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Though much ink has been spilled over these two philosophers, there are two features of Engels approach to their description and critique that make it unique when compared with other books that delve into the history of Indian philosophy’s influence on (...) these American philosophers. Engels’ purpose is not simply to recount the history, but rather to explicate Emerson and Whitman’s philosophies in light of that history in a way that makes them relevant to... (shrink)