Grennan bases his evaluation of arguments on two criteria: logical adequacy and pragmatic adequacy. He asserts that the common formal logic systems, while logically sound, are not very useful for evaluating everyday inferences, which are almost all deductively invalid as stated. Turning to informal logic, he points out that while more recent informal logic and critical thinking texts are superior in that their authors recognize the need to evaluate everyday arguments inductively, they typically cover only inductive fallacies, ignoring the inductively (...) sound patterns frequently used in successful persuasion. To redress these problems, Grennan introduces a variety of additional inductive patterns. Concluding that informal logic texts do not encourage precision in evaluating arguments, Grennan proposes a new argument evaluation procedure that expresses judgments of inferential strength in terms of probabilities. Based on theories of Stephen Toulmin, Roderick Chisholm, and John Pollock, his proposed system allows for a more precise judgment of the persuasive force of arguments. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the variety and richness of the taxonomical practices between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During these decades, zoologists and paleontologists came up with different quantitative practices in order to classify their data in line with the new biological principles introduced by Charles Darwin. Specifically, I will investigate Florentino Ameghino’s mathematization of mammalian dentition and the quantitative practices and visualizations of several German-speaking paleontologists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In (...) so doing, this paper will call attention to the visual and quantitative language of early twentieth-century systematics. My analysis will therefore contribute to a prehistory of the statistical frame of mind in biology, a study which has yet to be written in full. Second, my work highlights the productive intertwinement between biological practices and philosophical frameworks at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply rooted in Kantian bio-philosophy, several biologists sought to find rules in order to apply ordering principles to chaotic taxonomic information. This implies the necessity to investigate the neglected role of Kantian and Romantic bio-philosophy in the unfolding of twentieth-century biology. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that lesbian couples who wish to have children who are genetically related to both of them should be allowed access to mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs). First, we provide a brief explanation of mitochondrial diseases and MRTs. We then present the reasons why MRTs are not, by nature, therapeutic. The upshot of the view that MRTs are non-therapeutic techniques is that their therapeutic potential cannot be invoked for restricting their use only to those cases (...) where a mitochondrial DNA disease could be ‘cured’. We then argue that a positive case for MRTs is justified by an appeal to reproductive freedom, and that the criteria to access these techniques should hence be extended to include lesbian couples who wish to share genetic parenthood. Finally, we consider a potential objection to our argument: that the desire to have genetically related kin is not a morally sufficient reason to allow lesbian couples to access MRTs. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to propose and develop an intelligent e-learning system based on advanced document management techniques at Al-Quds Open University. In this article, we focus on a case using e-mail contents as supplement educational materials at QOU. We describe how the interactive classification system based on concept hierarchy can simplify this task. This system provides the functions to index, classify, and retrieve a collection of e-mail messages based on user profiles. By automatically indexing e-mail messages (...) using our E-mail Classification System for e-Learning, instructors and/or students can easily find their messages and find the topics. The test results of our system evaluation showed that a good classification quality has been achieved, with a precision of 77.4%, recall of 90%, and F-measure of 82.8. (shrink)

Ethics are of interest to business scholars because they influence decisions, behaviors, and outcomes. While scholars have increasingly shown interest in business ethics as a research topic, there are a mounting number of studies that examine ethical issues at the organizational level of analysis. This manuscript reports the results of a systematic review of empirical research on organizational ethics published in a broad sample of business journals over a 33-year period. A total of 184 articles are analyzed to reveal gaps (...) in the literature and, subsequently, lead to suggestions for future research; this is done in an effort to stimulate and perpetuate high quality research that more broadly impacts business scholars and practitioners. (shrink)

“Pick a card, any card. This has to be a completely free choice.” the magician tells you. But is it really? Although we like to think that we are using our free will to make our decisions, research in psychology has shown that many of our behaviours are automatic and unconsciously influenced by external stimuli (Ariely, 2008; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), and that we are often oblivious to the cognitive mechanisms that underpin (...) our decision (Wegner, 2002, 2003). Magicians have exploited this illusory sense of agency for a long time, and have developed a wide range of techniques to influence and control spectators’ choices of such things as card, word, or number (Annemann, 1933; Banachek, 2002a; Jones, 1994; Turner, 2015). These techniques are instances of what is called forcing. -/- Many forces are extremely effective, illustrating various weaknesses in our sense of control over decisions and their outcomes. Researchers have started to investigate them in various ways (Kuhn, Pailh s, & Lan, 2020; Olson, Amlani, Raz, & Rensink, 2015; Pailhes & Kuhn, 2020b, 2020c; Shalom et al., 2013) and are beginning to obtain valuable insights into decision-making processes as well as a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that lead people to experience an illusory sense of free will and of agency. -/- Although magicians have acquired large amounts of knowledge in covertly controlling people’s choices, much of this knowledge is only discussed in the context of individual magic tricks, or in books that are not readily accessible to non-magicans. As we and others have argued elsewhere (Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, 2017; Kuhn, 2019; Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008; Kuhn, Caffaratti, Teszka, & Rensink, 2014; Macknik et al., 2008; Olson et al., 2015; Olson, Landry, Appourchaux, & Raz, 2016; Shalom et al., 2013; Thomas, Didierjean, Maquestiaux, & Gygax, 2015), a particularly effective way of making this knowledge more available is via the creation of taxonomies centered around psychological mechanisms (Rensink & Kuhn, 2015). For example, the psychologically based taxonomy of misdirection (Kuhn et al., 2014) helps draw links between misdirection and formal theories of perception and cognition. -/- Our aim here is to apply a similar process to the knowledge magicians have about forcing. The present paper develops a psychologically based taxonomy of forcing techniques with two goals in mind. Firstly, it should help uncover the various psychological mechanisms that underlie forcing techniques. Secondly, it should facilitate knowledge transfer between magicians and psychologists. Among other things, this knowledge will allow researchers to gain new insights into the mechanisms underlying decision-making, and the feeling of free will and of agency over choice. We start by defining the magician’s force and then look at some of the past classifications of forcing. (shrink)

Recent developments in public economics have largely been in the direction of reaffirming the limits of the market and of establishing new ones. The possible existence of fundamental non-convexities, imperfect and asymmetric information, incentive compatibility, imperfect competition, strategic complementarity, and scale economies led to the conclusion that a large set of market failures exist; such situations also imply government failure. Acocella, considers this complicated picture and provides a discussion of the different approaches to establishing social 'rankings' of the possible situations (...) and the underlying principles. The arguments for and against different institutions are then analysed at a micro and macroeconomic level. The market and the government are recognised as imperfect, and thus complementary, institutions. Specific policy targets and instruments are considered in the areas of micro and macro-economic policy. Special attention is devoted to questions of policy management in an open economy. Finally, problems of domestic and international policy co-ordination are considered. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the proper subjects of intangible property claims include medical records, genetic profiles, and gene enhancement techniques. Coupled with a right to privacy these intangible property rights allow individuals a zone of control that will, in most cases, justifiably exclude governmental or societal invasions into private domains. I argue that the threshold for overriding privacy rights and intangible property rights is higher, in relation to genetic enhancement techniques and sensitive personal information, than is (...) commonly suggested. Once the bar is raised, so‐to‐speak, the burden of overriding it is formidable. Thus many policy decisions that have been recently proposed or enacted – citywide audio and video surveillance, law enforcement DNA sweeps, genetic profiling, national bans on genetic testing and enhancement of humans, to name a few – will have to be backed by very strong arguments. (shrink)

Optogenetics and DREADDs (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) are important research tools in recent neurobiology. These tools allow unprecedented control over activity in specifically targeted neurons in behaving animals. Two approaches in philosophy of neuroscience, mechanism and ruthless reductionism, provide explicit accounts of experiments and results using tools like these, but each offers a different picture about how levels of mechanisms relate. I argue here that the ruthless reductionist’s direct mind‐to‐cellular/molecular activities linkages “in a single bound” better fits (...) with both the experimental designs using these tools and some of the scientists’ own judgments about their results than does the mechanist’s “nested hierarchies of mechanisms‐within‐mechanisms.” So at least some important work in current neuroscience appears to be ruthlessly reductive. Mechanism may not correctly characterize all current work in neuroscience, despite its recent popularity. (shrink)

Recent developments in public economics have largely been in the direction of reaffirming the limits of the market and of establishing new ones. The possible existence of fundamental non-convexities, imperfect and asymmetric information, incentive compatibility, imperfect competition, strategic complementarity, and scale economies led to the conclusion that a large set of market failures exist; such situations also imply government failure. Acocella, considers this complicated picture and provides a discussion of the different approaches to establishing social 'rankings' of the possible situations (...) and the underlying principles. The arguments for and against different institutions are then analysed at a micro and macroeconomic level. The market and the government are recognised as imperfect, and thus complementary, institutions. Specific policy targets and instruments are considered in the areas of micro and macro-economic policy. Special attention is devoted to questions of policy management in an open economy. Finally, problems of domestic and international policy co-ordination are considered. (shrink)

The objective of this work is to propose ten efficient scaling techniques for the Wisconsin Diagnosis Breast Cancer dataset using the support vector machine. These scaling techniques are efficient for the linear programming approach. SVM with proposed scaling techniques was applied on the WDBC dataset. The scaling techniques are, namely, arithmetic mean, de Buchet for three cases p = 1,2, and ∞, equilibration, geometric mean, IBM MPSX, and Lp-norm for three cases p = 1,2, and ∞. (...) The experimental results show that the equilibration scaling technique overcomes the benchmark normalization scaling technique used in many commercial solvers. Finally, the experimental results also show the effectiveness of the grid search technique which gets the optimal parameters for the SVM classifier. (shrink)

BackgroundHealth behavior change is among the top recommendations for improving health of patients with lifestyle-related chronic diseases. An array of behavior change techniques have been developed to support behavior change initiation and maintenance. These BCTs often show limited success when they are not informed by theory, leading to a mismatch between the intention of the BCT and patients’ needs or expectations. Previous studies have identified a number of resources which patients may require to initiate and maintain health behavior change. (...) Indeed, not yet well established is how BCTs address these resources, i.e., the functional mechanisms of BCTs.PurposeProvide a theoretical framework of the functional mechanisms of BCTs for developing and implementing successful interventions for health behavior change.MethodsConceptual review, including literature analysis and synthesis as well as conceptualization of a new model based on the synthesis.ResultsThrough the integration of dual-process models as well as reward and motivation proceeding, i.e., affective, emotional, or intuitive neurobiological cues, into the rational framework of rather linear cognitive or task-related decision progress, we categorize previously identified resources into three distinct sets: external, internal reflective, and internal affective resources. Based on this triad, we classify BCTs according to their functional mechanisms into facilitating, boosting, and nudging. Consequently, we present a simplified Behavior Change Resource Model that is centered on patients’ resources.ConclusionThe model can be applied to develop health behavior change interventions, which promote engagement and empowerment. Future studies should aim at testing the applicability and practicality of the BCRM. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the methodology and techniques of metaargumentation to model argumentation. The methodology of meta-argumentation instantiates Dung's abstract argumentation theory with an extended argumentation theory, and is thus based on a combination of the methodology of instantiating abstract arguments, and the methodology of extending Dung's basic argumentation frameworks with other relations among abstract arguments. The technique of meta-argumentation applies Dung's theory of abstract argumentation to itself, by instantiating Dung's abstract arguments with meta-arguments using a technique called (...) flattening. We characterize the domain of instantiation using a representation technique based on soundness and completeness. Finally, we distinguish among various instantiations using the technique of specification languages. (shrink)

Is academic integrity research presented from a positive integrity standpoint? This paper uses Natural Language Processing techniques to explore a data set of 8,507 academic integrity papers published between 1904 and 2019.Two main techniques are used to linguistically examine paper titles: bigram analysis and sentiment analysis. The analysis sees the three main bigrams used in paper titles as being “academic integrity”, “academic dishonesty” and “plagiarism detection”. When only highly cited papers are considered, negative integrity bigrams dominate positive integrity (...) bigrams. For example, the 100 most cited academic integrity papers of all time are three times more likely to have “academic dishonesty” included in their titles than “academic integrity”. Similarly, sentiment analysis sees negative sentiment outperforming positive sentiment in the most cited papers.The history of academic integrity research is seen to place the field at a disadvantage due to negative portrayals of integrity. Despite this, analysis shows that change towards positive integrity is possible. The titles of papers by the ten most prolific academic integrity researchers are found to use positive terminology in more cases that not. This suggests an approach for emerging academic integrity researchers to model themselves after. (shrink)

Plusieurs épreuves peuvent être engagées avec l’image, depuis les "devinettes" du Sphinx auxquelles répond brillamment Oedipe jusqu’à la panique télévisuelle que déclenche l’entrée en eau d’Éric Moussambani aux jeux Olympiques de Sydney. Chacune des épreuves prises en compte dans cet ouvrage implique la mise en relation de l’image et du corps. Cet ouvrage se propose de mener une enquête pour tenter de comprendre comment, pour faire-image, un corps doit s’insérer dans une nouvelle configuration du sensible, à partir d’un choix d’objets (...) issus du théâtre, de la littérature, de la philosophie, du cinéma et de la télévision. Depuis Oedipe jusqu’aux Monty Pythons, de La Bruyère à Hrundi V. Bakshi, le héros du film The Party, de Blake Edwards, avec les traités de Balzac, de Barbey d’Aurevilly ou de Marcel Mauss, une "épreuve de l’image" se précise dans une nouvelle transaction des corps et de l’espace, où se déploient également de nouvelles puissances des corps. (shrink)

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

In this article, we argue that language-based techniques have the capacity to generate original ideas and thus account for progress in any discipline. We claim that language-based techniques used by some African scholars such as hermeneutics and related ones such as transliteration are creatively inadequate to inspire progress because they do not lead to the creation of new concepts and original ideas in African thought. We claim also that the technique of intellectual decolonisation with its foremost expression in (...) Kwasi Wiredu’s ‘conceptual decolonisation’ and Kwesi Tsri’s ‘conceptual liberation’, are two recent language-based strategies aimed at overcoming the creative problem inherent in the techniques of hermeneutics and transliteration. We argue that these two techniques are equally inadequate because they are tantamount to what can be called ‘conceptual manipulation’, which is not a creative strategy for progress in African thought. The goal of this paper therefore is to expose the creative weaknesses in these techniques in order to show that there is a dearth of creative language-based techniques in African studies and make a call for the formulation of one. Keywords: African philosophy, hermeneutics, transliteration, conceptual manipulation, conceptual decolonisation, conceptual liberation. (shrink)

Neuroendocrine regulation plays a pivotal role in orchestrating various physiological processes in organisms. The neuroendocrine system is a complex, multifaceted process that acts as a resource distributor in the body, monitoring and regulating a variety of physiological functions like metabolism, reproduction, stress response, and immunity by using complicated signaling pathways and sophisticated feedback mechanisms that use hormones, neurotransmitters, and neural circuits. This study aims to investigate the intricate mechanisms by which neuroendocrine signals modulate physiological functions. Adjuvant neuroendocrine strategies such as (...) the use of neurotransmitters, hormones, pharmacotherapy, surgical intervention, and emerging technologies play an invaluable role in alleviating symptoms and improving outlooks for people suffering from these conditions. Through a comprehensive review of current literature, we explore the role of neuroendocrine pathways in regulating processes such as metabolism, reproduction, stress response, and immune function. We highlight the involvement of key neuroendocrine factors such as hormones, neuropeptides, and neurotransmitters in modulating these physiological processes. Additionally, authors discuss emerging research avenues and potential clinical implications of understanding neuroendocrine regulation in health and disease. (shrink)

Our exploratory study considers whether the internal audit function is an efficient “third line of defense” for risk management and control as proposed by The Institute of Internal Auditors. To that end, we interview chief audit executives and experienced internal auditors to examine whether CAEs manage the impressions of audit committee members in the annual accountability process. We also provide an illustration of impression management techniques through a documentary case that explores a unique and exclusive dataset consisting of the (...) main guidance, framework, and accountability documents of one of these organizations. Our analysis highlights how several macro- and microimpression management techniques were used to burnish the image of internal auditors and, more importantly, the management team. Rather than monitoring managers, the CAEs team up with them. Our findings cast doubts on the conceptualization of internal audit as the independent third line of defense envisioned to be a keystone of the governance mosaic. This study supports other research that questions the effectiveness of internal auditing as a governance mechanism. It also contributes to the impression management literature by exposing impression management practices that occur through a private reporting channel—the internal audit function’s annual accountability to the audit committee. Last but not least, significant ethical concerns are raised in regard to internal audit, and research is urged in that area. (shrink)