This chapter contains sections titled: An Approach to the Logic of Action Normative Act Positions.

The paper discusses the potential value of a deontic approach to database specification. More specifically, some different types of integrity constraints are considered and a distinction is drawn between necessary (hard) and deontic (soft) constraints.Databases are compared with other normative systems. A deontic logic for database specification is proposed and the problems of how to react to, and of how to correct, or repair, a situation which arises through norm violation are discussed in the context of this logic. The limitations (...) of the proposed logic and possible modifications and extensions of it are analysed. (shrink)

Abstract.The paper outlines the approach to the analysis of deontic conditionals taken in earlier work by Jones and Pörn, compares it very briefly with two main trends within dyadic deontic logic, and then discusses problems associated with the augmentation principle and the factual detachment principle. The author then modifies Jones and Pörn's previous system, using a classical but not normal (in the sense of Chellas) deontic modality to provide the basis for an alternative analysis of deontic conditionals. This (...) new analysis validates neither the factual detachment nor the augmentation principles. However, influenced by the approach of James Delgrande to default reasoning, the author tries to show how a restricted form of factual detachment may be accommodated within the revised system. (shrink)

. The current literature in the Artificial Intelligence and Law field reveals uncertainty concerning the potential role of deontic logic in legal knowledge representation. For instance, the Logic Programming Group at Imperial College has shown that a good deal can be achieved in this area in the absence of explicit representation of the deontic notions. This paper argues that some rather ordinary parts of the law contain structures which, if they are to be represented in logic, will call for use (...) of a reasonably sophisticated deontic logic. (shrink)

This paper is a preliminary investigation into the application of the formal-logical theory of normative positions to the characterisation of normative-informational positions, pertaining to rules that are meant to regulate the supply of information. First, we present the proposed framework. Next, we identify the kinds of nuances and distinctions that can be articulated in such a logical framework. Finally, we show how such nuances can arise in specific regulations. Reference is made to Data Protection Law and Contract Law, among others. (...) The proposed approach is articulated around two essential steps. The first involves identifying the set of possible interpretations that can be given to a particular norm. This is done by using formal methods. The second involves picking out one of these interpretations as the most likely one. This second step can be resolved only by using further information (e.g., the context or other parts of the regulation). (shrink)

There seems to be no clear consensus in the existing literature about the role of deontic logic in legal knowledge representation — in large part, we argue, because of an apparent misunderstanding of what deontic logic is, and a misplaced preoccupation with the surface formulation of legislative texts. Our aim in this paper is to indicate, first, which aspects of legal reasoning are addressed by deontic logic, and then to sketch out the beginnings of a methodology for its use in (...) the analysis and representation of law.The essential point for which we argue is that deontic logic — in some form or other —needs to be taken seriously whenever it is necessary to make explicit, and then reason about, the distinction between what ought to be the case and what is the case, or as we also say, between the ideal and the actual. We take the library regulations at Imperial College as the main illustration, and small examples from genuinely legal domains to introduce specific points. In conclusion, we touch on the role of deontic logic in the development of the theory of normative positions. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown (...) University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)

The moving frame of a tracking or crane shot, or of a camera tilt or pan, can affect the way we engage with a film narrative. In this paper, I argue that certain uses of the moving frame in narrative fiction film prescribe us to imagine ourselves moving through the world of the film. The existence of such an imaginative prescription ultimately threatens the necessity of the cinematic narrator. In light of the standard indeterminacy of our means of access to (...) fictions, the prescription to imagine moving is not accompanied by a prescription to imagine a narrator providing us with a moving view. (shrink)

It seems to me certain that the perception of foreign bodies of a certain sort, although a necessary, is not the only, part of the basis of our belief in other persons. The greatest disagreement with this view that I know of has been expressed by Professor Aaron in a paper published in Philosophy , XIX, 72. He claims that, since one does not really know “what it means to be a mind in one's own case,” the question whether we (...) can be certain that there are other minds is meaningless except as reducible to the question whether such propositions as “Robinson exists” are propositions which we can be certain about. And he tries to show that no more is involved in the analysis of “Robinson exists” than would be involved in the analysis of propositions of whose truth we can be perceptually certain, such as “That table over there exists” or “The Eiffel Tower exists.” My assurance that Robinson exists is not the assurance that something called Robinson's mind exists. It is the perfectly ordinary perceptual assurance that ‘the person over there’ exists. “You ask me how I am certain that Robinson exists and I answer, ‘Well, look, there he is.’ It would be absurd for anyone to say that he does not exist when I see him here before me and hear him talk and watch him move that chair.”. (shrink)

The 2011 Thai general election was seen by many Thai political analysts as a watershed moment that would hopefully be the tipping point of socio-political reconciliation in the drawn out political struggle that has characterized Thai politics since 2005. The highly contested nature of Thai politics becomes salient when viewing campaign posters pictorial and linguistic content. The most controversial of which was the ``Vote No'' campaign taken on by the For Heaven and Earth Party, which is a political party nominally (...) associated with Thailand's conservative People's Alliance for Democracy. This study seeks to unwrap and decode the semiotics of this party's political campaign posters in Thailand's 2011 general election by providing cultural context to the application of multimodal discourse analysis and critical semiotics framework. I will argue that the ``Vote No'' campaign and its campaign posters depicting politicians as animals is a continuing political discourse of conservative Buddhist philosophers/scholars that reaches back to the 1980s. Furthermore, the ``Vote No'' campaign seeks to create dissonance and reinstate conservative rule via monarchial and/or military intervention by creating political deadlock thereby undermining democratic rights and rule by the exercising of democratic rights of voting, thus disenfranchising citizens by their own hand. (shrink)

We show that if κ is a weakly compact cardinal, then $\left( \matrix \kappa ^{+} \\ \kappa\endmatrix \right)\rightarrow \left(\left( \matrix \alpha \\ \kappa \endmatrix \right)_{m}\left( \matrix \kappa ^{n} \\ \kappa \endmatrix \right)_{\mu}\right)^{1,1}$ for any ordinals α < κ⁺ and µ < κ, and any finite ordinals m and n. This polarized partition relation represents the statement that for any partition $\kappa \times \kappa ^{+}=\underset i<m\to{\bigcup }K_{i}\cup \underset j<\mu \to{\bigcup }L_{j}$ of κ × κ⁺ into m + µ pieces either there (...) are A ∈ [κ]κ, B ∈ [κ⁺]α, and i < m with A × B ⊆ Ki or there are C ∈ [κ]κ, D ∈ [κ⁺]α, and j < μ with C × D ⊆ Lj. Related results for measurable and almost measurable κ are also investigated. Our proofs of these relations involve the use of elementary substructures of set models of large fragments of ZFC. (shrink)

Extant semantic theories for languages containing vague expressions violate intuition by delivering the same verdict on two principles of classical propositional logic: the law of noncontradiction and the law of excluded middle. Supervaluational treatments render both valid; many-Valued treatments, Neither. The core of this paper presents a natural deduction system, Sound and complete with respect to a 'mixed' semantics which validates the law of noncontradiction but not the law of excluded middle.

This essay contains material which will hopefully be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to those social scientists whose research concerns the analysis of communication, verbal or non-verbal. Although most of the topics taken up here are central to issues in the philosophy of language, they are, in my opinion, indistinguishable from topics in descriptive social psychology. The essay aims to provide a conceptual framework within which various key aspects of communication can be described, and it presents a (...) formal language, using techniques from modern modal logic, in which such descriptions can themselves be formulated. It is my hope that this framework, or parts of it, might also turn out to be of value in future empirical work. There are, therefore, essentially two sides to this essay: the development of a framework of concepts, and the construction of a formal language rich enough to express the elements of which that framework is composed. The first of these two takes its point of departure in the statement quoted from Lewis (1972) on the page preceding this introduction. The distinction drawn there by Lewis is accepted as a working hypothesis, and in one sense this essay may be seen as an attempt to explore some of the consequences of that hypothesis. (shrink)

Although pioneering studies using statistical methods in geographical data analysis were published in the 1930s, it was only in the 1960s that their increasing use in human geography led to a claim that a ‘quantitative revolution’ had taken place. The widespread use of quantitative methods from then on was associated with changes in both disciplinary philosophy and substantive focus. The first decades of the ‘revolution’ saw quantitative analyses focused on the search for spatial order of a geometric form within an, (...) often implicit, logical positivist framework. In the first of three reviews of the use of quantitative methods in human geography, this progress report uncovers their origin with regard to the underlying philosophy, the focus on spatial order, and the nature of the methods deployed. Subsequent reports will outline the changes in all three that occurred in later decades and will chart the contemporary situation. (shrink)

Women are making a substantial impact on the employment market, both in terms of overall numbers as well as by appointment to male-dominated organizational roles. Research on women in leadership positions within organizations has concentrated on two main foci. Firstly, the identification of relevant individual and organizational characteristics and secondly, on the impact of these variables on the women in management roles. This paper presents the findings from a series of studies in relation to these broad dimensions.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Collections of essays and conference papers are always liable to two defects. One is that the essays are not all of the same quality. The other is that the collection is ad hoc with no structural unity or organized purpose. The present collection—arising from the 1997 Claremont conference on the philosophy of religion—almost unavoidably exemplifies the first defect. I myself would pick out the contributions of Simon Blackburn, D. Z. Phillips R. W. Beardsmore, Jane McIntyre, Antony Flew, and Peter (...) class='Hi'>Jones as the most interesting. Many of the others are well worth the attention of Hume scholars, but two or three are turgid, over-annotated examples of argument by authority of the sort “Wittgenstein tells us...” compounded with emotive appeals to what is alleged to be Hume’s insufferable moral narrowness. But as I say, the uneven quality of contributions is a standard hazard of conference collections. The second hazard—lack of structure—is much less in evidence. There is a real coherence of subject and purpose in the eighteen sections that make up this book, and an effort has been made to relate the articles to each other. An odd omission is, however, the absence of any standard system of reference to agreed editions of Hume’s works. It happens, for example, that most contributors refer to the Selby-Bigge edition of the Enquiries, but this is an accident of common usage not a virtue of editorial policy. There is a general index. (shrink)

This is an examination of the significance of Gandhi's social philosophy for development. It is argued that, when seen in light of Gandhi's social philosophy, the concepts of appropriate technology and basic needs take on new meaning. The Gandhian approach can be identified with theoriginal "basic needs" strategy for international development. Gandhi's approach helps to provide greater equity, or "distributive justice," by promoting technology that is appropriate to "basic needs". Gandhi's social philosophy has been neglected by most development specialists, with (...) only a few exceptions. This analysis attempts to draw out some aspects of M.K. Gandhi's background and his thinking aboutswadeshi andswaraj. Gandhi's ideas, which emerged out of an "Indic" meta-cultural background, are based on an emphasis on equity. Gandhi's syncretic Indic background includes a belief in what Bateson, writing about Bali, Indonesia, has called the "steady state." Development activities should be carried out in a phased manner that does not disturb the beneficial aspects of dynamic equilibrium, but that does promote "positive development." A.T. is particularly useful within the context of a basic needs approach to international development because use of A.T. is probably more likely to lead to equitable growth. The "economic growth" strategy, utilizing "advanced technology" exclusively, has caused unemployment and has not led to effective "trickle down," much less "high mass consumption." In many developing countries the poorest 20% of the population are worse off in 1990 than they were in 1980. By making use of the "advantage of backwardness" and viewing development in terms of long-term impacts, a basic needs approach using A.T. is more likely to lead to a positive impact on third world food systems than a pure "economic growth" strategy. (shrink)

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants (...) were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing. (shrink)