This essay addresses the question of the effect of Russell's paradox on Frege's distinctive brand of arithmetical realism. It is argued that the effect is not just to undermine Frege's specific account of numbers as extensions (courses of value) but more importantly to undermine his general means of explaining the object-directedness of arithmetical discourse. It is argued that contemporary neo-Fregean attempts to revive that explanation do not successfully avoid the central problem brought to light by the paradox. Along the way, (...) it is argued that the need to fend off an eliminative construal of arithmetic can help explain the so-called Caesar problem in the Grundlagen, and that the "syntactic priority thesis" is insufficient to establish the claim that numbers are objects. (shrink)

How holographic patterns of information underlie our physical reality.

Publication date: 11 June 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Umar Aliyu, Abdulmalik Alhaji-Baba, Muhammad Alfa This research evaluates the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in Niger State. Strategies for reducing the effect of climate change have regularly been made without experimental foundations and adequate information on farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in the study area. Thus, integrated farmers’ vulnerability assessment approach was employed by classifying socioeconomic and biophysical indicators of vulnerability into adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure to determine (...) the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change. This is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of vulnerability. The study adopted a survey design and the method utilized for the study was questionnaire administered to 400 households in the study area. The results indicate that the farmers’ vulnerability was low in zone A with a mean index of 2.86, very low in zone B with a mean index of 3.74, and high in zone C with a mean index of 1.95. It is recommended that measures should be taken to integrate climate change adaptation into Niger State development process. These measures should include improvement in adoption of good agricultural practices. (shrink)

Nonverbal signals color the meanings of interpersonal relationships. Humans rely on facial, head, postural, and vocal signals to express relational messages along continua. Three of relevance are dominance-submission, composure-nervousness and trust-distrust. Machine learning and new automated analysis tools are making possible a deeper understanding of the dynamics of relational communication. These are explored in the context of group interactions during a game entailing deception. The “messiness” of studying communication under naturalistic conditions creates many measurement and design obstacles that are discussed (...) here. Possibilities for their mitigation are considered. (shrink)

Structural Injustice has become a hugely important concept in the field of political theory with the work of Iris Marion Young central to debates on what it is, what motivates it and how it should be addressed. In this article, I focus on a particular thread in Young’s account of structural injustice which I argue is all too often overlooked - the untraceability of structural injustice. This is not only a constant theme in Young’s account of structural injustice, it is, (...) in fact, a defining feature. By ‘untraceable’, Young means that structural injustice is distinct from other sorts of injustices for which there is a traceable agent at fault – these sorts of faut-based injustices fall under what Young calls the ‘liability model of injustice’. For the purposes of exploring the concept of structural injustice, I follow the logic of the claim that structural injustice is untraceable to see where it takes us in conversation with Young’s critics. I conclude that Young’s account is not only defensible with some clarification and development but vital politically. That said, I also find Young’s account of political responsibility for structural injustice wanting and accordingly I propose a way of understanding what I see as a dynamic transition from structural to fault-based injustices which I argue Young’s more ‘static’ account fails to accommodate. This is important, I suggest, for thinking about the ways in which responsibility for different forms of injustice operate and change. _Contemporary Political Theory_ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00634-4. (shrink)

The system GLS, which is a modal sequent calculus system for the provability logic GL, was introduced by G. Sambin and S. Valentini in Journal of Philosophical Logic, 11, 311–342,, and in 12, 471–476,, the second author presented a syntactic cut-elimination proof for GLS. In this paper, we will use regress trees in order to present a simpler and more intuitive syntactic cut derivability proof for GLS1, which is a variant of GLS without the cut rule.

The effect of contextual information on the resolution of ambiguity was investigated in a group of individuals awaiting dental treatment and a group of control individuals. Participants heard threat/neutral, neutral/neutral and positive/neutral homophones while being simultaneously presented with a context word that was consistent with one of the two meanings of the homophone. Participants then made a lexical decision task on a target word that was one of the two alternate spellings of the homophone. We found that the dental group (...) was more sensitive to context for all types of homophones, and there was no evidence for mood congruency. It also appeared that there might have been an element of mood regulation in the dental group, as they were slower to respond to the emotional targets overall. Our results show that sensitivity to context in state anxiety is a robust phenomenon and one that generalises to naturally occurring anxious moods. (shrink)

Publication date: 15 October 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Coleen Vogel, Philip Audu Ibrahim Flood is known to cause devastating livelihood impacts, suffering and economic damages. To reduce the impact of floods, it is very important to identify and understand the socio-economic factors that determine people’s ability to cope with stress or change. Consequently, the study assesses the social vulnerability of the households to floods in Niger State, in order to provide the empirical evidence necessary for flood adaptation (...) policies and strategies in the state. The data for the research were obtained from the household survey and Dartmouth Flood Observatory. The data obtained were analysed using descriptive and statistical analysis. The results show that flood events in the study area were caused by heavy rainfall, compounded by the opening of the Shiroro dam gate to release the excess flood in the reservoir. Moreover, results of Student “t” test and One-Way Analysis of Variance on socio-economic characteristics show that households’ major economic activities, educational status, household size, income distribution, and membership of cooperative society were significant at p 10, do not belong to cooperative society and earn less that N21000 per month have higher mean frequency, thus, the predominant households were, therefore, farmers, illiterate, have large family size, poor, and have no access to loan. Thus, the socio-economic characteristics of the households in the study area contribute to their vulnerability to floods by reducing their coping capacity. Based on the results of the assessment, it is recommended that measures are taken to mainstream flood adaptation into the development process. (shrink)

Background: Family members are often required to act as substitute decision-makers when health care or research participation decisions must be made for an incapacitated relative. Yet most families are unable to accurately predict older adult preferences regarding future health care and willingness to engage in research studies. Discussion and documentation of preferences could improve proxies' abilities to decide for their loved ones. This trial assesses the efficacy of an advance planning intervention in improving the accuracy of substitute decision-making and increasing (...) the frequency of documented preferences for health care and research. It also investigates the financial impact on the healthcare system of improving substitute decision-making.Methods/DesignDyads (n = 240) comprising an older adult and his/her self-selected proxy are randomly allocated to the experimental or control group, after stratification for type of designated proxy and self-report of prior documentation of healthcare preferences. At baseline, clinical and research vignettes are used to elicit older adult preferences and assess the ability of their proxy to predict those preferences. Responses are elicited under four health states, ranging from the subject's current health state to severe dementia. For each state, we estimated the public costs of the healthcare services that would typically be provided to a patient under these scenarios. Experimental dyads are visited at home, twice, by a specially trained facilitator who communicates the dyad-specific results of the concordance assessment, helps older adults convey their wishes to their proxies, and offers assistance in completing a guide entitled My Preferences that we designed specifically for that purpose. In between these meetings, experimental dyads attend a group information session about My Preferences. Control dyads attend three monthly workshops aimed at promoting healthy behaviors. Concordance assessments are repeated at the end of the intervention and 6 months later to assess improvement in predictive accuracy and cost savings, if any. Copies of completed guides are made at the time of these assessments.DiscussionThis study will determine whether the tested intervention guides proxies in making decisions that concur with those of older adults, motivates the latter to record their wishes in writing, and yields savings for the healthcare system.Trial RegistrationISRCTN89993391. (shrink)

The various aspects of Christian Liberty and of the life of the Christian in the world are linked in a singular way in Paul’s pronouncements on marriage, as is found in 1 Cor 7:1–7 ff. Our choice of St. Augustine in the numerous contemporary scholarly attempted hermeneutics of 1 Cor 7:1–7 is that he adopts and elaborated an already existing tradition on sex and marriage. Moreover, this text in the New Testament is the only one that speaks explicitly of the (...) significance of conjugal intercourse. The interpretation of this text or passage has to an extent determined the development of the church’s tradition. Thus, the importance of the passage has to be considered. In Cor 7:1, Paul starts answering the questions the Corinthians put to him. Verse 1 reads: “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote”. The first of these questions concerns marriage. According to the superscription of this work, Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Cor 7:1–7 has implications for Christians in the contemporary world. In as much as it raises numerous problems to our contemporary understanding of marriage and sexuality, the problem of sexuality characterized our society today. (shrink)

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame the debate, claiming (...) that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

Jude Edeh ABSTRACT: The challenge faced with the proliferation of various kinds of cognitivism is the difficulty of providing a straightforward characterization of moral realism and antirealism. In light of this tension, I identified a problem in Sayre-McCord’s way of specifying the criteria of moral realism. Furthermore, I provided a framework that characterized the moral ….

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are unique spaces that defy materialist interpretations of space and place. In drawing upon Edward Soja’s work of spatiality, CVEs can be considered as thirdspace, a space that has as much relevance as that typified by our physical, or ‘real,’ existence. Virtual space undermines the rigid polemic of the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ by revealing lived experience as a combination of both real and imagined experience. The virtual illuminates experience as a relativist combination of perception and interpretation (...) that inhabits both the corporeal and the virtual realms. Using the example of Second Life’s Lost Gardens of Apollo this article will illuminate the fluidity of real and imagined place through an environment of rich visual experience. Inaddition, such spaces will be discussed as places of potential social and political reconfiguration by challenging the traditional socio-cultural and historical aspects of space. (shrink)

Social relationships are constructed by and through the relational communication that people exchange. Relational messages are implicit nonverbal and verbal messages that signal how people regard one another and define their interpersonal relationships—equal or unequal, affectionate or hostile, inclusive or exclusive, similar or dissimilar, and so forth. Such signals can be measured automatically by the latest machine learning software tools and combined into meaningful factors that represent the socioemotional expressions that constitute relational messages between people. Relational messages operate continuously on (...) a parallel track with verbal communication, implicitly telling interactants the current state of their relationship and how to interpret the verbal messages being exchanged. We report an investigation that explored how group members signal these implicit messages through multimodal behaviors measured by sensor data and linked to the socioemotional cognitions interpreted as relational messages. By use of a modified Brunswikian lens model, we predicted perceived relational messages of dominance, affection, involvement, composure, similarity and trust from automatically measured kinesic, vocalic and linguistic indicators. The relational messages in turn predicted the veracity of group members. The Brunswikian Lens Model offers a way to connect objective behaviors exhibited by social actors to the emotions and cognitions being perceived by other interactants and linking those perceptions to social outcomes. This method can be used to ascertain what behaviors and/or perceptions are associated with judgments of an actor’s veracity. Computerized measurements of behaviors and perceptions can replace manual measurements, significantly expediting analysis and drilling down to micro-level measurement in a previously unavailable manner. (shrink)

This paper defends a normative basis for entrepreneurial ventures, and draws the conclusion that any enterprise, insofar as it is reasonable, has in final analysis to be a (free) gift to promote good. Building on Herbert Simon's idea of "satisficing" and developing it in line with axiological insights of the new classical natural law theory, this paper makes the argument that a choice to proceed reasonably in any entrepreneurial venture will be guided by rationality that is bounded. Bounded rationality entails (...) that the various end-values or goals of the venture will be incommensurable, and this implies that (1) the enterprise need not be locked in on promoting merely one value, such as profits, and (2) a choice to aim at one or more goals will be a personal (free) gift, which is ethically valuable. This paper has appeared in Spanish translation as El don personal en las empresas sanas: racionalidad limitada, valores incommensurables y agencia economica in Revista Empresa y Humanismo, Vol. XI no. 1 (2008), pp. 67-88, published by the Institute for Business and Humanism, University of Navarra, Spain. Permission granted to reproduce/publish the original English version here and elsewhere. (shrink)

In Frege's Conception of Logic Patricia A. Blanchette explores the relationship between Gottlob Frege's understanding of conceptual analysis and his understanding of logic.

AimRapid eye movement (REM) sleep, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and sleep spindles are all implicated in the consolidation of procedural memories. Relative contributions of sleep stages and sleep spindles were previously shown to depend on individual differences in task processing. However, no studies to our knowledge have focused on individual differences in experience with Vipassana meditation as related to sleep. Vipassana meditation is a form of mental training that enhances proprioceptive and somatic awareness and alters attentional style. The goal (...) of this study was to examine a potential role for Vipassana meditation experience in sleep-dependent procedural memory consolidation.MethodsGroups of Vipassana meditation practitioners (N = 22) and matched meditation-naïve controls (N = 20) slept for a daytime nap in the laboratory. Before and after the nap they completed a procedural task on the Wii Fit balance platform.ResultsMeditators performed slightly better on the task before the nap, but the two groups improved similarly after sleep. The groups showed different patterns of sleep-dependent procedural memory consolidation: in meditators, task learning was positively correlated with density of slow occipital spindles, while in controls task improvement was positively associated with time in REM sleep. Sleep efficiency and sleep architecture did not differ between groups. Meditation practitioners, however, had a lower density of occipital slow sleep spindles tha... (shrink)

Focusing on the debate between resource egalitarians and capability theorists, with particular attention to gender equality, this article rejects the prevailing assumption that the ‘capability approach’ to equality, as outlined by Amartya Sen, is better able to respond to important empirically identifiable inequalities than its resource egalitarian alternative, as developed by Ronald Dworkin. Developing and expanding upon the often overlooked Dworkinian ‘principle of independence’, the article contends that resource egalitarianism is capable of identifying and responding to a complex set of (...) structural inequalities that remain outside the purview of the capability approach. Key Words: capability approach • Dworkin • egalitarianism • equality • gender inequalities • Sen. (shrink)

Recently, significant research effort has focused on using Twitter to investigate mental health at the population-level. While there has been influential work in developing ethical guidelines for Internet discussion forum-based research in public health, there is currently limited work focused on addressing ethical problems in Twitter-based public health research, and less still that considers these issues from users’ own perspectives. In this work, we aim to investigate public attitudes towards utilizing public domain Twitter data for population-level mental health monitoring using (...) a qualitative methodology. The study explores user perspectives in a series of five, 2-h focus group interviews. Following a semi-structured protocol, 26 Twitter users with and without a diagnosed history of depression discussed general Twitter use, along with privacy expectations, and ethical issues in using social media for health monitoring, with a particular focus on mental health monitoring. Transcripts were then transcribed, redacted, and coded using a constant comparative approach. While participants expressed a wide range of opinions, there was an overall trend towards a relatively positive view of using public domain Twitter data as a resource for population level mental health monitoring, provided that results are appropriately aggregated. Results are divided into five sections: a profile of respondents’ Twitter use patterns and use variability; users’ privacy expectations, including expectations regarding data reach and permanence; attitudes towards social media based population-level health monitoring in general, and attitudes towards mental health monitoring in particular; attitudes towards individual versus population-level health monitoring; and users’ own recommendations for the appropriate regulation of population-level mental health monitoring. Focus group data reveal a wide range of attitudes towards the use of public-domain social media “big data” in population health research, from enthusiasm, through acceptance, to opposition. Study results highlight new perspectives in the discussion of ethical use of public data, particularly with respect to consent, privacy, and oversight. (shrink)

Corporate diversity initiatives have neither yielded higher financial returns for companies nor created significantly greater equity and equality of outcome for socially disadvantaged groups within organisations. There has been a systematic failure of diversity initiatives, as the strategic business importance of diversity has been avoided. Researchers argue that effective diversity management is dependent upon appropriate structures and systems, not upon human resource management training alone. This article discusses the impact of the design, introduction and application of the ‘Diversity Quality Cycle’. (...) This model allows for the embedding of the values of equality of opportunity and cultural diversity throughout core business functions, and for positive long-term change. A mixed-method approach was taken; Participative Action Research is the main methodology employed, within which quantitative data were generated, analysed and interpreted. The main case study organisation is a Further Education College in the West of England. (shrink)

This paper addresses the past, present and future aspects of African leadership and organizational ethics that have, are and will be key for any organization to sustain its systems and structures. Organizational ethics revolves around written and/or unwritten guidelines, ethical values, principles, rules and standards, that are drawn from the harmonious coexistence with the biosphere and it is how these elements are applied that dictates the style of leadership and the ethical thinking of the leaders. Africa has a wide range (...) of complexities which are compounded by, inter alia, tribal divisiveness, selfish leadership, wealth inequality, and massive unemployment. Africans tend to draw their leadership and ethical practices and reflections from the events in the environment with which they have interacted for many years. However, in order to fully address and understand the African perspective in leadership and organizational ethics, a broad comprehension of the African diverse and complex landscape is needed through unravelling of the three dimensional existence of the people. African ethics, developed over time, unifies organizations and leadership since it is part of life and is practised, sub-consciously or unconsciously, by the people as they transform from one practice to the other, and during intergenerational transitions. Globalization, liberalization, technological changes and advancement, and market changes are rapidly transforming the environment in which organizations operate. In such a situation, an effective and true leader cannot be rigid but should be flexible, with the ability to use different leadership styles whenever the situation calls for it. Only those leaders with a three-dimensional perspective live inspiring lives, live with a cause and adopt organizational ethics and leadership styles that will stand the test of time. Despite Africa being the cradle of humankind, leadership and organizational ethics is still in its infancy and wanting, even with the new generation of young leaders. The future outlook of African organizational ethics and leadership is to be found in the intersection of changes in technology, life style, demographics and geopolitics with new trends emerging in global polity and economy. (shrink)

Dialogue is promoted by its supporters as a pluralising force capable of accommodating the moral disagreement inevitable in every sphere of human society, but this promise is widely and vehemently challenged. How are we to determine the principles upon which the dialogical exchange should take place? How should we think of ourselves as interlocutors? Should we associate dialogue with the desire for consensus? How should we determine decision-making? What are the gender dynamics of dialogical politics and how much do they (...) matter? This book brings together internationally recognised expert authors from the fields of political and social theory, political philosophy and international relations to consider these controversial questions anew from a range of theoretical positions. The differences of opinions and clashes of views make for a fascinating and highly informative read. (shrink)

This work is a Festschrift to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji, Bishop of the Catholic diocese of Umuahia, Nigeria. Its title draws from his Episcopal Coat of Arms - <I>Caritas et Veritas. The focus of this book is Moral Theology. It contains fifteen diverse essays which indicate the spread and nuances of contemporary moral theological reflections. Their contributors are from three continents - Africa, Europe and North America. Firstly, this publication pays tribute to the efforts of Bishop (...) Ugorji to inspire interest in Moral Theology in Nigeria and deepen its reflections. Secondly, it hopes to provide more resource materials for students and researchers in the field of Moral Theology and Theological Ethics in Nigeria and beyond. (shrink)