Papers presented at the National Seminar on Language, Interpretation and Understanding: Hermeneutics from East-West Perspective, held in 2005 at the University of North Bengal in India.

This paper on friendship starts with noticing the cultural specificities of the words, “friend” and “friendship”: how they possess rich nuances and meanings in some cultures not available in others. It has then delved into Aristotle’s treatment of friendship in his three ethical treatises with special reference to the relationship between friendship and morality and that between friendship and self-knowledge. Some comments are made on whether friendship is possible between persons of unequal virtues and whether they are capable of attaining (...) self-knowledge. This paper also discusses certain challenges to Aristotle’s claims that friendship is an unalloyed good. The point of these challenges is that friendship can also be a great bad. The paper concludes with the observation how rare has friendship become in the modern world resulting in loneliness, depression and alienation. (shrink)

Man is a being-in–the-world and at the same time he defies the dictates of nature; he is a being-off-the-world. Man tries to transcend the unconditionally given nature through invention, symbolization, representation and imagination. Man not only belongs to nature but also intervenes in the processes of nature. Man is duplex. This duplicity is also species-specific to man and can be termed as human transcendence. This implies not only the transcendence of external nature but also self-transcendence, i.e. transcendence of his ego-self. (...) Self-transcendence not only makes morality possible but is also a the basis of formation of society. Further, it brings about a change in man’s attitude to nature. Nature is not seen purely as an object of utility, but also as a power, a force, having a telos or an end. In clarifying what we want to say, we study the positions of two figures, Friedrich Nietzsche and Rabindranath Tagore. This paper attempts to address the idea of man’s self-transcendence and its bearing on harmonious living with other individuals and with nature. (shrink)

The concern of this paper is to critique the political conception of nationalism as a theory of the nation-state. The basic point of the critique is that when the interests of the nation and the principles of the state coincide there emerges a fierce sense of national identity which endangers moral indifference to outsiders, the people within and outside the national boundary, without remorse. Here the attempt to uphold national identity is something more than nationhood. Besides involving territorial identity, common (...) language, custom and culture essential to the idea of a “nation,” it also upholds the consciousness of these as determining separate rights and allegiances, the idea of attachment to a nation and its interests. Such a consciousness can emerge only on the adoption of certain populist ideas such as racism, ethnicity and even such popular elusive myths as the “greatness” of a nation, the urge for the maintenance of “national character,” etc. Such “nationalist xenophobia” leads to the intensification of the distinction between the “own” and the “other,” “national” and the “alien,” the “citizen” and the “migrant” leading to “ethnic disharmony,” “colour bias,” hatred and suspicion of persons with whom one has lived closely as neighbours for decades. The most popular is the economic discourse of the “migrants” putting the “nationals” out of work. All this has its toll on multi-culturalism and humanitarian concerns. Many affluent nations have become cold to human misery, suffering and deaths from wars, terrorism, acute poverty, political persecution, environmental degradation, etc. This has created an “existential” crisis for millions of people on earth. (shrink)

Contributed research papers; published under the auspices of the Special Assistance Programme in Philosophy (UGC), Dept. of Philosophy, University of North Bengal.

There is a problematique about Buddhist Art. It cannot be deduced directly from the basic tenets of ethical Buddhism. Early Buddhist views forbid art as sensuous luxury. Even when Buddhists employed art for edifying ends it was essentially representative and realistic. With the changes in Buddhist system of beliefs and the rise of Buddhist philosophical schools Buddhist art came to symbolize the ideals of tranquility and Karunā - the Mahāyāna ideals par excellence. The masterpiece of the Gupta art depicting the (...) Master in dharmacakrapravartana mudra at Sarnath or the Bodhisattva Padmapani of the Ajanta murals shows that the beauty of the Buddha image resides not in following models of worldly beauty but rather in the creation of an ideal. The medieval Buddhist art is a continuation of the achievements at Sarnath and Ajanta. (shrink)

This paper is about the uses of language which the Oxford philosopher of language, J.L. Austin excluded from theoretical consideration in his William James Lectures delivered in 1955 and posthumously published as How to Do Things with Words. Uses of language, such as dramatic, poetic or comedic, are said by Austin to be non-serious, deviant and parasitic upon the everyday normal ordinary language. This leaves literature out of consideration as an etiolation. Derrida, who is not merely a trained philosopher but (...) also one of the finest literary critics of our day, fails to agree with Austin. In his “Signature, Event, Context”, and Limited Inc, he criticizes Austin of “totalization” and “idealization” of the norm or the standard; his inability to see that the parasitic is necessarily inbuilt in the standard. This paper is an attempt at seeing how far Derrida is justified in his critique as there is much that is common between his and Austin’s approaches towards language. (shrink)

The return of individual research results and incidental findings from biobanking research is a much debated ethical issue globally but has extensive relevance in India where the burden of out of pocket health care expenses is high for the majority. The views of 21 ethics committee (EC) members and 22 researchers from Bengaluru, India, concerning the ethics of biobanking research were sought through in‐depth interviews using an unfolding case vignette with probes. A shared view among most was that individual research (...) results which are ‘actionable’ or have ‘clinical significance’ should be returned to the sample contributors through their treating physicians. This was seen as an ethical obligation and a moral duty on the side of the researcher to “give back” to the person who contributed to the research. The challenges foreseen were that of resources, both financial and personnel, for the time and counseling needed to accompany the disclosure of results. Perceptions of ‘ownership’ appear to influence the concept of benefit sharing. While benefit sharing in financial terms was considered ethically challenging, certain researchers and ethics committee members made a case for “two way altruism” where the researcher in return for the altruistic ‘valuable contribution’, shares with the contributor/ community, benefits of the research which could include research findings, improved patient care, and more affordable access to the new diagnostic tests or products arising from the research. This defines the emerging ethic of “giving back” which goes beyond individual rights and ensures reciprocity and distributive justice. (shrink)

Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches Description: Very little is known about the author of this book apart from the facts that he is a retired Government of India officer, now in his late nineties, apparently hoary, but healthy. When requested for more bio-data, he wrote back…The Real author of the Original Yoga is the Lord Siva. In the mundane world, Patanjali is the prime propagator of yoga. Any other claim to authorship, therefore, cannot but be spurious. …It (...) is Truth that matters, not the utterer of the Truth. No Truth ever becomes a bit truer even when repeated by the most distinguished person. …Hence all genuine aspirants of yoga should be content to remain unknown and unnoticed by others. His other published work is Hindu Concept of Life and Death. (shrink)

Since the conceptualization of unethical pro-organizational behavior ten years ago, scholarly interest in exploring this phenomenon has multiplied. Given a burgeoning body of empirical research, a review of unethical pro-organizational behavior literature is warranted. This study, therefore, systematically reviews the extant literature on unethical pro-organizational behavior and presents a comprehensive theory-based review of the past developments in this field. We classify previous studies based on their underlying theoretical perspectives and discuss the antecedents and consequences of unethical pro-organizational behavior in work (...) context. We also explicate the boundary conditions under which the influence of these antecedents gets accentuated or alleviated. Overall, this study synthesizes past knowledge to elucidate why, how, and when unethical pro-organizational behavior unfolds in the workplace. Finally, the gaps in the extant theorization are identified and an agenda for future research is proposed. (shrink)

In the domain of legal information retrieval, an important challenge is to compute similarity between two legal documents. Precedents play an important role in The Common Law system, where lawyers need to frequently refer to relevant prior cases. Measuring document similarity is one of the most crucial aspects of any document retrieval system which decides the speed, scalability and accuracy of the system. Text-based and network-based methods for computing similarity among case reports have already been proposed in prior works but (...) not without a few pitfalls. Since legal citation networks are generally highly disconnected, network based metrics are not suited for them. Till date, only a few text-based and predominant embedding based methods have been employed, for instance, TF-IDF based approaches, Word2Vec and Doc2Vec based approaches. We investigate the performance of 56 different methodologies for computing textual similarity across court case statements when applied on a dataset of Indian Supreme Court Cases. Among the 56 different methods, thirty are adaptations of existing methods and twenty-six are our proposed methods. The methods studied include models such as BERT and Law2Vec. It is observed that the more traditional methods that rely on a bag-of-words representation performs better than the more advanced context-aware methods for computing document-level similarity. Finally we nominate, via empirical validation, five of our best performing methods as appropriate for measuring similarity between case reports. Among these five, two are adaptations of existing methods and the other three are our proposed methods. (shrink)

This paper attempts to unravel how a reader embraces the idea of moral education while enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of the Harry Potter series. It develops a view on moral education through literary experience, which is intrinsically intertwined with aesthetic experience. The amalgamation of reality and fantasy in the Harry Potter novels creates an authenticity that can easily capture the moral attention of a reader by which his/her self-realized valuable emotional intelligence takes place. The well-knit plot encourages reader's self-efficacy (“I” (...) reactive attitude) that triggers the sui-generis, first-personal sense of morality and gradually develops the third-personal “we” attitude. Finally, based on an empirical study, the article explains how the Harry Potter series is productive in building the reader's positive moral psychology through different applications like moral agency, moral point of view, and moral judgment. (shrink)

In a Common Law system, legal practitioners need frequent access to prior case documents that discuss relevant legal issues. Case documents are generally very lengthy, containing complex sentence structures, and reading them fully is a strenuous task even for legal practitioners. Having a concise overview of these documents can relieve legal practitioners from the task of reading the complete case statements. Legal catchphrases are (multi-word) phrases that provide a concise overview of the contents of a case document, and automated generation (...) of catchphrases is a challenging problem in legal analytics. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised neural sequence tagging model for the extraction of catchphrases from legal case documents. Specifically, we show that incorporating document-specific information along with a sequence tagging model can enhance the performance of catchphrase extraction. We perform experiments over a set of Indian Supreme Court case documents, for which the gold-standard catchphrases (annotated by legal practitioners) are obtained from a popular legal information system. The performance of our proposed method is compared with that of several existing supervised and unsupervised methods, and our proposed method is empirically shown to be superior to all baselines. (shrink)

Summarization of legal case judgement documents is a practical and challenging problem, for which many summarization algorithms of different varieties have been tried. In this work, rather than developing yet another summarization algorithm, we investigate if intelligently ensembling (combining) the outputs of multiple (base) summarization algorithms can lead to better summaries of legal case judgements than any of the base algorithms. Using two datasets of case judgement documents from the Indian Supreme Court, one with extractive gold standard summaries and the (...) other with abstractive gold standard summaries, we apply various ensembling techniques on summaries generated by a wide variety of summarization algorithms. The ensembling methods applied range from simple voting-based methods to ranking-based and graph-based ensembling methods. We show that many of our ensembling methods yield summaries that are better than the summaries produced by any of the individual base algorithms, in terms of ROUGE and METEOR scores. (shrink)

When agents know a protocol, this leads them to have expectations about future observations. Agents can update their knowledge by matching their actual observations with the expected ones. They eliminate states where they do not match. In this paper, we study how agents perceive protocols that are not commonly known, and propose a semantics-driven logical framework to reason about knowledge in such scenarios. In particular, we introduce the notion of epistemic expectation models and a propositional dynamic logic-style epistemic logic for (...) reasoning about knowledge via matching agentsÊ expectations to their observations. It is shown how epistemic expectation models can be obtained from epistemic protocols. Furthermore, a characterization is presented of the effective equivalence of epistemic protocols. We introduce a new logic that incorporates updates of protocols and that can model reasoning about knowledge and observations. Finally, the framework is extended to incorporate fact-changing actions, and a worked-out example is given. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. (shrink)

We make a proposal for formalizing simultaneous games at the abstraction level of player’s powers, combining ideas from dynamic logic of sequential games and concurrent dynamic logic. We prove completeness for a new system of ‘concurrent game logic’ CDGL with respect to finite non-determined games. We also show how this system raises new mathematical issues, and throws light on branching quantifiers and independence-friendly evaluation games for first-order logic.

The task of rhetorical role labeling is to assign labels (such as Fact, Argument, Final Judgement, etc.) to sentences of a court case document. Rhetorical role labeling is an important problem in the field of Legal Analytics, since it can aid in various downstream tasks as well as enhances the readability of lengthy case documents. The task is challenging as case documents are highly various in structure and the rhetorical labels are often subjective. Previous works for automatic rhetorical role identification (...) (i) mainly used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, and (ii) focused on certain law domains only (e.g., Immigration cases, Rent law), and a particular jurisdiction/country (e.g., US, Canada, India). In this work, we improve upon the prior works on rhetorical role identification by proposing novel Deep Learning models for automatically identifying rhetorical roles, which substantially outperform the prior methods. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed models over documents from five different law domains, and from two different jurisdictions—the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of the UK. Through extensive experiments over different variations of the Deep Learning models, including Transformer models based on BERT and LegalBERT, we show the robustness of the methods for the task. We also perform an extensive inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the predictions of the proposed model with the annotations by domain experts. We find that some rhetorical labels are inherently hard/subjective and both law experts and neural models frequently get confused in predicting them correctly. (shrink)

We discuss a simple logic to describe one of our favourite games from childhood, hide and seek, and show how a simple addition of an equality constant to describe the winning condition of the seeker makes our logic undecidable. There are certain decidable fragments of first-order logic which behave in a similar fashion and we add a new modal variant to that class of logics. We also discuss the relative expressive power of the proposed logic in comparison to the standard (...) modal counterparts. (shrink)

Atish R. Ghosh is Chief of the Policy Review Division of the Policy Development and Review Department of the International Monetary Fund.

We make a proposal for formalizing simultaneous games at the abstraction level of player's powers, combining ideas from dynamic logic of sequential games and concurrent dynamic logic. We prove completeness for a new system of 'concurrent game logic' CDGL with respect to finite non-determined games. We also show how this system raises new mathematical issues, and throws light on branching quantifiers and independence-friendly evaluation games for first-order logic.

We make a proposal for formalizing simultaneous games at the abstraction level of player’s powers, combining ideas from dynamic logic of sequential games and concurrent dynamic logic. We prove completeness for a new system of ‘concurrent game logic’ CDGL with respect to finite non-determined games. We also show how this system raises new mathematical issues, and throws light on branching quantifiers and independence-friendly evaluation games for first-order logic.

We have studied the dynamics and symmetries of a particle constrained to move in a torus knot. The Hamiltonian system turns out to be Second Class in Dirac’s formulation and the Dirac brackets yield novel noncommutative structures. The equations of motion are obtained for a path in general where the knot is present in the particle orbit but it is not restricted to a particular torus. We also study the motion when it is restricted to a specific torus. The rotational (...) symmetries are studied as well. We have also considered the behavior of small fluctuations of the particle motion about a fixed torus knot. (shrink)

Connected vehicle fleets have formed significant component of industrial internet of things scenarios as part of Industry 4.0 worldwide. The number of vehicles in these fleets has grown at a steady pace. The vehicles monitoring with machine learning algorithms has significantly improved maintenance activities. Predictive maintenance potential has increased where machines are controlled through networked smart devices. Here, benefits are accrued considering uptimes optimization. This has resulted in reduction of associated time and labor costs. It has also provided significant increase (...) in cost benefit ratios. Considering vehicle fault trends in this research predictive maintenance problem is addressed through hybrid deep learning-based ensemble method (HDLEM). The ensemble framework which acts as predictive analytics engine comprises of three deep learning algorithms viz modified cox proportional hazard deep learning (MCoxPHDL), modified deep learning embedded semi supervised learning (MDLeSSL) and merged LSTM (MLSTM) networks. Both sensor as well as historical maintenance data are collected and prepared using benchmarking methods for HDLEM training and testing. Here, times between failures (TBF) modeling and prediction on multi-source data are successfully achieved. The results obtained are compared with stated deep learning models. This ensemble framework offers great potential towards achieving more profitable, efficient and sustainable vehicle fleet management solutions. This helps better telematics data implementation which ensures preventative management towards desired solution. The ensemble method's superiority is highlighted through several experimental results. (shrink)

When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence children's early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies of parent–child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about (...) similarities and differences in parent–child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the child's name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names, but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences. Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the child's name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent–child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to children's early literacy skills and school readiness. (shrink)

This paper presents an attempt to bridge the gap between logical and cognitive treatments of strategic reasoning in games. There have been extensive formal debates about the merits of the principle of backward induction among game theorists and logicians. Experimental economists and psychologists have shown that human subjects, perhaps due to their bounded resources, do not always follow the backward induction strategy, leading to unexpected outcomes. Recently, based on an eye-tracking study, it has turned out that even human subjects who (...) produce the outwardly correct ‘backward induction answer’ use a different internal reasoning strategy to achieve it. The paper presents a formal language to represent different strategies on a finer-grained level than was possible before. The language and its semantics help to precisely distinguish different cognitive reasoning strategies, that can then be tested on the basis of computational cognitive models and experiments with human subjects. The syntactic framework of the formal system provides a generic way of constructing computational cognitive models of the participants of the Marble Drop game. (shrink)

Introduction: Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has unfavorable consequences for women as well as for newborn babies, which is very serious and preventable public health problem. It is believed to have an excessive occurrence in lives of women in South Asia. The objective of this study is to describe the prevalence, risk factors and consequences of IPV in Bangladesh. Methods: A scoping review was carried out based on the past 12 years of posted and gray literature about IPV in Bangladesh using (...) Arksey and O’Malley’s framework. Only the literature addressing abuses or violence in households or outside including physical, sexual or mental violence on the married woman in Bangladesh were taken into consideration for the study. Results: The overall prevalence of IPV in Bangladesh, the latest reviews of rates ranging from 15.5-82.7%.Most of the IPV in Bangladesh was based totally on the experience of legally married women. The main risk factors of IPV in Bangladesh were women being younger, from lower socioeconomic reputation, from lower academic attainment and lower education of husband, dowry, child marriage, perceived disobedience of wives, family conflict, children had recently been ill, and incapability of to furnish sexual satisfaction. Maternal depressive symptoms, signs of stress, anxiety and constraint to the better health of young children are the main consequences of IPV in Bangladesh. Besides, IPV causes unwanted pregnancy, pregnancy loss in the form of miscarriage, induced abortion, or stillbirth and termination of pregnancy in Bangladesh. Conclusions: Woman’s empowerment may reduce IPV and understanding attitudes towards IPV in cultural context could be crucial for developing interventions to reduce IPV and its consequences. (shrink)