Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of entailment in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for causal probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or “associational”) languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex—both expressively and inferentially—we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. (...) Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well-known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the ${\exists \mathbb {R}}$ -completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability. (shrink)

Where did the notion of 'moral duty' come from? In _The Invention of Duty: Stoicism as Deontology_, Jack Visnjic argues that it was the Stoics who first developed a robust notion of duty as well as a deontological ethics.

The relationship between great statesmen and political parties and what this means for political science and theories of the state; studies of Otto von Bismarck, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi and Nikola Pasic and their struggles for the public good and the national interest.

The presumed lifestyle changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic are the reason for research into the self-assessment of parents of early and preschool children about parental behaviors during lockdown in the first wave of a pandemic. The aim was to explore the quality of parenting through joint activities and behaviors towards children. A relative majority of survey participants estimate that they have not significantly changed individual activities with children while a quarter of parents estimate that they do so more often (...) than before. Nearly half of parents estimate that they play more with their children than before the lockdown. Family relationships have been singled out as the most important dimension of parenting. Age, level of formal education and marital status of research participants as a predictor explains only 2.3 % of the variability of parental self-assessment, so it is reasonable to assume the existence of other, more significant predictors of parenting quality. The collected data indicate the advantages and disadvantages of online research. The size of the sample indicates the involvement of parents on social networks, which indicates the possibility of further research on parenting. (shrink)

This article reconsiders contemporary conservatism’s “libertarian” claim to economic and political liberty and related claims. It re‐examines the relation of conservatism and its supposed “libertarianism” to the principle or ideal of liberty in society and economy, respectively. The paper argues and demonstrates that since its inception out of medieval traditionalism, conservatism has continued to consistently oppose the ideal and practice of liberty defining liberalism, and to that extent modern liberal‐democratic society as a reality or project premised on that ideal. The (...) argument and inference is that conservative “libertarianism” is effectively the antithesis to the ideal of liberty, couched in and rationalized as antagonism toward liberalism identified as its original and continual antagonist. (shrink)

Kripke-style models with two accessibility relations, one intuitionistic and the other modal, are given for analogues of the modal systemK based on Heyting's prepositional logic. It is shown that these two relations can combine with each other in various ways. Soundness and completeness are proved for systems with only the necessity operator, or only the possibility operator, or both. Embeddings in modal systems with several modal operators, based on classical propositional logic, are also considered. This paper lays the ground for (...) an investigation of intuitionistic analogues of systems stronger thanK. A brief survey is given of the existing literature on intuitionistic modal logic. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore ways in which metaphors contribute to hermeneutical resistance, that is, to practices that overcome and/or ameliorate hermeneutical injustice. I distinguish two aspects of hermeneutical injustice and two corresponding kinds of resistance: exoteric and esoteric hermeneutical injustice/resistance. The former injustice consists in unjust harm due to an inability to make one's experience understood to others. The latter consists in such a harm due to an inability to fully understand one's own experiences. In exoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors (...) can overcome resistances in others to understand oppressed agents' contributions because of its automatic processing and anti-deniability. In esoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors may highlight common structures in various aspects of marginalised agent's experiences, they can provide means of denoting social properties obscured by hermeneutical injustice and they can exhibit hermeneutical injustice by resisting interpretation. I illustrate these practices through works by Emily Dickinson, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. Those examples show the power of metaphors in hermeneutical resistance. (shrink)