Zamanda özdeşlik problemi felsefe tarihinin en önemli ve temel problemlerinden birisidir. Fakat bu özdeşlik problemi sadece fiziksel nesnelerde değil, bilincin özdeşliğinde de kendisini gösterir. Bilincin özdeşliği problemi onun salt bir tanımlama mı yoksa kendi içinde bir varlık olarak ontolojik bir statüsü olup olmadığı mı sorusuyla ilgilidir. Bu makalede demet teorisi gibi önde gelen bilinç teorilerinin bilincin geçişi veya bölünmüş zihin gibi temel problemlerin çözümünün açıklanmasında yetersiz olduklarını zaman felsefesinin bir kuramı olan dört-boyutçuluğun özdeşliğin geçişi konusundaki çözümlere yönelik yaklaşımını uyarlayarak savunacağım. (...) Bu amaçla Theseus’un gemisi ve Chisholm’un kahve kupası gibi felsefenin bilinen örneklerini verecek ve aynı örnekleri bilincin geçişine uygulayacağım. Bu örneklerden hareket ederek, B-serisi yargılamalarıyla (özellikle Ezelicilikle) ışınlanma paradoksunun çözümünü öne süreceğim. Bilinç benzeri nesnelerden kastın, bilincin var olmasını sağlayan bir zamansal ilişki mi yoksa bu ilişkilerden soyut bir ontolojik statü mü olduğu sorununa da değineceğim. Eğer bilinç ve nesneler arasındaki bu ilişki ortaya konulursa Parfit ve diğer filozofların ortaya koyduğu benzeri sorunların çözülebileceğini düşünüyorum. Bunu yaparak bilincin diğer tüm uzay zaman nesneleri gibi mereolojik (parça bütün ilişkisi bağlamında) bir özü olduğunu ileri süreceğim. Bu sebeple de demet teorisini ve Parfit’in çözümünü, Sider’ın Perry ve Prior’a karşı argümanlarından analojiyle reddedeceğim. Bu sayede argümanımı özdeşliğin analitik metafizik konumu lehine güçlendireceğim. (shrink)

This study aims to evaluate the ideas on the scope and method of economics of Joseph Schumpeter who is one of the important economists of the 20th century. The study consists of four sections: In the first section we underline the interesting points of his life to understand the roots, background, or 'vision' of his thought system. In the second section, we will examine his methodological views that he asserted in his first (but translated into English only in 2010) book. (...) Third section will be concerned with his 'analysis of economics' which refers to his critics of Leon Walras's general equilibrium analysis (as static) and his own alternative (dynamics analysis of capitalist economies) about the central subject matter of economics. In the fourth section we will treat his approach about the development/evolution process of economic thought in time. The study concludes with a brief assessment: Schumpeter is one of the rare economists who can build his own thought system in the history of economics, and he embraced a pluralist perspective in the field of the methodology of economics. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson proposed in the early seventies a threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of "what is said" when a sentence is uttered. The proposal was somewhat tentative and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various questions to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review Strawson's scheme, note his concerns, and add some of our own. We also defend its essence and recommend it as an insightful entry point re the interplay of intended (...) meaning and context. (shrink)

The work described in this report is motivated by the desire to test the expressive possibilities of action language C+. The Causal Calculator (CCalc) is a system that answers queries about action domains described in a fragment of that language. The Zoo World and the Traffic World have been proposed by Erik Sandewall in his Logic Modelling Workshop—an environment for communicating axiomatizations of action domains of nontrivial size. -/- The Zoo World consists of several cages and the exterior, gates between (...) them, and animals of several species, including humans. Actions in this domain include moving within and between cages, opening and closing gates, and mounting and riding animals. The Traffic World includes vehicles moving continuously between road crossings subject to a number of restrictions, such as speed limits and keeping a fixed safety distance away from other vehicles on the road. We show how to represent the two domains in the input language of CCalc, and how to use CCalc to test these representations. (shrink)

One of the concepts with unclear definitions is teacher leadership. Teachers must be inclined to take various risks to become leaders. In fact, in practice, most teachers are not taught leadership skills in career preparation programs. Teachers' success in decision-making processes and school leadership efforts is sometimes limited. Teachers who achieve control in their classrooms have much more power to make suggestions to other adults in the school and can bring valuable qualities to the school as teacher leaders. In addition (...) to aiming to organize effective classroom activities, teacher leadership also requires taking part in school activities. This research was conducted to discuss the roles and strategies of principals and teachers in developing teacher leadership in Azerbaijan. To achieve the purpose of the research, the scanning method was followed and a theoretical analysis was made. Leadership is the ability to motivate a group, gather them around certain goals, and achieve these goals together. As an effective leader, the teacher has the responsibility of developing a vision, sharing his vision, and organizing learning experiences appropriate to the development and individual differences of all students. (shrink)

The standard propositional exposition of necessary and sufficient conditions, as available in introductory logic texts, leads to a contradiction. It should be abolished.

Strawson proposed in the early seventies an attractive threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of 'what is said' when a sentence is uttered. The proposed scheme is somewhat crude and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various points to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review the scheme of Strawson, note his concerns, and add some of our own. However, our main point is to defend the essence of Strawson's approach and to recommend (...) it as a starting point for research into intended meaning and context. (shrink)

Analogy-making is finding analogies between different situations. In this paper, we provide a new model of computational analogy-making which uses Situation Theory as its formal background. Situation Theory is a semantic and logical theory which provides a naturalistic way to represent relations in situations. The system described in this paper is aimed at solving analogy problems made by basic geometric figures in a chessboard-like environment.

In this paper we attempt to develop a problem representation technique which enables the decomposition of a problem into subproblems such that their solution in sequence constitutes a strategy for solving the problem. An important issue here is that the subproblems generated should be easier than the main problem. We propose to represent a set of problem states by a statement which is true for all the members of the set. A statement itself is just a set of atomic statements (...) which are binary predicates on state variables. Then, the statement representing the set of goal states can be partitioned into its subsets each of which becomes a subgoal of the resulting strategy. The techniques involved in partitioning a goal into its subgoals are presented with examples. (shrink)

Some recent studies in computational linguistics have aimed to take advantage of various cues presented by punctuation marks. This short survey is intended to summarise these research efforts and additionally, to outline a current perspective for the usage and functions of punctuation marks. We conclude by presenting an information-based framework for punctuation, influenced by treatments of several related phenomena in computational linguistics.

The papers you will find in this special issue of JoLLI develop letter and spirit of Turing’s original contributions. They do not lazily fall back into the same old sofa, but follow – or question – the inspiring ideas of a great man in the search for new, more precise, conclusions. It is refreshing to know that the fertile landscape created by Alan Turing remains a source of novel ideas.

This article is based on an ethnographic investigation of the Gezi Park events in 2013. Starting from the much acknowledged characteristics of Gezi as being its cultural and political pluralism and its commitment to non-violence, in this article we are engaging with two interlinked questions: How has the plurality of participants and orientations been possible to attain, and how could this pluralism be contained without any major conflict at Gezi? We propose to provide an answer by focusing on the manners (...) of everyday life at Gezi Park during the time of dissidence, which we conceptualize as ‘manner of contention’. It was the manner of contention that characterized the specific ways in which contentious politics took place at Gezi and prevented the formation of clashes among the plurality of contenders. The ethnographic research delineates at least 4 components of manner of contention in the case of Gezi: an ethos of collective work; a spirit of exchange and gift-giving; politeness; and non-violence. (shrink)

Scientists’ responsibility to inform the public about their results may conflict with their responsibility not to cause social disturbance by the communication of these results. A study of the well-known Brady-Spence and Iben Browning earthquake predictions illustrates this conflict in the publication of scientifically unwarranted predictions. Furthermore, a public policy that considers public sensitivity caused by such publications as an opportunity to promote public awareness is ethically problematic from (i) a refined consequentialist point of view that any means cannot be (...) justified by any ends, and (ii) a rights view according to which individuals should never be treated as a mere means to ends. The Parkfield experiment, the so-called paradigm case of cooperation between natural and social scientists and the political authorities in hazard management and risk communication, is also open to similar ethical criticism. For the people in the Parkfield area were not informed that the whole experiment was based on a contested seismological paradigm. (shrink)

Deflationism, one of the influential philosophical doctrines of truth, holds that there is no property of truth, and that overt uses of the predicate "true" are redundant. However, the hypothetical examples used by theorists to exemplify deflationism are isolated sentences, offering little to examine what the predicate adds to meaning within context. We oppose the theory not on philosophical but on empirical grounds. We collect 7,610 occurrences of "it is true that" from 10 influential periodicals published in the United States. (...) We classify and annotate these with respect to the positions of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that they contain. This way we investigate the contextual relationships between the proposition following "it is true that" with its surroundings. Overall, 34 different syntactical patterns are encountered. In some occurrences of "true", the predicate acts in the same manner as a performative verb does. These occurrences, having been observed in linguistically reliable media, constitute pragmatic counter-examples to deflationism. (shrink)

According to the target article authors, initial experience with a circumstance primes a relation that can subsequently be applied to a different circumstance to draw an analogy. While I broadly agree with their claim about the role of relational priming in early analogical reasoning, I put forward a few concerns that may be worthy of further reflection.

In this special issue of Minds and Machines ("Situations and Artificial Intelligence") we take a close look at recent situation-theoretic research which has mostly originated within a philosophical framework but promises to have strong connotations for Artificial Intelligence workers. The seven papers which make up this special issue (three of the papers appear in Minds and Machines 9(1)) demonstrate the advantages of the situation-based approach towards problems with a definite AI flavor.

The notion of context arises in assorted areas of artificial intelligence (AI), including knowledge representation, natural language processing, intelligent information retrieval, etc. Although the term ‘context’ is frequently employed in descriptions, explanations, and analyses of computer programs in these areas, its meaning is frequently left to the reader’s understanding. -/- My aim in this paper is to offer a swift review of context in AI. I will first identify the role of context in various fields of AI. I will then (...) consider the enterprise of formalising context. The focus of my discussion will be McCarthy's (1993) proposal – a landmark study that inspired almost every logical theory of context since then – and its close variants, studied by his students. -/- (The author is grateful to Prof. Carlo Penco for his invaluable assistance with this work.). (shrink)

This position paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in AI to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to 'interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Harris (1988), (...) enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two thought-provoking papers in interpretation, (Barwise 1989) and (Hobbs 1990), are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context. (shrink)

There are two main sources of compensation liability in Islamic Law of Obligations. These; contract and tort. Harming someone else is prohibited by any means. However, in social life, we witness that people harm others. Here, too, the legal order tries to ensure that the said damage is remedied. However, it is not a legal way to harm the other party for this. Are there other obligations at the same time as the liability for compensation? In this regard, Article 86 (...) of Mecelle regulates that compensation liability and usage benefit cannot be combined in accordance with the Hanafi sect. There are some theoretical reasons for this within the sect. However, other sects have opposing views to the Hanafi sect on this issue. In particular, they approached positively to the compensation of the usage benefit of the usurped property separately. The basis of this difference is based on whether the benefit is legally accepted as property. However, in the later periods, some exceptions were made to the first view within the Hanafi sect. These; foundation, orphan and commercial property. In addition, it has been accepted that in the Majalla amendments, the benefit can be accepted as property and may be the subject of compensation. (shrink)

We focus on how we should define the relevance of information to a context for information processing agents, such as oracles. We build our formalization of relevance upon works in pragmatics which refer to contextual information without giving any explicit representation of context. We use a formalization of context (due to us) in Situation Theory, and demonstrate its power in this task. We also discuss some computational aspects of this formalization.

On Crimmins and Perry’s account of propositional attitude ascription (1989), beliefs are concrete cognitive structures—particulars ("things in the head") that belong to an agent and that have a lifetime. They are related to the world and to other cognitive structures and abilities, allowing one to classify the latter by propositional content. Containing ideas and notions as constituents, beliefs are structured entities. The difference between notions and ideas is the difference between an agent’s ways of thinking about individuals vs. properties.

This article has two interrelated purposes, one of historical and one of contemporary significance. It first seeks to challenge the common view in the literature that Article 82EC is a product of ordoliberalism. This is done by directly examining the travaux préparatoires of the competition rules of the EC Treaty to discover the intent of the drafters of Article 82EC. This inquiry is important for a modernized approach to Article 82EC since it must be determined whether Article 82EC can be (...) applied with a ‘consumer welfare’ standard without a Treaty amendment. This is because, if the provision is ‘ordoliberal’, its objective cannot be the enhancement of ‘consumer welfare’. As its second and policy-driven purpose, this article suggests that the intent of the drafters of Article 82EC provides the EC Commission and the courts with the means to apply Article 82EC in a modernized manner with a ‘more economic approach’. The article shows that the drafters of Article 82EC were mainly concerned with increasing ‘efficiency’. Hence, adopting a welfarist objective would not imply a fundamental change in the goals of Article 82EC. On the contrary, including efficiencies in the assessment would be a late but welcome recognition since efficiency is already imbedded in the provision. (shrink)

“It’s so hard to be a saint in the city,” sings Bruce Springsteen in a ballad released 35 years ago. Judging from the national popular sentiment about the matter, he could have been talking about the complexity of being a philosopher in Turkey.

The papers that make up this special issue do not take idealized abstractions of context as their point of departure but rather start with the actual phenomena under study and later generalize. We agree that, more often than not, giving a formal model and providing a theory of a loaded notion – such as context – can lead to important insights. Thus, precise models of context and accompanying theories are useful. However, given the widely different fields, methodologies and worldviews within (...) which people study, an approach that starts with the root phenomena/problems and only attempts normalization and generalization post hoc might be a more productive way to proceed. (shrink)

The importance of contextual reasoning is emphasized by various researchers in AI. (A partial list includes John McCarthy and his group, R. V. Guha, Yoav Shoham, Giuseppe Attardi and Maria Simi, and Fausto Giunchiglia and his group.) Here, we survey the problem of formalizing context and explore what is needed for an acceptable account of this abstract notion.

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun (...) resolution are implemented in this paper. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results. (shrink)

The success of set theory as a foundation for mathematics inspires its use in artificial intelligence, particularly in commonsense reasoning. In this survey, we briefly review classical set theory from an AI perspective, and then consider alternative set theories. Desirable properties of a possible commonsense set theory are investigated, treating different aspects like cumulative hierarchy, self-reference, cardinality, etc. Assorted examples from the ground-breaking research on the subject are also given.

This is the proceedings of the "1st Turkish Conference on AI and ANNs," K. Oflazer, V. Akman, H. A. Guvenir, and U. Halici (editors). The conference was held at Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara on 25-26 June 1992. -/- Language of contributions: English and Turkish.

This paper investigates an alternative set theory (due to Peter Aczel) called Hyperset Theory. Aczel uses a graphical representation for sets and thereby allows the representation of non-well-founded sets. A program, called HYPERSOLVER, which can solve systems of equations defined in terms of sets in the universe of this new theory is presented. This may be a useful tool for commonsense reasoning.

The modern republican history of Turkey and its relation with the question of ethnic diversity could be understood via the tension between the processes of system integration and social integration. This article, based on Jürgen Habermas’ conceptual framework, draws the sources of such tension with reference to the Kurdish identity in Turkey since the early republican era. For this purpose, from the 1920s to the 2000s, policies and discourses of system integration aiming at a certain degree of ethnic homogenization to (...) eliminate ‘possible threats’ to territorial integrity and national unity are discussed in detail. While system integration processes reflect an exclusionary and assimilative-securitist logic of state practices regarding the Kurdish question, this article argues that the Kurdish challenge to republicanism and to its system integration logic promises more for the dynamics of social integration. Especially since the 1990s, while processes of system integration are still in force; national, regional and diasporic achievements of Kurdish politics and its call for a democratic transformation of the republic based on decentralist, participatory and multiculturalist values have become much more visible. This new focus on democratic transformation demands more for social integration through internalization of roles as well as through promotion of an active communication between citizens by raising the claims of active participation to social and political spheres as well as by making identity visible in different aspects of socio-cultural life. Degree of social integration and its success vis-à-vis system integration will be decisive in the democratic transformation of Turkey in the future. (shrink)

"Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I'm shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man's-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I (...) spend most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn't fit the wrong pieces next to each other. His uncertainties were of a different order, but no matter how hard life became for him in other ways, words were never his problem." -Paul Auster, Leviathan. (shrink)

Papers in this special issue were written upon invitation. They were then subjected to the usual refereeing process of the Journal of Pragmatics. While we have attempted to cover almost all important areas in which context is employed as a conceptual apparatus, our coverage is clearly limited in scope. Accordingly, instead of a general updated overview of the use of context in every conceivable specific field (let's say the state-of-the-art of interdisciplinary research on context: a colossal/impossible enterprise!), we will offer (...) the readers of this special issue an introduction to the problems involved in the study of context by way of eight papers encompassing eight different areas. These are (in alphabetical order): artificial intelligence, bilingualism, child development, cognitive science, conversation analysis, neuroscience, philosophy of language, and pragmatics. Our goal is to propose a multi-faceted view of context, and to stimulate further investigations of this fertile topic, which permeates our lives. (shrink)

At the heart of natural language processing is the understanding of context dependent meanings. This paper presents a preliminary model of formal contexts based on situation theory. It also gives a worked-out example to show the use of contexts in lifting, i.e., how propositions holding in a particular context transform when they are moved to another context. This is useful in NLP applications where preserving meaning is a desideratum.

Günümüzde hızla yayılan, insanların hayat kalitesini ve mutluluğunu olumsuz olarak etkileyen yalnızlık, özellikle Amerika ve Avrupa’da en önemli toplumsal sorunlardan birine dönüşmüştür. İngiltere’de yalnızlıktan sorumlu bakanlık kurulmasına kadar varan bu olgunun, Türkiye’de özellikle genç nesli temsil eden üniversite öğrencilerinde ne düzeyde olduğu, bu araştırmanın temel araştırma konularından birini oluşturmaktadır. Bu araştırma, Ordu üniversitesinin değişik fakültelerinde öğrenim gören 416 öğrenci örneklemi üzerinde yürütülmüştür. Anket formunda; UCLA yalnızlık ölçeği, dini başa çıkma ve hayat memnuniyeti ölçekleri kullanılmıştır. Ayrıca katılımcıların bireysel dindarlık algıları ve (...) sosyal medya kullanım düzeylerini belirlemeye yönelik sorular oluşturulmuştur. SPSS istatistik programıyla yapılan analizler sonucunda; dindarlık algısı ile yalnızlık, olumsuz dini başa çıkma, sosyal medyada görünürlük düzeyi ve kullanılan sosyal medya sayısı arasında negatif yönde; dindarlıkla olumlu dini başa çıkma arasında ise pozitif yönde bir ilişki tespit edilmiştir. Ayrıca öznel dindarlık algısı cinsiyet üzerinde farklılığa açmazken, hayat memnuniyeti üzerinde farklılığa yol açtığı anlaşılmıştır. Yalnızlık ile olumlu dini başa çıkma, hayat memnuniyeti ve mesajlaşma arasında negatif yönde ilişki ve etkileşim tespit edilirken, hayat memnuniyeti ile olumlu dini başa çıkma arasında pozitif, olumsuz dini başa çıkma arasında negatif yönde ilişki ve etkileşimin varlığı bulgulanmıştır. Bu çalışma birçok değişkenin birbiri ile ilişki ve etkileşimini ele alması bakımından önemlidir. (shrink)

This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in artificial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to 'interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of the intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Wendell (...) Harris, enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two recent approaches to interpretation, due to Jon Barwise and Jerry Hobbs, are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context. It must be noted that there has been a considerable body of contributions connecting linguistic structure with social context. For example, anthropological linguistics, from Bronislaw Malinowski onwards, has underlined the cultural context of discourse as essential to meaning. This viewpoint became prominent with the emergence of the ethnography of speaking in anthropology. Thus, conversation analysis represents a consistent formal effort to contribute to an analysis of the nature of context. While this paper emphasizes and reviews the literary theory approach, it makes various contacts with works of the latter kind (e.g., the landmark contributions of Erving Goffman, John Gumperz, William Hanks, John Heritage, Dell Hymes, et al.) in order to deliver a more balanced and complete study of the dimensions of context. (shrink)