This is the first definitive graduate and advanced undergraduate level treatment of behavioral economics that describes the cutting edge of the subject. It carefully outlines the evidence, describes the relevant theory, and provides interesting and economically relevant applications of the theory. Behavioral economics is not only the fastest growing area in economics but it is rapidly going mainstream, and it is most likely to be the future of economics. The field has lacked a definitive treatment- this is it. The book (...) covers most areas in economics, which accounts for its length. Behavioral economics not only explains the evidence much better, it is fun to do relative to the dismal science of traditional economics; this book conveys both these aspects. (shrink)

Tim Maudlin has influentially argued that Humeanism about laws of nature stands in conflict with quantum mechanics. Specifically Humeanism implies the principle Separability: the complete physical state of a world is determined by the intrinsic physical state of each space-time point. Maudlin argues Separability is violated by the entangled states posited by QM. We argue that Maudlin only establishes that a stronger principle, which we call Strong Separability, is in tension with QM. Separability is not in tension with QM. Moreover, (...) while the Humean requires Separability to capture the core tenets of her view, there's no Humean-specific motivation for accepting Strong Separability. We go on to give a Humean account of entangled states which satisfies Separability. The core idea is that certain quantum states depend upon the Humean mosaic in much the same way as the laws do. In fact, we offer a variant of the Best System account on which the systemization procedure that generates the laws also serves to ground these states. We show how this account works by applying it to the example of Bohmian Mechanics. The 3N-dimensional configuration space, the world particle in it and the wave function on it are part of the best system of the Humean mosaic, which consists of N particles moving in 3-dimensional space. We argue that this account is superior to the Humean account of Bohmian Mechanics defended by Loewer and Albert, which takes the 3N-dimensional space, and its inhabitants, as fundamental. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature is, roughly, the view that the laws of nature are just patterns, or ways of describing patterns, in the mosaic of events. In this paper I survey some of the (many!) objections that have been raised to Humeanism, considering how the Humean might respond. And I consider how we might make a positive case for Humeanism. The common thread running through all this is that the viability of the Humean view relies on the Humean having (...) an importantly different conception of explanation to the anti-Humean. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture (...) suggested by Humeanism. -/- I suggest that the Humean can respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that is appropriate. In particular the Humean can, in the spirit of Loewer (2012), distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation — this is motivated by differing aims of explanation in science and metaphysics. And they can further leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces. (shrink)

I give an account of what makes an event a coincidence. -/- I start by critically discussing a couple of other approaches to the notion of coincidence -- particularly that of Lando (2017) -- before developing my own view. The central idea of my view is that the correct understanding of coincidences is closely related to our understanding of the correct 'level' or 'grain' of explanation. Coincidences have a kind of explanatory deficiency — if they did not have this deficiency (...) they would not be coincidences. This deficiency, I claim, is the same explanatory deficiency as when we give low-level explanations of special science phenomena. Such explanations are typically too specific and not robust enough. I claim that there is this same badness in purported explanations of coincidences. -/- I cash out this idea sketching an account of explanatory goodness — an account of what makes explanations better or worse -- and using that to give a more precise account of coincidences. (shrink)

There is a tension in our theorizing about laws of nature: our practice of using and reasoning with laws of nature suggests that laws are universal generalizations, but if laws are universal generalizations then we face the problem of explanatory circularity. In this paper I elucidate this tension and show how it motivates a view of laws that I call Minimal Anti-Humeanism. This view says that the laws are the universal generalizations that are not grounded in their instances. I argue (...) that this view has a variety of advantages that could make it attractive to people with both Humean and anti-Humean inclinations. (shrink)

Views which deny that there are necessary connections between distinct existences have often been criticized for leading to inductive skepticism. If there is no glue holding the world together then there seems to be no basis on which to infer from past to future. However, deniers of necessary connections have typically been unconcerned. After all, they say, everyone has a problem with induction. But, if we look at the connection between induction and explanation, we can develop the problem of induction (...) in a way that hits deniers of necessary connections, but not their opponents. The denier of necessary connections faces an `internal' problem with induction -- skepticism about important inductive inferences naturally flows from their position in a way that it doesn't for those who accept necessary connections. This is a major problem, perhaps a fatal one, for the denial of necessary connections. (shrink)

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is distributed over a number of actors and artifacts and is mediated by a weaving notation called talim. The script encodes entire design in practice-specific symbols. This encoded script is decoded and interpreted via design-specific conventions by weavers to weave the design embedded in it. The cognitive properties of this notational system are described in the paper employing cognitive dimensions (CDs) framework of Green (People and computers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989) and Blackwell (...) et al. (Cognitive technology: instruments of mind—CT 2001, LNAI 2117, Springer, Berlin, 2001). After introduction to the practice, the design process is described in ‘The design process’ section which includes coding and decoding of talim. In ‘Cognitive dimensions of talim’ section, after briefly discussing CDs framework, the specific cognitive dimensions possessed by talim are described in detail. (shrink)

Many moral debunking arguments are driven by the idea that the correlation between our moral beliefs and the moral truths is a big coincidence, given a robustly realist conception of morality.One influential response is that the correlation is not a coincidence because there is a common explainer of our moral beliefs and the moral truths. For example, the reason that I believe that I should feed my child is because feeding my child helps them to survive, and natural selection instills (...) in me beliefs and dispositions that help my children survive since that is conductive to my genes continuing through the generations. Similarly, the reason that it's morally good to feed my child is because it helps them to survive, and survival is morally valuable.But if we look at some cases from scientific practice, and from everyday life, we can see, I argue, why this response fails. A correlation can be coincidental even if there is a common explainer. I give an account of the nature of coincidence that draws upon recent literature on scientific explanation and argue that the correlation between moral belief and moral truth is a coincidence, even given such common explainers. And I use this to defend a certain form of debunking argument. (shrink)

Principles of Behavioral Economics, written by an acknowledged leader in the field, provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the most exciting areas of modern economics. It demonstrates how models of economic theory can be enriched by using interdisciplinary insights from psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience to build the basis for a more empirically supported set of economic principles. Unique in its level of rigor and lucidity, the book highlights the important link between theoretical and empirical economics by demonstrating (...) the usefulness of a range of data sources such as observational data, lab data, survey data, and neuroeconomic data. This field-defining textbook argues that behavioral economics is not just a supplement to mainstream economics. Taking behavioral economics seriously requires a total rethink, and eventual transformation, of every area of economics. (shrink)

In this discussion note I reply to some criticisms that Marc Lange (2022) has directed at my Humean view of scientific laws (Bhogal, 2020) -- about whether Humean views can make sense of the apparent fact that laws are counterfactually invariant. The key idea of my response is that the Humean should think of their reduction of the laws to the Humean mosaic as closely related to other views where we reduce one domain to another but still allow that (...) the higher-level domain can be `autonomous' of the lower-level in some respects -- like, for example, the view that the special sciences reduce to physics but can still can work autonomously of physics. (shrink)

Some patterns call out for explanation, in the sense that we have a pro tanto reason to reject theories that do not give them an appropriate explanation. I argue that certain modal patterns call out for explanation in this way—and this provides a reason to reject certain theories of modality that fail to explain such patterns. However, I also consider a response to this argument, which claims that the modal patterns do not need explanation. This response might be viable but (...) it involves some substantial commitments about the nature of explanation. (shrink)

Here is a puzzling phenomenon. Moral theories are typically thought to be necessary. If act utilitarianism is true, for example, then it is necessarily true. However, scientific theories are typically thought to be contingent. If quantum field theory is true, it’s not necessarily true — the world could have been Newtonian. My aim is to explore this discrepancy between domains. -/- In particular, I explore the role of what I call `internality’ intuitions in motivating necessitism about both moral and scientific (...) domains. In effect, these internality intuitions tell against the explanatory role of certain `external’ entities – like moral or scientific principles. I’ll suggest that perhaps these internality intuitions are more compelling in the moral case than the scientific case. If so, this would rationalize the combination of moral necessitism and scientific contingentism. (shrink)

Humeanism – the idea that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences – and Nomic Essentialism – the idea that properties essentially play the nomic roles that they do – are two of the most important and influential positions in the metaphysics of science. Traditionally, it has been thought that these positions were incompatible competitors. We disagree. We argue that there is an attractive version of Humeanism that captures the idea that, for example, mass essentially plays the role that (...) it actually does in the laws of nature. In this paper we consider the arguments that have lead many to conclude that Humeanism cannot be combined with Nomic Essentialism; we identify the weaknesses in these arguments; and we argue in detail that a version of Humeanism based on a variant of the Best System account of laws captures the key intuitions behind nomic essentialism. (shrink)

At the core of the recent debate over moral debunking arguments is a disagreement between explanationist and modalist approaches. Explanationists think that the lack of an explanatory connection between our moral beliefs and the moral truths, given a non-naturalist realist conception of morality, is a reason to reject non-naturalism. Modalists disagree. They say that, given non-naturalism, our beliefs have the appropriate modal features with respect to truth -- in particular they are safe and sensitive -- so there is no problem. (...) -/- There is something of a stand-off here. I argue, though, that by looking at the role explanatory and modal factors have to play in theory choice more generally, and, in particular, by considering the practice of theory choice in science, we can see that the explanationist is right. The lack of an explanatory connection between our moral beliefs and the moral truths is a reason to reject non-naturalist realism about morality. (shrink)

Some properties – like charge – are natural, some – like grue are unnatural. The distinction between natural and unnatural properties is normally taken as primitive. However, Barry Loewer’s Package Deal Account (PDA) aims to provide an reductive account of natural properties, integrated with a reductive account of laws of nature. In addition, the account seems to be able to apply to natural properties at the level of fundamental physics, and higher-level, special science, properties. -/- If the account is successful, (...) then, it looks to be incredibly powerful and attractive. The PDA, however, is somewhat underexplored in the literature. So the first aim of the paper is to understand the PDA better -- to map the connections between naturalness and laws on the traditional BSA and to consider how those connections have to adapted in order to develop different versions of the PDA. -/- The second aim is to start to evaluate different versions of the PDA. In particular, perhaps the most promising version of the PDA construes it as an instance of a larger approach to Humeanism — one that has been very visible in the recent literature — that focuses on the role of 'ideal observers' or 'ideal scientists'. While such an approach might be feasible, I claim, it gets its proponents much less than they were originally hoping for. (shrink)

Humean accounts of chance have a problem with undermining futures: they have to accept that some series of events are physically possible and have a nonzero chance but are inconsistent with the chances being what they are. This contradicts basic platitudes about chances (such as those given by Bigelow et al. (1993) and Schaffer (2007)) and leads to inconsistency between plausible constraints on credences. We show how Humeans can avoid these contradictions by drawing on metaphysically impossible worlds that are, nevertheless, (...) scientifically possible. One major advantage of our approach is that one single move deals with these both problems, whereas previous Humean approaches to undermining (such as that given by Lewis (1994), Thau (1994), and Hall (1994)) have only addressed the connection between credence and chance. Furthermore, our approach connects more closely with the way we employ stochastic scientific theories. And it’s part of a unified solution to other challenges that the Humean faces. (shrink)

About this book Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. As student of Rudolph Carnap's and Hans Reichenbach's, he went on to become not only a major figure in North American analytic philosophy, who made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and physics but also to the disciplines of logic, number theory, and computer science. He passed away on March 13, 2016. The present volume is a memorial (...) to his extraordinary intellectual contributions, honoring his contributions as a philosopher, a thinker, and a public intellectual. It features essays by an international team of leading philosophers, covering all aspects of Hilary Putnam's philosophy from his work in ethics and the history of philosophy to his contributions to the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Each essay is an original contribution. -/- Author information James Conant, Univ. of Chicago/Univ. of Leipzig, USA/Germany; Sanjit Chakraborty, IISER Kolkata/VIT-AP University, India. (shrink)

A debut picture book that explores the importance of pronouncing names properly and celebrates cultural identity. Saajin loves his name--he loves it so much that he sees it spelled out in the world around him in his snacks, in the sky and sometimes he even sings it aloud. On his first day of school, Saajin is excited to meet his new classmates, but things take a turn when the teacher mispronounces his name as Say-jin and he is not sure how--or (...) if he should--correct her. After trying to live with the different version of his name for a while and some thoughtful conversations with his family about the meaning behind it, Saajin realizes the importance of reclaiming his name and embracing his identity. This empowering story, accompanied by energetic and vibrant art by Samrath Kaur, will resonate with any reader who has ever felt misunderstood. (shrink)

Why do we value higher-level scientific explanations if, ultimately, the world is physical? An attractive answer is that physical explanations often cite facts that don’t make a difference to the event in question. I claim that to properly develop this view we need to commit to a type of deterministic chance. And in doing so, we see the theoretical utility of deterministic chance, giving us reason to accept a package of views including deterministic chance.

This book carries forward the discourse on the mind’s engagement with the world. It reviews the semantic and metaphysical debates around internalism and externalism, the location of content, and the indeterminacy of meaning in language. The volume analyses the writings of Jackson, Chomsky, Putnam, Quine, Bilgrami and others, to reconcile opposing theories of language and the mind. It ventures into Cartesian ontology and Fregean semantics to understand how mental content becomes world-oriented in our linguistic communication. Further, the author explores the (...) liaison between the mind and the world from the phenomenological perspective, particularly, Husserl’s linguistic turn and Heidegger’s intersubjective entreaty for Dasein. The book conceives thought as a biological and socio-linguistic product which engages with the mind-world question through the conceptual and causal apparatuses of language. A major intervention in the field of philosophy of language, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers interested in philosophy, phenomenology, epistemology, and metaphysics . (shrink)

Many scholars and activists have argued that the International Criminal Court holds potential for advancing the rights of women and girls, leading to extensive feminist engagement with and investment in the Court. As the ICC enters its second decade of existence, this article offers a reflection on both the possibilities and the challenges facing feminists. Can the international criminal law really offer a site for enhancing the rights of women? And if so, how? To explore these questions I focus on (...) the interaction between feminist activism and international criminal law institutions in relation to crimes of sexual and gender-based violence. I argue that some of the feminist strategies deployed to get sexual violence onto the international agenda have resulted in perverse outcomes. This should lead us to greater critical reflection regarding how international law conceives of sexual violence and direct our future engagements with international legal institutions. In particular feminist activists and scholars need to move away from focusing on the number of prosecutions towards challenging the international criminal law to characterise the nature of the harm in accordance with a recognition of sexual rights. (shrink)

Sports officials, players, and fans are concerned about overseas player rankings for the IPL auction. These rankings are becoming progressively essential to investors when premium leagues are commercialized. The decision-makers of the Indian Premier League choose cricketers based on their own experience in sports and based on performance statistics on several criteria. This paper presents a scientific way to rank the players. Our research examines and contrasts different multicriteria decision-making algorithms for ranking foreign players under various criteria to assess their (...) performance and efficiency. The paper uses three MCDM algorithms, TOPSIS, TODIM, and NR-TOPSIS, for foreign players ranking in the Indian Premier League. Our analysis is limited to the batsmen and bowlers only. We perform the analysis using Python language, a popular high-level programming language. Finally, we perform a sensitivity analysis to determine the stability of each method when the weights of the criterion or the value of a parameter was changed. Our analysis exhibits the superiority of TODIM over TOPSIS and NR-TOPSIS. (shrink)

The academic literature on unethical leadership is witnessing an upward trend, perhaps given the magnitude of unethical conduct in organisations, which is manifested in increasing corporate fraud and scandals in the contemporary business landscape. Despite a recent increase, scholarly interest in this area has, by and large, remained scant due to the proliferation of concepts that are often and mistakenly considered interchangeable. Nevertheless, scholarly investigation in this field of inquiry has picked up the pace, which warrants a critical appraisal of (...) the extant research on unethical leadership. To this end, the current study systematically reviews the existing body of work on unethical leadership and offers a robust and multi-level understanding of the academic developments in this field. We organised the studies according to various themes focused on antecedents, outcomes and boundary conditions. In addition, we advance a multi-level conceptualisation of unethical leadership, which incorporates macro, meso and micro perspectives and, thus, provide a nuanced understanding of this phenomenon. The study also explicates critical knowledge gaps in the literature that could broaden the horizon of unethical leadership research. On the basis of these knowledge gaps, we develop potential research models that are well grounded in theory and capture the genesis of unethical leadership under our multi-level framework. Scholars and practitioners will find this study useful in understanding the occurrence, consequences and potential strategies to circumvent the negative effects of unethical leadership. (shrink)

Explaining the supervenience of the moral on the natural is, perhaps, the central metaphysical challenge for the non-naturalist. However, Scanlon (2014) and Fogal and Risberg (2020) have developed a strategy which purports to explain supervenience rather simply. Fogal and Risberg call it the 'Divide and Conquer' strategy. The key idea is to postulate explanatory moral principles linking the natural and the moral. The moral principles are metaphysically necessary, so trivially supervene on the natural. All other moral facts are determined by (...) the necessary moral principles and the natural facts, so they supervene on the natural too. -/- I argue that there are two versions of the Divide and Conquer strategy and both fail. The first strategy doesn’t give an adequate explanation of supervenience because it doesn't properly identify what makes a difference to the holding of supervenience. The second perhaps does give an adequate explanation of supervenience, but only by introducing something similarly puzzling that needs explanation. -/- Consequently, non-naturalists need additional metaphysical machinery to develop their view -- just appealing to moral principles or metaphysical laws won't do the job. (shrink)

Should nonprejudiced reproducers genetically select embryos for light skin under background conditions of racism and colourism, given that darker skin will be disadvantageous for their child? Many intuit that there are strong moral reasons not to select light skin in these contexts. I argue that existing procreative principles cannot adequately account for this judgement. Instead, I argue that a more compelling rationale for this intuition is that such selection completes an instance of race or colour injustice. Given this, I propose (...) a new, complementary principle—Procreative Justice—which holds that reproducers have strong pro tanto moral reasons to avoid completing race and colour injustices via their selection choices. While these reasons may be overridden by competing considerations, they nonetheless continue to exert normative force. (shrink)

After China, India has the most skewed sex ratio at birth. These two Asian countries account for about 90 to 95% of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million missing female births annually, worldwide, due to gender-biased sex selection. To understand this extreme discrimination against girls, this article examines the gendered biopolitics embedded in population policies, new sex selection technologies, and in the social reproduction of patriarchal society. The ethical consequences of advanced reproductive technologies, which remove the moral turpitude around gender-based (...) sex selection by reformulating it into a “modern”, “scientific” endeavour, facilitating the rise of “missing girls”, make this an issue of gender justice, as noted by the World Population Report 2020. This article argues that unpacking gendered biopolitics within the household is crucial to understanding the reproduction of son preference and daughter aversion since it is here that reproduction and parenthood are subjected to biopolitical governance. We discuss how “biosocial” strategies of the household aimed at producing the “desired” and “right” family of more sons at the cost of daughters are operationalized through women’s bodies with a view to family mobility. While women and girls continue to bear the burden and costs of social reproduction that lie at the heart of the patriarchal capitalist system of accumulation, a perusal of more recent studies suggests the beginning of an equalizing trend of parental investments, especially in the health and education of daughters who are “allowed” to be born. We suggest that familial enhancement of girls’ human capital can help as a means of developing girls’ capabilities and agency, enhancing their power in the biopolitics of the family and increasing their “bio-value” in parents’ eyes. (shrink)

Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of life-world as (...) composed of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not. The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’ ‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully evade Rorty’s naive realism and Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection. (shrink)

The concept of morality underpins the moral responsibility that not only depends on the outward practices (or ‘output,’ in the case of humanoid robots) of the agents but on the internal attitudes (‘input’) that rational and responsible intentioned beings generate. The primary question that has initiated the extensive debate, i.e., ‘Can humanoid robots be moral?’, stems from the normative outlook where morality includes human conscience and socio-linguistic background. This paper advances the thesis that the conceptions of morality and creativity interplay (...) with linguistic human beings instead of non-linguistic humanoid robots, as humanoid robots are indeed docile automata that cannot be responsible for their actions. To eradicate human ethics in order to make way for humanoid robot ethics highlights the moral actions and adequacy that hinges the myth of creative agency and self-dependency, which a humanoid robot can scarcely express. (shrink)

Abstract Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of life-world (...) as composed of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not. The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’ ‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully evade Rorty’s naive realism (structured by linguistic representation) and Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ (a kind of minimalist ethics depending on solidarity) respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection. (shrink)

The nominal ground that entwines human beings and animal behaviours is unwilling to admit moral valuing as a non-human act. Just to nail it down explicitly, two clauses ramify the moral conscience of human beings as follows: a) Can non-humans be moral beings?, b) Unconscious animal behaviours go beyond any moral judgments. My approach aims to rebuff these anthropomorphic clauses by justifying animals’ moral beings and animals’ moral behaviours from a meta-ethical stance. A meta-ethical outlook may enable an analysis of (...) ethical and normative views through the limit of moral motives and reasoning. Animals’ sense of moral motives and their apparatus of getting involved in moral acts cannot be compared with human actions. In human moral engagement, we abide by moral paradigmatic theories and their diversified attitudes that could have conceptual and linguistic use in our societal discourses. However, animals’ intentional apparatus may have the propensity to choose an act following the moral consequences (care, utility, responsibility, etc.) in their life-forms. (shrink)

The concept of morality underpins the moral responsibility that not only depends on the outward practices (or ‘output’, in the case of humanoid robots) of the agents but on the internal attitudes (‘input’) that rational and responsible intentioned beings generate. The primary question that has initiated extensive debate, i.e. ‘Can humanoid robots be moral?’, stems from the normative outlook where morality includes human conscience and socio-linguistic background. This paper advances the thesis that the conceptions of morality and creativity interplay with (...) linguistic human beings instead of non-linguistic humanoid robots, as humanoid robots are indeed docile automata that cannot be responsible for their actions. To eradicate human ethics in order to make way for humanoid robot ethics highlights the moral actions and adequacy that hinges the myth of creative agency and self-dependency, which a humanoid robot can scarcely express. -/- . (shrink)

The translation of the Guru Granth Sahib (GGS), or Sikh ‘scripture’, within the discourse of (European) colonial/modernity was enacted by the use of hermeneutics—which oversaw the shift from the openness of praxis to the closure of representation and knowledge. Such a shift demoted certain indigenous interpretive frames, wherein the GGS is assumed to enunciate an excess that far transcends the foreign demand to fix the text’s ‘call’ into singular meanings (beyond time), but rather transforms the hermeneutic desire into a process (...) of learning (Sikhi) through multiple meanings (in time). Thus the GGS is not translated according to a particular life-world, but actively transforms the life-world of those that respond to its excessive call. How should hermeneutics be reformed in this case? If the GGS as text demands interpretation, then the text as Guru demands engagement, and together they would necessarily call forth a radicalization of hermeneutics via a certain poetic reticence to all philosophical messengers. (shrink)

Background As noise brings great error in the analysis of metallographic images, an adaptive weighted mean filtering method proposed to overcome the shortcomings of the standard mean filtering method. Methods The method used to detect the pulse noise points in the image, and then the modified mean method used to filter out the detected noise points. Patents on metallographic image processing have discussed for the development of the proposed methodology. Results It is shown that filter window can be filtered in (...) comparison with the conventional 3×3, 5×5 and 7×7 filt window to reduce noise detection and reduce the complexity of the weight calculation. Conclusion It can be concluded that this method can better protect the details of the image, has better filtering effect than the standard mean filtering, and its processing speed is faster than the median filtering of the large window, which has profound significance for the edge detection and processing of the metallographic image. (shrink)

This paper presents a method for the study of the influence of stability of a power transformer on the power system based on the vibration principle. Traditionally, the EMD and EEMD algorithms are employed to test the box vibration signal data of the power transformer under three working conditions. The proposed method utilizes a partial EMD screening along with MPEEMD method for the online monitoring of power transformer. A complete online monitoring system is designed by using the STM32 processor and (...) LabVIEW system. The proposed system is compared with EMD and EEMD algorithms in terms of the number of IMFs obtained by decomposition, maximum correlation coefficient, and mean square error. The inherent mode correlation, when compared with the mean square error of the reconstructed signal, shows that the reconstruction error of MPEEMD algorithm is 4.762×10−15 which is better than the traditional EMD algorithm. It is observed from the results that the proposed method outperforms both EMD and EEMD algorithms. (shrink)

This article examines the development of a multidimensional, transnational feminist research approach from and within Uganda in relation to a high-profile case of domestic violence and femicide of a middle-class, upper-caste Indian migrant woman in Kampala in 1998. It explores indigenous Ugandan public and Ugandan Asian/indian community interpretations and the dynamics of cross-racial feminist mobilisation and protest that emerged in response to the Joshi-Sharma domestic violence case. In doing so, it advocates for a transnational feminist research approach from and within (...) Uganda and the Global South that works against the grain of nationalist and nativist biases in existing feminist scholarly trends. This approach lays bare power inequalities and internal tensions within and across racialised African and Asian communities, and thus avoids the romanticisation of cross-racial feminist African-Asian solidarities. (shrink)

In recent years, the network has become more complex, and the attacker’s ability to attack is gradually increasing. How to properly understand the network security situation and improve network security has become a very important issue. In order to study the method of extracting information about the security situation of the network based on cloud computing, we recommend the technology of knowledge of the network security situation based on the data extraction technology. It converts each received cyber security event into (...) a standard format that can be defined as multiple brochures, creating a general framework for the cyber security situation. According to the large nature of network security situation data, the Hadoop platform is used to extract aggregation rules, and perform model extraction, pattern analysis, and learning on a network security event dataset to complete network security situation rule mining, and establish a framework for assessing the state of network security. According to the results of the federal rule extraction, the level of network node security risk is obtained in combination with signal reliability, signal severity, resource impact, node protection level, and signal recovery factor. A simulation test is performed to obtain the intrusion index according to the source address of the network security alarm. Through the relevant experiments and analysis of the results, the attack characteristics obtained in this study were obtained after manually reducing the network security event in the 295 h window. The results show that after the security event is canceled, the corresponding window attack index decreases to 0, indicating that this method can effectively implement a network security situation awareness. The proposed technique allows you to accurately sense changes in network security conditions. (shrink)

The páramos of Boyacá in Colombia are earmarked for delimitation to prevent the expansion of the agricultural frontier and protect endemic flora that contribute to water provision for cities. A varied conservation toolbox will be used, including the creation of protected areas for re-wilding and the ‘sustainable’ transitioning of livelihoods identified as environmentally destructive. Agriculture and cattle livestock farming has been identified for transitioning. Despite the negative discourse related to livestock holding, this paper argues that small-scale agropastoralism contributes to re-peasantisation (...) and provides the foundations for an agrobiodiverse conservation approach. Agropastoralism facilitates re-peasantisation through strong socio-economic networks, interconnected communities, the solidarity economy, and self-management of natural resources. Whilst, agropastoral mobility spatially binds social networks across large and disconnected spaces. Mobility is also fundamental to dynamic land access and pasture management, as it prevents over-grazing. This exemplifies how resilient socio-economic networks and mobile production strategies could be harnessed for agrobiodiversity, instead of land sparing and other sedentary ‘green’ economies. This paper makes conceptual contributions to ‘autonomy’ in re-peasantisation by empirically demonstrating the importance of mobile and flexible systems of production. It also makes a novel methodological contribution in applying a spatial lens that further unpacks how movement across the páramos facilitates autonomy and re-peasantisation. These themes are explored using interview data from 53 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and small-scale agropastoralists from across the páramos and field observation. The paper concludes by recommending a harnessing of agropastoral knowledge, to potentiate agrobiodiversity, for a more socio-ecologically just approach to farming and conservation in the páramos. (shrink)

This paper discusses Kant’s prospect of ‘hope’ that entangles with interrelated epistemic terms like belief, faith, knowledge, etc. The first part of the paper illustrates the boundary of knowing in the light of a Platonic analysis to highlight the distinction between empiricism and rationalism. Kant’s notion of ‘transcendent metaphysical knowledge’, a path-breaking way to look at the metaphysical thought, can fit with the regulative principle that seems favoruable to the experience-centric knowledge. The second part of the paper defines ‘hope’ as (...) an interwoven part of belief, besides ‘hope’ as a component of ‘happiness' can persuade the future behaviours of the individuals. Revisiting Kant’s three categorizations of hopes (eschatological hope, political hope, and hope for the kingdom of ends), the paper traces out Kant’s good will as a ‘hope’ and his conception of humanity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to revisit how ‘acquaintance’ could bring about belief and how belief becomes knowledge in our language system due to the credential undertaking of truth, justification, evidence, and causal or conceptual preservation. My quest in this paper is to interrogate belief and the cessation of belief (I call this the ‘death of belief’) from the perspective of the doxastic approach of externalism and internalism in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. I will attempt to make sense (...) of the nominal appeal (an approach that conserves the process of continuing belief through evidence and conceptualization) to both of these ideas in a sophisticated manner. The linguistic form of using words seems allied to the context sensitivity of the speakers involved in social practices. A tripartite structure pivots the model of linguistic belief, where minds are causally entrenched in a world that stimulates conceptual or internal states, representing how objectivity works. The entanglements of concepts with pictures hinge on conceptual prerequisites to impact the world. (shrink)

This fictionalized script traces the contours of the conversation that seeks to fathom the crisis unleashed by the outbreak and global spread of the coronavirus and the ensuing anxieties created in our current social living. The scenario of deepened isolation of the self from the other is considered, and it is proposed that isolation, while an unavoidable requirement, does not mean it is some mental lassitude but rather may be seen as an enthusiastic concern toward recovering physical and mental wellbeing (...) of the larger communities concerned to control the possible avenues of transmission of the contagion. The conversation meanders around the issue of quarantine, its attraction or otherwise, and who benefits from this restriction, its effects on one’s mental constitution, etc. Philosophers have been known to isolate themselves in other contexts and situations give us a taste of what is to come in the dialogue to resist the calamity of the coronavirus and its grim effects that engulf the entire humanity. (shrink)