Logical Difficulties Research Articles

Life as category of the humanities

On the basis of concepts of various researchers in article the analysis of a phenomenon life from a position of the humanities is given. The author allocates problems which thinkers through the appeal to this concept tried to solve, logical difficulties of the conceptual image of life are shown, fundamental categories for definition of life are allocated, the objective structures displaying life are designated. Work is guided by Diltey, Gusserl, Heidegger, Zimmel, Spengler's concepts, Ortega-and-Gasseta.

Einstein’s 1905 Paper on E=mc2

It is well-known that Einstein’s first paper on E=mc2 as published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 is problematic in that it suffers from the error of circular reasoning. This means that it uses as one of its premises a statement which is equivalent to the conclusion of the paper, namely, that E=mc2. This difficulty with the paper has been pointed out by many writers including Max Planck, Herbert Ives, Max Jammer and also biographers of Einstein including Gerald Holton and Arthur I. Miller. Unfortunately, the derivation is repeated today as being correct without any mention of the above criticisms of it. In view of this it seems to us worthwhile to have a clear and as simple as possible explanation of the logical difficulties associated with Einstein’s 1905 derivation, and it is to this end that this paper is written. Herewith we present a very simple treatment of the problem which makes absolutely clear the logical difficulties in Einstein’s first published work on E=mc2. KEYWORDS: History of Science; Origins of Special Relativity

Testing for noninferiority of binomial distributions referring to a modified equivalence region with piecewise linear boundary

In testing for noninferiority of two binomial distributions, the hypothesis formulation most commonly considered defines equivalence in terms of a constant bound to the difference of the two parameters. In order to avoid some basic logical difficulty entailed in this formulation we use an equivalence region whose boundary has fixed vertical distance from the diagonal for all values of the reference responder rate above some cutoff point and coincides left from this point with the line joining it with the origin. For the corresponding noninferiority hypothesis we derive and compare two different testing procedures. The first one is based on an objective Bayesian decision rule. The other one is obtained through combining the score tests for noninferiority with respect to the difference and the ratio of the two proportions, respectively, by means of the intersection–union principle. Both procedures are extensively studied by means of exact computational methods.

Emmanuel Levinas: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Art

This article draws attention to the subject of art in Levinas’s thinking through consideration of his philosophical language, which is aided by images, metaphors, and idioms of art. The primary image that will accompany our discussion throughout this article is the image of art as shadow, which Levinas incorporates into the title of the essay which he devotes to the subject of art: “Reality and Its Shadow”. Thinking about art from the perspective of Levinas means thinking about image and essence, about which is visible before us and which we cannot see, and about the different ways in which art can express itself. Levinas’s theory of interpretation is grounded in and guided by the field of ethics and addresses the ethical aspects of interpretation. Levinas approaches the discourse of interpretation not out of naivete but rather based on a deep understanding of the field of hermeneutics, with all its shortcomings and challenges. Thinking of hermeneutics from an ethical perspective is no mere addition to the discussion but the very crux of the matter. An attempt to understand interpretation as an act of exposing the truth encounters serious philosophical and logical difficulties, whether we are seeking to discover the intention of the artist, the intent of a specific work of art, or a hidden form within the work itself. The engagement with Levinas’s theory of hermeneutics, however, raises a different question which is the focus of this article: Can Levinas’s theory of interpretation be applied to the realm of artistic creation, and if so, how? This question is sharpened by the difficulties that Levinas himself poses to his readers by designating art as the “shadow” of reality and drawing attention to the egoistic dimension of the artistic act.

A social reproduction approach to depreciation

It is my theme to prove that the collaboration of depreciation procedure and banking is indispensable to keep social reproduction. My proof is carried out by developing the part 3 of volume II of Capital. This part takes up the problems of social reproduction. There the case of simple reproduction is explained in detail, but in the explanation of the reproduction on an expanded scale you must meet a logical difficulty caused by the inconsistency of depreciation and renewal of fixed capitals. However, the schema of reproduction must have no contradiction. How to solve? In this article, the difficulty can be solved by collecting depreciation fund and distributing them socially. In Soviet and China, before the banking system was established, finance department in government would distribute fund to national companies for plant and collect depreciation fund with profit. It looked like a mystery for our capitalistic system. My paper can also make clear the reason why they adopted a strange accounting procedure.

Machine Wars: Machina Humeana

The main goal of the article is to reconstruct the conceptual bases of the original sociological project contained in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. The core of Humean sociology is a meticulously designed doctrine of passions. The foci of the Humean doctrine of passions are the questions of influences observed between the emotional component of human nature and the multiple forms of human actions. According to David Hume, the faculty of imagination, which operates on ideas, is not by itself able to supply a set of regular and uniform practices for an agent. The real foundations for any agent’s habitual form of action are always emotions and passions. The influences of emotions and passions on an agent have various natures: emotions as the primary impressions (the impressions of sensation) initiate actions performed by an agent, and passions, as secondary impressions (the impressions of reflection), put these activities into a regular and uniform shape. These very passions define the nature and structure of an agent’s habits, avoiding the traditional logical difficulties in solving the riddle of induction. A habit does not arise as a simple result from the multiple performances of these or that actions, but it is formed by predilections of an agent of activity. Against the backgrounds of a burgeoning interest in contemporary social sciences and a variety of practice-oriented theories and concepts, Humean sociology finds a new theoretical practicality, demonstrating the strength of its arguments and the ability to become a new important source of conceptual intuitions in the social sciences.

Acquiring English as a second language via print: The task for deaf children

Only a minority of profoundly deaf children read at age-level. We contend this reflects cognitive and linguistic impediments from lack of exposure to a natural language in early childhood, as well as the inherent difficulty of learning English only through the written modality. Yet some deaf children do acquire English via print. The current paper describes a theoretical model of how children could, in principle, acquire a language via reading and writing. The model describes stages of learning which represent successive, conceptual insights necessary for second/foreign language learning via print. Our model highlights the logical difficulties present when one cannot practice a language outside of reading/writing, such as the necessity of translating to a first language, the need for explicit instruction, and difficulty that many deaf children experience in understanding figurative language. Our model explains why learning to read is often a protracted process for deaf children and why many fail to make progress after some initial success. Because language acquisition is thought to require social interaction, with meaning cued by extralinguistic context, the ability of some deaf individuals to acquire language through print represents an overlooked human achievement worthy of greater attention by cognitive scientists.

A Gaussian Markov random field approach to convergence analysis

Spatial models have been widely applied in the context of growth regressions with spatial spillovers usually modelled by simultaneous autoregressions (SAR). Although largely used, such a class of models present some logical difficulties connected with the error behaviour, the lack of identifiability of the model parameters and their substantive interpretation. To overcome these logical pitfalls, in this paper we introduce a new specification of regional growth regressions by applying multivariate Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs). We discuss the theoretical properties of the proposed model and show some empirical results on the economic growth pattern of 254 NUTS-2 European regions in the period 1992–2006. We show that the proposed GMRF model is able to capture the complexity of the phenomenon including the possibility of estimating site-specific convergence parameters which may highlight clustering of regions and spatial heterogeneities in the speed of convergence.

The Backus-Gilbert method and their minimum-norm solution

This paper has two objectives. One is to review the Backus-Gilbert (BG) method. Backus and Gilbert investigate continuous inverse problems in a radially symmetric earth using an approach completely different from that of standard inversion methods. If [Formula: see text] is an earth property of interest, the BG method provides average values of [Formula: see text] over some radial intervals. If an interval [Formula: see text] is relatively short and centered near a particular radius [Formula: see text], the BG average will be a local average of [Formula: see text] near [Formula: see text] with a resolving length of [Formula: see text]. Backus and Gilbert also introduce the concept of trade-off between resolution and error, which is essential in inverse theory regardless of the inversion method. In spite of its importance, inverse theory texts neither describe the BG method in full nor show how to apply it in all its generality. Because the three papers that introduce the BG method are mathematically difficult, this paper provides background material and a detailed derivation of the method, as well as two completely worked-out synthetic 1D examples. In addition, the application of the method to disciplines other than solid-earth geophysics is discussed. The second objective is to derive the minimum-norm solution for the continuous case, also introduced by Backus and Gilbert. Their derivation is little known, and it is completely different from a better known, simpler derivation that has some logical difficulties. The minimum-norm solution lacks a constraint that the BG averages have, which may lead to results affected by significant error. To address this problem, a constrained minimum-norm solution is derived here. The two examples for the BG method were used to compute minimum-norm solutions. Interestingly, these examples show that the BG averages can be closer to the true values than the corresponding minimum-norm solutions, although these results should not be considered general.

Who is Presumed Innocent of What by Whom?

The article analyses the components of the presumption of innocence and tries to clarify some of the conceptual and logical difficulties surrounding the notion of ‘innocence’ and the structure of legal presumptions. It is argued that all conceivable literal interpretations of the maxim make little or no sense, and that the presumptions form is, as such, devoid of original content: presumptions do not explain nor justify anything but are auxiliary norms which refer to the legal consequences spelled out in other norms. Therefore, the presumption of innocence can be used to express any kind of requirement and standard for the criminal process and the treatment of suspect citizens only in a tautological, albeit rhetorically forceful, way. This instrumental use of the presumption of innocence is theoretically without merit but can be practically beneficial as long as there is no developed system of fundamental rights and protections of individual freedoms in a given legal order. Finally, a functional understanding of the presumption of innocence is proposed which gives it an original, though limited field of application as a guarantee of the procedure itself, in particular of the openness of the outcome.

Anomalous experiences, psi and functional neuroimaging

Anomalous experiences, psi and functional neuroimaging

Логические и практические трудности многомерного подхода к измерению религиозности

The article is dedicated to analysis of difficulties arising from applying multidimensional approach to religiosity. Those difficulties are divided into logical and practical ones. Logical difficulties are connected with the absence of clear base (self-evident, theoretical or empirical) prescribing the usage of one set of scales or another and the framework of such usage. Practical difficulties are explained in context of social research practice where multidimensional scaling of religiosity is eventually non-applicable nowadays. Conclusion made regards the advantage of unidimensional measurement.

Logical Difficulty from Combining Counterfactuals in the GHZ-Bell Theorems

In eliminating the fair sampling assumption, the Greenberger, Horne, Zeilinger (GHZ) theorem is believed to confirm Bell's historic conclusion that local hidden variables are inconsistent with the results of quantum mechanics. The GHZ theorem depends on predicting the results of sets of measurements of which only one may be performed. In the present paper, the non-commutative aspects of these unperformed measurements are critically examined. Classical examples and the logic of the GHZ construction are analyzed to demonstrate that combined counterfactual results of non-commuting operations are in general logically inconsistent with performed measurement sequences whose results depend on non-commutation. The Bell theorem is also revisited in the light of this result. It is concluded that negative conclusions regarding local hidden variables do not follow from the GHZ and Bell theorems as historically reasoned.

Is Corporate Law 'Private' (and Why Does it Matter)?

This paper examines and challenges the dominant academic portrayal of Anglo-American corporate law as an aspect of ‘private’ or facilitative law, and argues for a re-characterisation of the subject that reflects the centrality of public regulation to its core dynamics. In this regard, the paper represents part of a larger project aimed at highlighting the limitations of the popular contractarian theory of corporate law, which essentially seeks to present corporate law rules as the endogenous outcome of private contractual processes rather than regulatory state interventionism. The first part of the paper explains how the particular way in which an area of law (including corporate law) is characterised academically is of paramount importance to its future development, by establishing the core descriptive and normative parameters thereof. The second part explores the purported ‘privity’ (or ‘privateness’) of corporate law as it is most commonly understood and taught within the Anglo-American environment, and demonstrates the important normative implications that tend to follow from this position. The third part highlights how the widespread presence of mandatory and irreversible corporate law rules in the Anglo-American environment poses a difficult empirical challenge for those who seek to present corporate law as a principally contractual, rather than regulatory, phenomenon. The fourth and fifth parts of the paper look at the various ways in which proponents of the contractarian paradigm have sought to rationalise the regulatory dimensions of corporate law in a way that actually affirms, rather than undermines, the purported ‘contractualness’ (and thus 'privateness') of the subject matter. Particular attention is devoted to the controversial ‘market mimicking’ rationalisation of regulatory state interventionism in corporate law, which essentially seeks to portray mandatory rules as a publicly-provided embodiment of what the relevant contracting parties (i.e. shareholders and managers) would have bargained for had they been afforded the opportunity to do so. The sixth part of the paper explains the logical difficulties with this claim, and the final part concludes by highlighting the principal normative implications of the paper’s key finding – in short, that Anglo-American corporate law is at root an undeniably public phenomenon, whose innate regulatory dimensions cannot readily be explained away by recourse to contractarian logic.

Reasoning abilities in primary school: A pilot study on poor achievers vs. normal achievers in computer game tasks

This paper presents the results of preliminary research on the assessment of reasoning abilities in primary school poor achievers vs. normal achievers using computer game tasks. Subjects were evaluated by means of cognitive assessment on logical abilities and academic skills. The aim of this study is to better understand the relationship between school performance and logical reasoning and to analyze the major cognitive abilities underpinning digital games. The study also considers emotional and behavioral aspects through individual observation of poor achievers. The results point out higher logical difficulties in the target group compared with controls, supposedly related to working memory capacity and attention control.

Naive Modus Ponens

The paper is concerned with a logical difficulty which Lionel Shapiro’s deflationist theory of logical consequence (as well as the author’s favoured, non-deflationist theory) gives rise to. It is argued that Shapiro’s non-contractive approach to solving the difficulty, although correct in its broad outlines, is nevertheless extremely problematic in some of its specifics, in particular in its failure to validate certain intuitive rules and laws associated with the principle of modus ponens. An alternative non-contractive theory is offered which does not suffer from the same problem.

Estimación del valor del regadío a partir del precio de la tierra

In this paper, we estimate the value of irrigated land in the province of Leon (Spain) using land prices (irrigated and non irrigated) for two different uses (crop production and pasture) in ten different districts. The value of benefits associated with irrigation can be estimated by comparing the price of an irrigated plot of land with a similar plot of non irrigated land. The logical difficulty of finding these two similar (except for water) plots of land can be overcome using regression analysis where the effect of irrigation on land prices can be estimated after controlling for other differences in the plots of land analyzed. In the present paper, using an econometric model, we estimate the average prices associated with irrigated and non irrigated land. The difference among these average prices is an estimate of the value of irrigation. The results of this paper can be used in the analysis of new irrigation projects.

Financial Crisis, Social Pathologies and 'Generalised Perversion': Questioning Žižek's Diagnosis of the Times

Slavoj Zizek's work has been highly influential in the formulation of an emerging consensus among Lacanian social researchers, that we live in a society of generalised perversion whose initial fruits are the corrosion of democracy and the recent financial crisis. This position rests upon a notion of modern subjectivity that connects ‘commodity fetishism’ with clinical perversion in a pathological configuration, so that social theoretical identification of crisis tendencies, evaluative language about moral problems and diagnostic categories from the Lacanian clinic can be combined in a single figure. In this article, we question the series of conceptual links that constitute this position, tracing them from Zizek’s critique in his short work on the global financial crisis and his broader restatement of this analysis in the recent Living in the End Times, through the moment of his announcement of the notion of ‘generalised perversion’ in The Ticklish Subject, all the way back to fundamental propositions outlined in his earliest work. Our argument progresses through three claims. First, we show in the evolution of this position that it leads Zizek to equivocate in his diagnosis of contemporary society between two mutually exclusive categories (‘psychosis’ and ‘perversion’), indicating an antinomy in his work that is resolved in favour of ‘generalised perversion’ on empirical, not logical, grounds. Secondly, we offer a critical resolution of the antinomy through a critique of what we argue is Zizek’s mistaken over-extension of psychoanalytic reason beyond its legitimate scope of application. Finally, we point to some of the political implications of the way that Zizek speculatively resolves his logical difficulties, by analysing the consequences of his claim that generalised social perversion - the problem to be solved - involves a dethroning of the communal ego ideal. A communitarian streak, implicit in the potential conflation of moral denunciation with psychoanalytic diagnosis that the rhetoric of ‘perversion’ invokes, runs through Zizek’s work on capitalism, we propose in conclusion.

Hierarchical web resources retrieval by exploiting Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis

In recent years, knowledge structuring is assuming important roles in several real world applications such as decision support, cooperative problem solving, e-commerce, Semantic Web and, even in planning systems. Ontologies play an important role in supporting automated processes to access information and are at the core of new strategies for the development of knowledge-based systems. Yet, developing an ontology is a time-consuming task which often needs an accurate domain expertise to tackle structural and logical difficulties in the definition of concepts as well as conceivable relationships. This work presents an ontology-based retrieval approach, that supports data organization and visualization and provides a friendly navigation model. It exploits the fuzzy extension of the Formal Concept Analysis theory to elicit conceptualizations from datasets and generate a hierarchy-based representation of extracted knowledge. An intuitive graphical interface provides a multi-facets view of the built ontology. Through a transparent query-based retrieval, final users navigate across concepts, relations and population.

Reviewing the logic of self-deception

AbstractI argue that framing the issue of motivated belief formation and its subsequent social gains in the language of self-deception raises logical difficulties. Two such difficulties are that (1) in trying to provide an evolutionary motive for viewing self-deception as a mechanism to facilitate other-deception, the ease and ubiquity of self-deception are undermined, and (2) because after one has successfully deceived oneself, what one communicates to others, though untrue, is not deceptive, we cannot say that self-deception evolved in order to facilitate the deception of others.