Logical Inconsistencies Research Articles

Critical interpretation of practical and legal conclusions on the lack of free will and moral responsibility

The article analyzes the concepts of moral responsibility and free will in their close relationship and looks into their essential characteristics and influence on the legal system. Logical inconsistency of the conclusions on moral inadmissibility of the functioning of criminal law and legal proceedings in case of no free will and hence moral responsibility is proved. Some alternative non-moral approaches to substantiation of legal institutions in a world without moral responsibility are outlined. The former consider that philosophy makes it possible to address the question of why man should be responsible for his actions. Legal systems are mainly supported by the thesis that free will is the social basis for imposing responsibility on man for his behavior. Freedom is the main personal social implication for criminal responsibility. An attempt is made to substantiate the illegitimacy of the conclusions regarding the internal contradiction in the functioning of legal systems in a world without moral responsibility. It is shown that not all legal systems are based on moral principles, especially in a world where moral responsibility is not expected in principle. Therefore, in the world lacking moral responsibility no guilt and accusations of injustice are unlawful.

Valuing health states: is the MACBETH approach useful for valuing EQ-5D-3L health states?

BackgroundQuality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) are a key outcome measure widely used within health technology assessment and health service research studies. QALYs combine quantity and quality of life, with quality of life calculations relying on the value of distinct health states. Such health states’ values capture the preferences of a population and have been typically built through numerical elicitation methods. Evidence points to these value scores being influenced by methods in use and individuals reporting cognitive difficulties in eliciting their preferences. Evidence from other areas has further suggested that individuals may prefer using distinct elicitation techniques and that this preference can be influenced by their numeracy. In this study we explore the use of the MACBETH (Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation Technique) non-numerical preference elicitation approach for health states’ evaluation.MethodsA new protocol for preference elicitation based on MACBETH (only requiring qualitative judgments) was developed and tested within a web survey format. A sample of the Portuguese general population (n=243) valued 25 EQ-5D-3L health states with the MACBETH protocol and with a variant of the time trade-off (TTO) protocol, for comparison purposes and for understanding respondents’ preference for distinct protocols and differences in inconsistent evaluations. Respondents answered to a short numeracy test, and basic socio-economic information collected.ResultsResults show that the mean values derived from MACBETH and the TTO variant are strongly correlated; however, there are substantial differences for several health states’ values. Large and similar numbers of logical inconsistencies were found in respondents’ answers with both methods. Participants with higher levels of numeracy according to the test preferred expressing value judgments with MACBETH, while participants with lower levels were mostly indifferent to both methods. Higher correlations between MACBETH and TTO variant evaluations were observed for individuals with higher numeracy.ConclusionResults suggest that it is worth researching the use of non-numerical preference elicitation methods. Numeracy tests more appropriate for preference elicitation when no explicit considerations of uncertainty are made need to be explored and used. Further behavioural research is needed to fully understand the potential for using these methods in distinct settings (e.g. in different evaluation contexts and in face-to-face and non-face-to-face environments), as well as to explore the effect of literacy on assessments and on respondents’ preferences.

Addressing Beliefs Surrounding Urban Sustainability: The Need for a Contextual Urban Model

While talking about practical advancement at city level, nearby administration is perhaps the main factor and can’t be avoided among the numerous significant angles; financial aspects, innovation, and climate, as metropolitan maintainability includes staggered administration and complex political elements. Utilizing the hypothesis of contextualism established by S. Pepper, this paper first and foremost considers the significance of ‘feasible’ and investigates the utilization and more extensive ramifications of the word ‘reasonable’ all through as conceived by contextualism. While featuring how metropolitan maintainability can be surveyed, this paper scrutinizes explicit strategies for evaluating metropolitan supportability. It endeavors to connect the basic way of thinking of contextualism to the idea of nearby administration as far as metropolitan administration. It then, at that point, investigates the disconnected part of these standards involving the city of Curitiba for instance. Anyway the model of the city of Curitiba demonstrated hard to survey, as there are excessively many variables to consider. It is felt that this contextual analysis is useful as a showing of the possible significance of the context oriented metropolitan model. We accept it impossible that this will be addressed soon, however it is critical to check out it and an answer for this logical inconsistency ought to be focused on.

Replacement and reasoning: a reliabilist account of epistemic defeat

In this paper, I present a solution to the problem that the need to accommodate the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses for reliabilism. Defeaters are supposed to remove justification for previously justified beliefs. According to standard process reliabilism, the justification of a belief depends on the reliability of a process that is already completed when a defeater for that belief is obtained. It is hard to see, then, how a defeater can affect reliabilist justification, if that justification, from the perspective of the defeater, lies wholly in the past. What is more, undercutting defeaters plausibly defeat by generating incompatibilities with higher-order propositions (Sturgeon in Philos Stud 169(1):105–118, 2014; Melis in Philos Stud 170(3):433–442, 2014). This is hard to integrate with reliabilism which explicitly denies higher-order conditions for justification. I argue that both of these phenomena can be accommodated by it via what I call the “Replacement Principle”: when a defeater is obtained, it generates either a logical incompatibility (in cases of rebutting defeat) or a doxastic incompatibility (in cases of undercutting defeat). The resulting tension is registered and initiates a reasoning process that compares the epistemic support for the defeater with that for the defeated belief. This process may replace the original reliable formation process as a doxastic base for the defeated belief. If the defeater is not given its due weight in the reasoning process, that process was unreliable and if the defeated belief is retained as a result, it will be unjustified. This is intuitively the right result. Since reasoning is reliable, only if it is rational, the account manages to capture the intuition that disregarding a defeater would be irrational without having to make rationality a condition for justification. Replacement is not only plausible on causal pictures of doxastic basing, but also required in order to allow for the possibility of belief reevaluation in general and is therefore not an ad hoc addition to reliabilism, but rather part of its inherent explanatory resources.

Knowledge-Based Error Detection in External Beam Physician Orders Using Association Rules

The physician orders for external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) are associated with top-level treatment decision parameters including prescription dose, number of treatment fractions, treatment modality, treatment positioning, image guidance, etc. Physician order errors manifest as wrong values of individual parameters or logical inconsistencies between multiple parameters, which are difficult to detect even to human experts without going through many data and documentations. The purpose of this work is to investigate an association rule based approach to error detection in physician orders. The goal is to catch those errors earlier so to avoid the costly re-simulation and re-planning. Clinical physician orders for patients who received EBRT treatments from 2008 to 2017 at author’s institution. A total of 3059 individual single-prescription orders for nine disease sites – brain, breast, lung, pelvic, pelvis, prostate, spine, TBI, extremely – were acquired. Each order includes disease attributes and prescription parameters. Seven disease attributes were considered as conditions - site, tumor stage, nodal stage, metastatic stage, intent, laterality and previous treatment. Errors were detected on the four prescription parameters - total dose, fractions, technique and modality. The a priori algorithm was employed to extract frequent item sets from the historical physician orders. The association rules were generated by arranging items in each frequent item set as antecedent items and consequent items. The active association rules were selected according to their support and confident scores. The error detection tool raises an error flag if a new physician order breaks any active association rules. 10 percent of physician orders were randomly chosen and errors (wrong values in prescription parameters) were added manually for testing the performance of the method. A total of 257 active association rules were selected on average for each individual disease sites. The mean values of true positive and false positive rates of error detection were 92.38% and 10.23% respectively for single-prescription cases of nine disease sites. The wrong value of individual physician order parameters and logical inconsistence between physician order parameters could be detected by applying association rules with high positive rate, which could be further improved by optimizing the association rule discovery algorithm. The association rules are human expert understandable and verifiable, and linked directly to historical physician orders. Association rule discovery algorithm can naturally handle physician orders with missing values existing in more than 50% physician orders. The approach supports incorporation into independent error detection tools for assisting manual double-checks on physician orders. The success of the method here also gives promise to further scaling to include patient setup parameters and all treatment sites.

“Looking for more Brazilian solutions”: Rhetorical Strategies against Ethnic Quotas in Brazilian Higher Education

Since the 1990s, Brazil has experienced a growing public debate about policies of ethnic affirmative action. The arguments invoked by the opponents of affirmative action quotas, expressed in scientific publications, the mass media and even manifestos, have been the subject of study in several research projects. In their analyses, these scholars have concluded that the the anti-quota arguments suffered from logical inconsistency, theoretical and methodological flaws or simple lack of empirical evidence. However, anti-quota rhetoric appears to persist seemingly unaffected by academic counter-arguments, if not in the academic debate, at least in public opinion. This paper argues that the persuasive power of anti-quota arguments derives from the strategic use of specific rhetorical strategies, based on time-proven classical speech imagery that foreground evidence and logic even where speculation and heuristics are the actual foundation. Using methods of Critical Discourse Analysis I will analyze a representative corpus of prominent public discourses against ethnic affirmative action quotas in order to demonstrate how rhetorical strategies are deployed in these texts, showing how they broadly mirror the proposition of a “Rhetoric of Reaction” (Hirschman 1991). These rhetorics, I argue, draw heavily on the myth of “racial democracy” combined with a long-standing national master-narrative of Brazilian exceptionalism, the combination of which masks racial animosity and defers policy action to support ethnic minorities.

Complex narrative systems and the minimisation of logical inconsistencies in narrative and dramatic writing

ABSTRACTDue to the large amount of multi-layered and hierarchically structured information, fundamental narrative dynamics and mechanisms, a screenplay, or any work of narrative for this matter, may be better understood if it is examined under the perspective of complex narrative systems (CNS). The notion of complex narrative systems is a mindset that attempts to explain a narrative system not by separating and analysing its parts individually but rather by examining the whole, the entire work of narrative. A screenplay is constituted of a large number of autonomous narrative components such as the story’s setting, structure, characters, their psychological motivations, needs and conflicts, and the interactions and interrelations between these characters. Such interactions are non-linear and underlie the screenplay’s emergent behaviour that can be understood as the derivative consequence of the holistic cause-and-effect sum of all its narrative parts. The interactions between the narrative components create dramatic conflict, the most fundamental property of drama, that in turn adds forward progression and direction to the screenplay. The characteristics of CNS describe the principles that allow a screenplay to function as such and explain why a screenplay is contextually larger than its individual narrative parts while it maintains its structural integrity, functional form and logical consistency throughout.

Quantitative Risk Analysis in Megaprojects Schedules: a critical comparison between the theoretical findings and the empirical evidence from a brazilian oil and gas company

Megaprojects are temporary endeavors that involve high investments and long term results, high degree of uncertainty and risks. The purpose of this article is to stablish a critical comparative analysis of the quantitative risk analysis process in megaproject schedules. The methodology includes a study of the scientific literature and the empirical evidence obtained from interviews with specialists of an oil and gas segment company. A systematic survey of the scientific literature was carried out in ISI Web of Science, Scopus and Scielo databases. The primary data collection was carried out through interviews with a sample of 10 professionals with high level of seniority. As results, the evidences indicate that there is restricted scientific literature on the subject in peer reviewed journals, which suggests an academic contribution of the present study. In addition, Monte Carlo simulation is the most frequent technique used in risk management of megaproject scheduling that provides precision to the probability of project completion data. Besides, it was observed an existence of subjectivities, such as the bias of experts, not judgment of the time estimates of activities, and gaps, such as an inconsistency of the logic of the schedules, no process of quantitative risk analysis. Finally, it was detected the need for training in risk management of hierarchical senior managers, as a way to contribute to the achievement of better results with the use of non-decision-making practice.

Some Problems with Scientific Relativism and Moral Realism

In its early development philosophy of science did not allow the possibility of a relativistic approach with regard to explanation of external phenomena. Relativism was seen as justified exclusively with regard to internal phenomena, for example, in the realm of moral and aesthetic judgment. In the realm of moral judgment, external realism functions as a necessary hypothesis, according to which our moral judgment and moral decisions have a real effect in the external world, for which we can be held responsible. A paradigm shift in the theory of science, inaugurated by Th. S. Kuhn, led to the rise of relativism with regard to judgment in the realm of external phenomena and specifically with regard to the validity of scientific theories. Critics of relativism do not take into account that it is not enough to point out the logical inconsistency of relativism. Most arguments for scientific justification of external realism are doomed to failure, because they do not take into account the role of the judgmental subject. In this article I will show that the role of “second nature” is significant not only for the constitution of moral realism, but also for the implementation of scientific naturalism.

Is incivility really tit-for-tat? Experienced and instigated incivility in dyadic relationships

In the nearly 20 years since Andersson and Pearson (1999) suggested workplace incivility occurs in “tit-for-tat” exchanges between employees, no empirical research has adequately captured the inherently dyadic nature of the construct. Rather, prior research has only studied incivility from the perspective of one dyad member. This misalignment between the levels of theory and method can lead to model misspecification, biased parameter estimates, logical inconsistencies, and inaccurate inferences. The present study therefore examined workplace incivility in the context of dyadic relationships. Using dyads as the unit of analysis in a sample of employees at a restaurant chain, we find that experienced and instigated incivility exhibit substantial variation within and between dyads, that the two are related within dyads after accounting for individual differences in experienced and instigated incivility, and that the within-dyad relationship between experienced and instigated incivility is moderated by perceived incivility norms. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Negation as Cancellation, Connexive Logic, and qLPm


 
 
 In this paper, we shall consider the so-called cancellation view of negation and the inferential role of contradictions. We will discuss some of the problematic aspects of negation as cancellation, such as its original presentation by Richard and Valery Routley and its role in motivating connexive logic. Furthermore, we will show that the idea of inferential ineffectiveness of contradictions can be conceptually separated from the cancellation model of negation by developing a system we call qLPm, a combination of Graham Priest’s minimally inconsistent Logic of Paradox with q-entailment (quasi-entailment) as introduced by Grzegorz Malinowski. 
 
 

Estimating a Preference-Based Single Index Measuring the Quality-of-Life Impact of Self-Management for Diabetes.

Self-management is becoming increasingly important in diabetes but is neglected in conventional preference-based measures. The objective of this paper was to generate health state utility values for a novel classification system measuring the quality-of-life impact of self-management for diabetes, which can be used to generate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). A large online survey was conducted using a discrete choice experiment (DCE), with duration as an additional attribute, on members of the UK general population ( n = 1,493) to elicit values for health (social limitations, mood, vitality, hypoglycaemia) and non-health (stress, hassle, control, support) aspects of self-management in diabetes. The data were modelled using a conditional fixed-effects logit model and utility estimates were anchored on the one to zero (full health to dead) scale. The model produced significant and consistent coefficients, with one logical inconsistency and 3 insignificant coefficients for the milder levels of some attributes. The anchored utilities ranged from 1 for the best state to -0.029 for the worst state (meaning worse than dead) defined by the classification system. The results presented here can potentially be used to generate utility values capturing the day to day impact of interventions in diabetes on both health and self-management. These utility values can potentially be used to generate QALYs for economic models of the cost-effectiveness of interventions in diabetes.

How to Repair Inconsistency in OWL 2 DL Ontology Versions?

Semantic modeling knowledge formalisms, such as ontologies, have to follow the continuous evolution and changes of knowledge. However, ontology changes should never affect its consistency. Ontology needs to remain in a consistent state along its whole engineering process. In the literature, most of approaches check/repair ontology inconsistencies in an a posteriori way. In this paper, an a priori inconsistency approach was proposed to generate consistent OWL 2 DL ontology versions. It relies on the OWL 2 DL change kits, which anticipate inconsistencies upon each change request on an ontology version. The proposed approach predicts potential inconsistencies, provides an a priori repair action and applies the required changes. Consistency rules were defined and used to check logical inconsistencies, but also syntactical invalidities and style issues. A protégé plugin was implemented to validate our approach.

A Logical Analysis of Framing for Specifications with Pure Method Calls

For specifying and reasoning about object-based programs, it is often attractive for contracts to be expressed using calls to pure methods. It is useful for pure methods to have contracts, including read effects, to support local reasoning based on frame conditions. This leads to puzzles such as the use of a pure method in its own contract. These ideas have been explored in connection with verification tools based on axiomatic semantics, guided by the need to avoid logical inconsistency, and focusing on encodings that cater for first-order automated provers. This article adds pure methods and read effects to region logic, a first-order program logic that features frame-based local reasoning and provides modular reasoning principles for end-to-end correctness. Modular reasoning is embodied in a proof rule for linking a module’s method implementations with a client that relies on the method contracts. Soundness is proved with respect to conventional operational semantics and uses an extensional (i.e, relational) interpretation of read effects. Applicability to tools based on SMT solvers is demonstrated through machine-checked verification of examples. The developments in this article can guide the implementations of linking as used in modular verifiers and serve as a basis for studying observationally pure methods and encapsulation.

Estimating a Dutch Value Set for the Pediatric Preference-Based CHU9D Using a Discrete Choice Experiment with Duration

ObjectiveThis article presents the development of the Dutch value set for the Child Health Utility 9D, a pediatric preference-based measure of quality of life that can be used to generate quality-adjusted life-years. MethodsA large online survey was conducted using a discrete choice experiment including a duration attribute with adult members of the Netherlands general population (N = 1276) who were representative in terms of age, gender, marital status, employment, education, and region. Respondents were asked which of two health states they prefer, where each health state was described using the nine dimensions of the Child Health Utility 9D (worried, sad, pain, tired, annoyed, school work/homework, sleep, daily routine, able to join in activities) and duration. The data were modeled using conditional logit with robust standard errors to produce utility values for every health state described by the Child Health Utility 9D. ResultsThe majority of the dimension level coefficients were monotonic, leading to a decrease in utility as severity increases. There was, however, evidence of some logical inconsistencies, particularly for the school work/homework dimension. The value set produced was based on the ordered model and ranges from –0.568 for the worst state to 1 for the best state. ConclusionThe valuation of the Child Health Utility 9D using online discrete choice experiment with duration with adult members of the Dutch general population was feasible and produced a valid model for use in cost utility analysis. Normative questions are raised around the valuation of pediatric preference-based measures, including the appropriate perspective for imagining hypothetical pediatric health states.

Theaters of war: Tracing the strange careers of Shina No Yoru in the military contact zones of the Pacific, 1937–1954

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which multiple traditions of camp shows and the overlapping and relational layers of Imperial Japan and U.S. presence in Korea shaped Korean entertainers’ lives after 1945, producing their idiosyncratic performances in response to rapid shifts in Korea’s relations with Japan and the United States in the 1940s–1950s. When the United States sought to reposition Japan at the top of the newly emerging American hegemonic order of Asian countries, Korean entertainers who served the Imperial Japanese Army a few months earlier found themselves performing for American soldiers. The stage of the Korean native camp shows became a “strange and exotic” yet “familiar and even comforting” place where inconsistent logics, such as Imperial Japan’s pan-Asian ideology and American Orientalist fantasy, mingled. Under the complicated legacies of overlapping militarization and colonization in Korea, militarization has constituted a structuring force that enabled Korean women camp show entertainers generating their hybrid performance styles in ironies, contradictions, and complexities. Building on postcolonial theorists’ notion of hybridity, I argue that Korean entertainers’ performances were being shaped or negotiated in contact with different audiences and expectations as well as Korean entertainers attempted to navigate the acceptable ground of performances and womanhood in the constantly changing political and ideological environment.

NOTAS PARA UNA SEMIÓTICA DEL TEXTO YIHADISTA

El terrorismo yihadista se apoya en un discurso religioso fundamentalista que justifica el martirio y el asesinato de inocentes. Dicho discurso ha sido deslegitimado básicamente por dos vías: (a) demostración de su falsedad y (b) demostración de su inconsistencia lógica. No obstante, para entender el mantenimiento de su fortaleza doctrinaria (pese a su evidente carencia de legitimidad), esta ponencia propone introducir una tercera perspectiva: el análisis semiótico. Por esta vía, el discurso fundamentalista se presenta como un mecanismo retórico-literario que permite a su destinatario atribuir un sentido ético-religioso a prácticas terroristas. Se presentan ejemplos de análisis semiótico del discurso de la Yihad islámica. Las potencialidades de este enfoque son: (a) desarrollo de una metodología científica para determinar la autoría de proclamas terroristas, a través de la elaboración de una huella digital semántica, (b) desarrollo de un modelo de retórica-pensamiento yihadista, que permita establecer semejanzas y diferencias con el discurso y prácticas de grupos antisistémicos latinoamericanos, (c) mejorar tácticas para la guerra de la información contrainsurgente.

Reply to “Critical Comments on the Paper ‘On the Logical Inconsistency of the Special Theory of Relativity’”

It has been critically argued by V. A. Leus (Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, Novosibirsk, Russia) that in my proof that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is logically inconsistent and therefore false, I violated the basic tenets of Special Relativity and foisted an alternative theory upon Einstein’s. A careful study of the critical analysis reveals however a failure to address the key arguments I adduced to prove Special Relativity logically inconsistent, and a concomitant invocation of Einstein’s theory to try to argue that my analysis is incorrect because it does not concur with Einstein. There is therefore no proof advanced of any alleged error in my analysis. In my paper I did not introduce an alternative theory. The aforementioned critical paper affords opportunity in rebuttal to amplify the invalidity of A. Einstein’s tacit assumption, in constructing the Special Theory of Relativity, that systems of clock-synchronised stationary observers consistent with Lorentz Transformation can be mathematically constructed. Since such systems of observers have in fact no mathematical existence the Special Theory of Relativity is logically inconsistent. It is therefore invalid. The consequences for physics, astronomy, and cosmology, are significant.

“Looking for more Brazilian solutions”: Rhetorical Strategies against Ethnic Quotas in Brazilian Higher Education

Since the 1990s, Brazil has experienced a growing public debate about policies of ethnic affirmative action. The arguments invoked by the opponents of affirmative action quotas, expressed in scientific publications, the mass media and even manifestos, have been the subject of study in several research projects. In their analyses, these scholars have concluded that the the anti-quota arguments suffered from logical inconsistency, theoretical and methodological flaws or simple lack of empirical evidence. However, anti-quota rhetoric appears to persist seemingly unaffected by academic counter-arguments, if not in the academic debate, at least in public opinion. This paper argues that the persuasive power of anti-quota arguments derives from the strategic use of specific rhetorical strategies, based on time-proven classical speech imagery that foreground evidence and logic even where speculation and heuristics are the actual foundation. Using methods of Critical Discourse Analysis I will analyze a representative corpus of prominent public discourses against ethnic affirmative action quotas in order to demonstrate how rhetorical strategies are deployed in these texts, showing how they broadly mirror the proposition of a “Rhetoric of Reaction” (Hirschman 1991). These rhetorics, I argue, draw heavily on the myth of “racial democracy” combined with a long-standing national master-narrative of Brazilian exceptionalism, the combination of which masks racial animosity and defers policy action to support ethnic minorities.

Value Chains: Production Upstreamness and Downstreamness Revisited

Measures devised to quantify value chain position have been used increasingly in recent years. While the constructs underlying these measures are meaningful, this paper identifies an overlooked implementation problem. Proposed algorithms have been applied as though the underlying data represent flows. Implementation data are drawn from modern input-output accounting frameworks that recognize secondary production explicitly. Un-adjusted Use matrices are not conventional flows matrices because they do not identify the industries from which commodities originate. We demonstrate logical inconsistencies that arise, provide correct flow matrix formulations for upstreamness and downstreamness measures, and present empirical comparisons of correct and incorrect formulations.