Main Claim Research Articles

System Science Can Relax the Tension Between Data and Theory

The actual hype around machine learning (ML) methods has pushed the old epistemic struggle between data-driven and theory-driven scientific styles well beyond the academic realm. The potential consequences of the widespread adoption of ML in scientific work have fueled a harsh debate between opponents predicting the decay of basic curiosity-driven science and enthusiasts hoping for the advent of a ‘theory-free’ objective science. In this work, I suggest how the system science style of reasoning could drastically de-potentiate this (sometimes deceptive) opposition through the generation of multi-purpose relational theoretical frames stemming from the network paradigm. The recognition of the virtual non-existence of purely ‘theoryfree’ approaches and the need for a careful balancing of theoretical and empirical contributions is the main claim of the present work.

Whose Fundamental Constitutions?

This article uses the methods that Locke advocated in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to evaluate manuscript evidence from five different schemes and two drafts of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, to thereby determine what role, if any, John Locke had in writing it, and in advocating for slavery and absolutism. It focuses on the influential claims put forward by David Armitage 20 years ago, that Locke was responsible for actively promoting slavery in Carolina’s Fundamental Constitutions. It enables the reader to view, and judge, the relevant evidence. The author concludes, and invites the reader to conclude, that Armitage’s main claims lack foundation in the manuscript evidence. That evidence instead points towards the legal power of those who owned Carolina, the Lords Proprietors, and to the crown, which granted Carolina’s charter, and to the logic of a different theory of government, patriarchalism, for the rationale behind both slavery and absolutism. The central ideas behind slavery and colonization were epitomized, as Locke understood, by Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote the book to which Locke responded in his Two Treatises of Government. Filmer’s ally, Sir Henry Spelman, like Filmer a deeply committed royalist who believed in the king’s unlimited prerogatives, composed the original 1629 Carolina charter that shaped the Fundamental Constitutions. Misattributing the authorship of particular clauses to Locke is a symptom of a larger failure to distinguish the impact of momentous debates over authority and race in the seventeenth century. Locke’s theories did, in practice as well as principle, reject the theory of domination put forward by Filmer, and argued instead for human rights and democracy that were inclusive and capacious. The manuscript evidence has the potential to reshape how modern democratic theory is understood in the present.

Response to “Discussion of S. Ponsioen, S. Jain and G. Haller: ’Model reduction to spectral submanifolds and forced-response calculation in high-dimensional mechanical systems’, Journal of Sound and Vibration 488, 2020, pages 1-23”

We have reproduced our disputed simulation results from our original article as well as the simulations of the discussion article of Krack and Gross referenced above in the title. We have found several inaccuracies and omissions in the discussion article that invalidate its author’s main claims. We also briefly address inherent performance differences between the SSMTool and the NLvib algorithms to the benefit of the former.

Concocting Teleology in Aristotle’s Meteorology 4 and Generation of Animals

Abstract Aristotle claims that in making an animal, nature acts like a “good housekeeper” who “is accustomed to throw out nothing from which it is possible to make something useful” (744b16–17). How does nature act when it “make[s] something useful” in these cases – and does it differ from other ways it acts? I defend two main claims. The first is that Meteor. 4.2’s distinction between two sorts of ‘concoction’ processes offers an underappreciated source of evidence for answering this question. My second claim concerns the nature of those processes and the ends they realize. While they are both the ends of their respective types of concoction, they differ in that some essential (process-defining) features of the second end – but not the first – are supplied by what the capacities of the “underlying” patient (on which the agent acts) are for. The result is a distinction between two kinds of end-directed efficient causation.

Climate change related litigation in Indonesia

Indonesia contributes to greenhouse gas emissions but is also vulnerable to climate change. However, the country does not have a single, overarching law explicitly addressing climate change. Climate litigation is now used in Indonesia to hold governments and corporations accountable. Here, I review the courts’ decisions for criminal and civil climate change-related cases between 2010 and 2020 and highlight trends and examples of case studies, driving factors, and impacts of climate litigation cases in Indonesia. I show that 112 climate change-related cases were brought to Indonesian courts, most of which were criminal cases concerning forestry or forest fires. In addition, there were a number of civil court cases. The cases use phrases concerning climate change in their main claim, argument, evidence, expert witness arguments, and judgments. They are regarded as incidental climate change litigation cases. However, these cases are essential in developing climate change litigation in Indonesia because they open up a discussion of climate change issues in the Indonesian courts and public media.

Resistance as desubjectivation in Foucault

The article scrutinizes Foucault’s articulations of resistance, arguing against the entrenched understanding that resistance in Foucault is necessarily negative, or impossible. We concentrate on a specific period of his work, situated between the disciplinary phase and the beginning of the 1980s when Foucault began to develop the idea of the aesthetic of existence. We argue that in this period Foucault developed the notion of resistance as agentic, lived and possible, through three interrelated concepts. These are reverse discourse, counter-conduct and the critical attitude, elaborated in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, the course Security, Territory, Population and the lecture ‘What is Critique?’. The link between these concepts is provided by the effect they produce, captured by Foucault’s understanding of desubjectivation. Our claim is that Foucault reorients his work towards studying subjectivity through articulating resistance as desubjectivation. The main claim of the article is that Foucault not only allows for the possibility of resistance, but that his attempts to calibrate what it may mean to resist led him to fine-tune his understanding of power. Foucault arrived at power as subjection through the gradual development of resistance as desubjectivation.

Affluence, Vividness, and Blame

Abstract Most affluent people do little to aid those living in severe poverty. In this paper, we consider the extent to which such people are blameworthy for their inaction. We argue for three main claims. First, we cannot convincingly appeal to the phenomenon of non-culpable moral ignorance to argue that the affluent are not seriously blameworthy for their inaction: affluent people are either not ignorant, or else they are culpably ignorant. Second, however, a parallel phenomenon of non-culpable lack of vivid awareness does have some purchase in mitigating blame. Although this diminishes blame to some degree, significant blame is still appropriate, given that vivid awareness is to some extent under our control. Thirdly, there is good reason to believe that expressions of appropriate blame, which could alert us to moral wrongdoing, are systematically suppressed regarding global poverty. Therefore, the absence of blame doesn’t indicate the absence of blameworthy behaviour.

Disjointing state and war: defence policy as hauntology

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between state and war in defence policy. To do so it develops a hauntological vocabulary of spectrality, conjuring, and the messianic in close conversation with Derrida’s Specters of Marx. This allows for paying attention to the tensions of statehood and state–war relations, and to how they are determined. Specifically, the paper identifies three aporias signalled in Max Weber’s definition of the state—legitimate violence, community, and territory—and traces how they are addressed in two post-Cold War defence policy paradigms—expeditionary force and territorial deterrence—through two Swedish Defence Bills (2009 and 2020). The main claim concerns how these paradigms, despite their differences, disjointed the state from war by transposing questions of force and violence to the limits of the international order and by subordinating defence to instrumentalism. Traditional spectres of society, state, and the international were dislocated to domains outside statist conceptions of politics. Thus, the paper complements conventional understandings of security and defence as central to statehood by indicating a different function of defence policy and what is at stake in inheriting received political imaginations.

The Tomb of Nabi Yusha’ in the Upper Galilee: The Evolution of a Sacred Place

Among the six sites regarded as the burial place of Joshua bin Nun, the one of Nabi Yusha’, located on the eastern slopes of the Upper Galilee highlands was regarded with great reverence by the "Matawila" or "Mutawalli" Shi'ites in Southern Lebanon and in the Galilee, including the inhabitants of the village Al-Nabi Yusha’. Jewish tradition tends to reject the identification of Joshua’s tomb at this site but rather identify it with a site in Samaria, and therefore this place did not become part of the traditional sanctified gravesites of saintly figures found throughout the Galilee. This article is related to the date and reason for the construction of the mausoleum in its present form, and of the two domes over it, as well as to the tradition of pilgrimage to the site and the cult of the local Shi’ite inhabitants. In its second part, the article refers to the cultic changes that occurred after the establishment of the State of Israel, and to the question of the location of the tomb today in the process of creating a sacred landscape in the Galilee. The main claim of the article is that tracing the changes in the cult of this site will show the geopolitical importance of this place on the one hand, and the changing social values of the surrounding inhabitants and of the sovereign authority on the other.

Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life

ABSTRACT The goals of this paper is to offer a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of horror and argue that horror displays an organization of experience that cannot be traced back to the activity of the constituting subject. The main claim is that the essential feature of horror consists of its unintelligibility, which is neither reducible to the psychoanalytical repression nor to the complete breakdown of intelligibility but should be rather conceived as counter-intelligibility: horror occurs when anomalies and irregularities that are normally seen as disrupting the phenomenal field and undermining everyday intelligibility turn into positive principles of a new organization of experience. The confusion and perversion of horror consist of transforming the negativities and counter-forces of the cultural phenomenal field into a positive way of being. Horror is an optimal way of bringing non-optimality and disarray, which is characterized by self-exclusion from the cultural domain of intelligibility.

Finite-time ruin probability of a risk model with perturbation and subexponential main claims and by-claims

The paper considers a nonstandard risk model with stochastic return and perturbation, in which the price process of the investment portfolio is described as a geometric Lévy process and each main claim may induce a delayed by-claim. When the main claims and by-claims have subexponential distributions, we obtain some asymptotic estimations of the finite-time ruin probability.

Woman and Human Rights in Nigeria: A Study of Delta State

The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 chose certain rights to protect under chapter IV and termed them as Fundamental Rights. These rights protected not only by the Constitution, but also by the African Charter on Human and Peoples Right. Whenever there are breaches of these fundamental rights, the law provides a procedure for their enforcement, which is the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules 2009. The basic objective of the 2009 Rules is to facilitate enforcement procedure by removing some of the impediments in 1979 rule. Unfortunately, it is clear that the procedure for enforcement of Fundamental Rights is still bedeviled by delay. Many applications alleging serious human rights violations are routinely struck out or dismissed. However, the pertinent question is: to what extent are the human rights provision in these legal instruments realized or enforced as it relates to the women folk? It is worthy of note that there are equally other important impediments in the realization of the objective of Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules 2009, such as the distinction between main claim and ancillary claim in the Nigerian fundamental rights, because litigants are cautious of whether or not their will succeed because of this distinction. This research examines Women and Human Rights in Nigeria. This research made an in depth analysis of the rules and considered to what extent it achieved its objective in order to enhance a robust human right regime as it relates to the women folk. To achieve a close -to- accurate" if not accurate result, the research embarked on a field work. To this end, empirical method of research is used. This research found out that the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules 2009, though has brought tremendous changes in the field of human rights protection (e.g the abolishment of locus standi and leave, is still faced with some major setback like the issue of principal and ancillary claim in the enforcement of fundamental rights and the jurisdiction of the National Industrial Court which is not clear in the rule. The work recommend that Courts should do away with the dichotomy between principal and ancillary and the definition of courts in the Rule should include the National Industrial Court.

Asymptotics for ruin probabilities of a bidimensional risk model with a random number of delayed claims

This article considers a non-standard bidimensional risk model with constant force of interest, in which every main claim may cause a random number of delayed claims in an uncertain period of time. Specifically, if both the main claims and delayed claims are subexponential and follow some dependence structure, we drive precise asymptotic formulae for finite-time ruin probabilities, which generalize the results of Lu and Yuan (2022) and Li (2023b) to some extent.

(Non) representation and normalized losses of the other in pro-migrant media texts: what is at stake in migrant visibility?

ABSTRACT This article investigates whether and how media texts that explicitly support migrants and their settlement in Greece may echo racist assumptions. Our main claim is that the texts examined here overrepresent a “tolerable” and “familiar Other”, in contrast to some “vague” and “threatening Others”, who are largely minimized (i.e. deprived of agency, face and name). They remain at the margins of visibility and are not tolerated, while their foreclosure and loss emerge as normal. The racist underpinnings of this process are deconstructed on the basis of two theoretical axes: (a) that discourses of tolerance may be permeated by a liquid fear of the Other and fail to recognize migrants beyond the racist stereotype of the “Other as a threat” and (b) that this convergence of tolerance and fear takes place implicitly and can be studied in terms of what is silenced in discoursal representation of tolerance. Our analysis will draw upon a conceptual framework for the study of the (non) representation of migrants, based on the notions of recognition and abjection, in combination with linguistic/semiotic tools proposed by van Leeuwen.

The ‘feverish’ society and the aims of education

Borrowing the Platonic metaphor of a ‘feverish’ society, this article discusses the argument that a critical stance toward our contemporary realities makes a revisiting of educational aims more urgent. The article begins with how aims have been tackled in educational philosophy. The head-on educational-philosophical engagement with aims-talk has been diminishing. There have been socio-political developments unfavourable to aims-talk, related to hegemonic, neoliberal mindsets. Neoliberalism discourages the theorization of educational aims that challenges its conventional ‘wisdom’. There have also been philosophical reasons for the decline in the frequency of aims-talk, related to some postmodern positions that combat modern assumptions of ‘ultimate’ aims and register the possibility of an ‘education without aims’. Against the tendency to under-theorize educational aims, the article critically explores why our contemporary societies may be described as ‘feverish’ and what this entails for theorizing educational aims. My main claim is that the educational aims-talk should be reinvigorated and the related fault lines rethought from a more enlarged viewpoint.

Physicist's view on the unbalanced k-cardinality assignment problem.

The k-cardinality unbalanced assignment problem asks for assigning k "agents" to k "tasks" on a one-to-one basis, while minimizing the total cost associated with the assignment, with the total number of agents N and the total number of tasks M possibly different and larger than k. While many exact algorithms have been proposed to find such an optimal assignment, these methods are computationally prohibitive when the problem is large. We propose an approach to solving the k-cardinality assignment problem using techniques adapted from statistical physics. This paper provides a full description of this formalism, including all the proofs of its main claims. We derive a strongly concave free-energy function that captures the constraints of the k-assignment problem at a finite temperature. We prove that this free energy decreases monotonically as a function of β, the inverse of temperature, to the optimal assignment cost, providing a robust framework for temperature annealing. We also prove that for large enough β values the exact solution to the k-assignment problem can be derived using simple round-off to the nearest integer of the elements of the computed assignment matrix. We show that this framework can be adapted to handle degenerate k-assignment problems. We describe a computer implementation of our framework that is optimized for the GPU parallel architecture, using the library CUDA. This implementation is found to be as efficient as state-of-the-art implementations of parallel Hungarian algorithms on generic assignment problems, and orders of magnitude faster than those algorithms for pathological assignment cases.

Adoption of Diabetes Technology in Denmark: Continuous Glucose Monitor as Time-Machine

ABSTRACT Health technologies to monitor glucose values are an important part of daily diabetes self-care. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in Denmark with 14 people with type 2 diabetes, I explore people’s experience of living with Continuous Glucose Monitoring. This new technology automatically measures glucose levels throughout the day but is not yet common in type 2 diabetes treatment in Denmark. In this article, I capture the social shaping of Continuous Glucose Monitoring, employing the concept of time. I show how adoption of the technology is embedded in a form of biographical time. This refers to people’s use of the technology linked to their stories about themselves. Drawing on a notion of habitus, people’s embodied past experiences and future prospects come to shape its use, I propose. My main claim is that while people with diabetes implement the technology into their lives in unique ways, adapting it to their circumstances and social conditions, practice of Continuous Glucose Monitoring reproduce social structures. This is evinced, I argue, in people’s tinkering with the technology and the frames of reference used to inform it. I introduce the term “tinkering in time”, highlighting the introduction of new health technology within the frame of lived human time.

From Security To Cooperation: Change and Continuity in Türkiye’s Middle East Policies

This study examines the transformation of Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East context after the Cold War until today under four basic periods. These periods will be discussed as post-Cold War, September 11, Arab Spring process and post-Arab Spring. The main developments affecting the change and transformation in Türkiye-Middle East relations in these four periods will be analyzed. Turkey adopted a security-oriented foreign policy strategy in the Middle East after the Cold War; It can be said that during and after September 11, it followed a more active strategy based on mutual cooperation, prioritizing economic cooperation and historical and cultural ties. It should be noted that Turkey adopted a more interventionist strategy that supported changes during the Arab Spring, and in the post-Arab Spring period, it focused on solving the problems that arose during the Arab Spring. The main claim of this article is to reveal that the intensity of Turkey-Middle East relations increased after the Cold War and to analyze and evaluate the factors and practices that show this.

Is Moore’s Moral Objectivist Argument Sufficient Against Moral Relativism?

This study aims to expose certain weaknesses in Moore’s moral objectivist argument against moral relativism and subjectivism. It suggests that a moral objectivist argument has to explain moral diversity against moral relativism. Moral relativism is one of the most critical debates in metaethics, and it can be interpreted in two different ways: one as moral realism and the other as moral anti-realism. Moral realism, when reduced to moral objectivism, excludes moral relativism and subjectivism beyond moral realism. I will refer to this interpretation as narrowed moral realism. But moral realism can be extended in an inclusive way such as moral subjectivism and relativism. I will refer to this as extended moral realism. Due to the focus of the study, I will introduce both extended moral realism and narrowed moral realism in the introduction section. Then, I will address G. E. Moore's narrowed moral realism. I will criticize his arguments for their failure to explain the diversity of moral codes. Finally, I suggest that moral subjectivism and moral relativism can be appropriately addressed within extended moral realism. Contrary to Moore's claims, I contend that moral relativism and moral subjectivism would be claims within moral realism. I also evaluate the two main claims from a moral realist perspective. Moral subjectivism claims that moral reality is constructed by an individual’s mental state. Moral relativism argues that social codes of human conduct completely determine moral reality. In the first section of the study, I discussed moral relativism from a Moorean perspective, which asserts that there are self-evident and indefinable truths at the foundation of objective morality. The second section contends that if Moore is correct, however, it necessitates an explanation for why different cultures accept different moral codes. The third section argues the fact that Moore fails to provide any explanation for this. In the conclusion part, I claim that moral relativism and moral subjectivism can be viewed as moral realist theories based on the failure of Moore's arguments.

What is Animal Dignity in Law?

The article seeks to understand dignity in the context of primarily European animal law. Its main claim is that the notion of dignity is used in animal law discourse to express claims of more-than-welfarism. Whereas welfarism is premised on the humane treatment of animals and the prevention of unnecessary suffering, animal dignity is premised on respect for animals. However, adopting dignity-premised legal regulation does not necessarily entail the abandonment of welfarism. Rather, jurisdictions that have adopted dignity-based animal law have left welfarist regulations mostly intact. Hence, in its current stage of development, dignity-based animal law does not replace but rather augments the welfarist regime by “plugging its gaps”. Dignity-based animal law is then identified as consisting of four aspects: non-instrumentalization, egalitarianism, flourishing, and essence-respect. Finally, the article discusses the relationship of dignity to intrinsic value, arguing that the legal recognition of animals’ dignity is neither necessary nor sufficient for a recognition of their intrinsic value as individuals.