Normal Logic Research Articles

On the Equivalence between Logic Programming and SETAF

Abstract A framework with sets of attacking arguments ( $\textit{SETAF}$ ) is an extension of the well-known Dung’s Abstract Argumentation Frameworks ( $\mathit{AAF}$ s) that allows joint attacks on arguments. In this paper, we provide a translation from Normal Logic Programs ( $\textit{NLP}$ s) to $\textit{SETAF}$ s and vice versa, from $\textit{SETAF}$ s to $\textit{NLP}$ s. We show that there is pairwise equivalence between their semantics, including the equivalence between $L$ -stable and semi-stable semantics. Furthermore, for a class of $\textit{NLP}$ s called Redundancy-Free Atomic Logic Programs ( $\textit{RFALP}$ s), there is also a structural equivalence as these back-and-forth translations are each other’s inverse. Then, we show that $\textit{RFALP}$ s are as expressive as $\textit{NLP}$ s by transforming any $\textit{NLP}$ into an equivalent $\textit{RFALP}$ through a series of program transformations already known in the literature. We also show that these program transformations are confluent, meaning that every $\textit{NLP}$ will be transformed into a unique $\textit{RFALP}$ . The results presented in this paper enhance our understanding that $\textit{NLP}$ s and $\textit{SETAF}$ s are essentially the same formalism.

Frege’s extrinsicism about the normativity of logic

One ought to be logically consistent. This is sometimes referred to as the Normativity Thesis about logic. But why do we acknowledge it? This is the “source question”. This paper shows that Frege provided a promising, yet often ignored, answer to that question. Frege held that the logical consequence relation |= is not intrinsically normative. Rather, the normativity of logic is derived from something other than logic itself, namely the norm that one ought to judge truly and not falsely. I demonstrate that this carves out a spectrum of two opposed views on why logic is normative. I call Frege’s view extrinsicism, which contrasts with intrinsicism. The extrinsicist view, from an exegetical point of view, is basically absent from all interpretations of Frege’s view on the normativity of logic. From a systematic point of view, it offers a sound alternative to the widely accepted assumption that logic is demarcated from other disciplines such as microphysics, biology or arithmetic through a distinct and exceptional kind of normative force over how to judge and reason about the world, because it is taken to have a direct relation to truth and truth preservation.

Paths Not Taken: On Negative Wayfaring in Ladakh

For Buddhist laity in Ladakh, familiar paths and places are delineated by both movement and avoidance. Negative forms of engagement with the landscape operate as active means of place-making: curtailed movement, avoidance, and the redirection of non-human movement all work to disentangle self and landscape, protecting against dangers often embodied in spirits. These processes invert the normal logic of wayfaring and dwelling, relying on curtailed movement as a means of protection against the threats inherent in the landscape. Avoidance behaviour contributes to the management of the porous and shifting boundaries through which threatening forces routinely flow, particularly after nightfall.

Social Rationality and Human Reasoning: Logical Expressivism and the Flat Mind.

This paper attempts to reconcile the claims that the mind is both flat (Chater, 2018) and highly rational (Oaksford & Chater, 2020). According to the flat mind hypothesis, the mind is a mass of inconsistent and contradictory fragments of experience. However, standard accounts of rationality from formal epistemology argue that to be rational, our beliefs must be consistent, and we must believe all the logical consequences of our beliefs. A social account of rationality is developed based on Brandom's (1994) logical expressivism, in which respecting the norms of logic and probability theory is still central but where these standards apply to our public commitments in social dialogical contexts rather than to our individual belief systems (Skovgaard-Olsen, 2017). According to this account, even if someone's individual beliefs are inconsistent, they cannot be condemned as irrational if they acknowledge the inconsistency and seek to resolve it. It is shown how this approach interacts with people's fragmented and shallow world knowledge, and its social distribution yields some counterintuitive consequences, such as it sometimes being rational individually not seeking to resolve contradictions. Other consequences of this social expressivist approach are considered, including for dual process theories of reasoning, our view of beliefs, the status of logic, and Fodor's (1983) view of central systems. It is concluded that people can have flat minds and yet be highly rational.

Mod Installation as Reclaiming Representational Diversity: The Role of Aesthetic Agency in Stardew Valley

Media (e.g., film) are often designed around cisgender, heternormative logics and are not representative of the multiplicity of identities and identity expressions that exist in the world. Thus, media impedes the identity expression and performance of the communities who use them, as we do not see many parts of our identities represented or find that our identities are misrepresented. Video games, which are a genre of media, are especially problematic in how they perpetuate heteronormative normative logics. Unlike most media, however, video games give people agency over the aesthetics of game worlds--the characters and narratives--through the installation of mods. We conducted a content analysis coupled with a triangulation of mods through personal experience focused on the widely popular farming simulation game Stardew Valley. Drawing on a conceptual lens bringing together theories of identity and aesthetic agency, we highlight how the aesthetic agency afforded by mod installation provides opportunities for reclaiming representational diversity in game worlds along the following dimensions: sex and intimacy, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and body diversity. We discuss the implications of mod installation, exploring its potential relationship with identity work and identity play. We then propose design guidelines for achieving aesthetic alignment.

The new informality? The financialization of informal housing as a parasitic relation (2023) Plenary Commentary

ABSTRACT This paper responds to Raquel Rolnik's Urban Geography Plenary Lecture, delivered at the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, titled “The Empire Strikes Back.” Rolnik's essay introduces the idea that a “new informality” has begun in Latin American cities. She uses this concept to understand how financial innovations like digital platforms and state-backed rental assistance programs draw informal housing into bankable debt relations without needing to convert them into cadastral property. This paper uses Marx's distinction between formal and real subsumption, and Gidwani's theorization of the parasitism of capital, to reframe Rolnik's provocative argument via the noncapital–capital relation. It then raises three questions about the empirical “next steps” of research into the financialization of informal housing that need to be explored to understand the novelty of financialization in the global South. These pertain to (i) the normative logics governing racialized and other forms of difference upon which financialization feeds and depends, (ii) the scale at which financial innovations should be studied and the presumed coherence “high finance” should be granted as an analytical category, and (iii) the fictions used to generate and sustain political buy-in for financial capital's attempt to subsume/consume informal lifeworlds.

The European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union – three rationalities of interaction and the problem of non-democratic regionalism

ABSTRACT The article outlines three different rationalities of the interactions between the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union before the Russian 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The first rationality refers to a neo-Westphalian model of interaction. According to this, the EU in its interaction with the EAEU has followed a focus on borders and spheres of interest. The second rationality is based on ‘new regionalism’, and the interactions between the EU and the EAEU are based on economic interdependence. Whereas the first rationality type ignores the actorness of the smaller counties in the region, the second emphasises it. The final rationality addresses the ideational, normative dimensions. The conclusion stresses that the EU in its interaction with a non-democratic regional organization ends up in the neo-Westphalian interaction logic. The regionalism rationale fails due to the mutual exclusiveness of the projects and the EU’s normative logic, when challenged, turns into hard power.

The Foundational Principles upon Which the Centre for Management Excellence in Public Finance Management is Built "A Comparative Study"

The fundamental regulations that govern the administration's effective management and safeguarding of public funds constitute the theoretical underpinnings of the administrative centre of excellence in public funds management. These foundations are linked to the same standards that established the existence of administrative law as a whole and the management of public funds in particular; thus, general philosophical foundations, including public utility theory, public authority theory, and modern theory, emerged. The most meritorious of these theories were the mixed theories whose contents are derived from the theories of public authority and public utility. This is due to the logical norms that this theory establishes regarding the management of public funds for the benefit of the public. Public ownership and discretionary power may be regarded as the pillars of a unique theory that effectively grants the administration control over its funds, as well as the flexibility and space these theories afford the administration to exercise its privileged position in the management of public funds.

Some additional axioms for t-normal logics. Defining K45, KB4, KD45 and S5 without using modal rules

The paper will study extensions of t-normal logics S0.5o and S0.5 using some axioms of normal logics. We will prove determination theorems for these extensions by appropriate Kripke-style models. It will allow us to obtain the determinations of the logics K45, KB4 (= KB5), KD45 and S5 without using modal rules.

Design and High Performance Evaluation of a Low Power Bit-Line SRAM PMOS Biased Sense Amplifier

Sense amplifiers developed into very big circuits due to their significant role in Memory design. The sense amplifier plays a significant role in terms of its recital, Functionality and reliability of the memory circuits. Fast access time and low power Dissipation are achieved with newly developed circuits of sense amplifiers for low voltage supply. Static RAM is the sense amplifiers at the ends of the two Complementary bit lines that amplify the small voltages to a normal logic level. Static RAM (SRAM) is a type of random access memory that retains data bits in its Memory as long as power is supplied. The proposed circuit is a P-type metal oxide Semiconductor (PMOS) biased sense amplifier, which provides very high, output Impedance, has reduced sense delay, and has reduced power dissipation. It performs the same operations as conventional circuits. The proposed circuit has a smaller number of transistors, so sensing delay and power consumption are also reduced. These circuits are simulated and examined using the Tanner EDA tool employing 180 nm technology library parameters. Key Words: Low power consumption, Power Consumption, Sense amplifiers, sense delay, static RAM.

In the Multitude of Words, Sin is Not Lacking: Are Codes of Ethics Promoting Corporate Responsibility or Providing Legal Shields?

In the wake of corporate governance scandals, questions arise about the effectiveness and intent of corporate ethical codes: Are they genuine governance mechanisms to enhance corporate responsibility, or are they mere shields against legal risks? This study delves into the linguistic choices within ethical codes, positing that these choices serve as communication devices that articulate a firm’s institutional logic. We use stakeholder theory to differentiate between code language that is governed by instrumental (legal-oriented) or normative (behavior-oriented) logic. Upon analyzing the lexicon of Fortune 500 corporate codes, our findings reveal that behavior-oriented codes are associated with a decrease in the number of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Yet, they correspond to an increase in class action lawsuits. By contrast, legal-oriented codes are linked to an increase in ESG issues but to reduced legal litigation. Notably, firms that blend approaches from both logics experience lower litigation rates. These findings enrich the discourse on stakeholder theory and provide practical guidance for organizations aiming to refine their ethical codes. This refinement seeks to enhance ethical behavior and mitigate corporate risks.

Generalisation through Negation and Predicate Invention

The ability to generalise from a small number of examples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an inductive logic programming (ILP) approach that combines negation and predicate invention. Combining these two features allows an ILP system to generalise better by learning rules with universally quantified body-only variables. We implement our idea in NOPI, which can learn normal logic programs with predicate invention, including Datalog programs with stratified negation. Our experimental results on multiple domains show that our approach can improve predictive accuracies and learning times.

Inquiry, reasoning and the normativity of logic

According to the traditional view in the philosophy of logic facts of logic bear normative authority regarding how one ought to reason. Usually this is to mean that the relation of logical consequence between statements has some special relevance for how one’s beliefs should cohere. However, as I will argue in this article, this is just one way in which logic is normative for reasoning. For one thing, belief is not the only kind of mental state involved in reasoning. Besides adopting and revising beliefs, rational agents pose and resolve questions. For another thing, the consequence relation of classical logic can be conservatively extended such that it includes logical relations between questions as well. Therefore, there is an argument to be made that not only the inference of new beliefs from extant beliefs but also the process of raising additional questions falls under the normative authority of logic. Accordingly, a nuanced account of the normativity of logic presents itself, which convincingly deals with problems such as clutter-avoidance and the paradox of the preface.

Logical norms as defeasible obligations: disentangling sound and feasible inferences

ABSTRACT This paper develops a novel approach to the question of the normativity of logic, which we reinterpret as a clash between two intuitions: the direct normativity intuition and the unfeasibility intuition. The standard response has been to dismiss the direct normativity intuition, bridging logic and reasoning via principles that relativize the normative import of logic to pragmatic and feasibility considerations. We argue that the standard response is misguided. Building upon theories of bounded rationality, our approach conceptualizes reasoning as constrained by multiple, independent normative factors, logical and non-logical ones. These different factors can conflict with one another, to the effect that logically sound inferences might not coincide with what is feasible for an agent to infer. From this perspective, we will argue that logic gives us only prima facie, i.e. contributive and defeasible, obligations on what to believe, but that such obligations do not always coincide with what an agent ought to believe all things considered. These distinctions will dissolve the alleged clash between the direct normativity and the unfeasibility intuition.

Does high-quality news attract engagement on social media? Mediatization, media logic, and the contrasting values that shape news sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook

Despite the concern over deteriorating news quality on social media, few studies have empirically examined how much high-quality news is rewarded on social media. Guided by the mediatization literature, we compared the extent to which normative values (i.e. factual reporting and public importance) in news stories as opposed to social media values (i.e. popularity) contribute to actual engagement such as sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook. The normative values and social media values were drawn from survey participants’ evaluations of the news content, recruiting both consumers ( n = 5816) and journalists ( n = 742). Each news post’s engagement metrics were extracted from Facebook. Our analysis shows that consumers’ news judgments are overall consistent with those of journalists. More importantly, the study finds that a social media value dominates news engagement whereas normative values are eminently weak. We discuss the implications of the disproportionally powerful social media logic shaping news engagement in comparison to normative logics for news.

On that demon time: Black time geographies of reimagining, recovering, and resisting

This article introduces “Demon Time” as a theoretical concept for examining Black time geographies. Building off the theorization of demonic space, I theorize that demon time is an alternative Black temporality. I use the soundscapes of the Black church, the Black barber/beauty shop, and the strip club to think through demonic temporality as a mode of reimagination, a reimagining of Black subjectivities, a mode of recovery, an iterative process of recovery from anti-blackness, and a mode of resisting, a continual resistance of normative logics and western ideologies. These Black soundscapes produce Black timescapes which are anchored to time-spaces of Black cultural production. Thus, demon time offers us a way to reorient how we understand Blackness in moments of economic, social, and ecological crisis, while also allowing us to think about the incommensurability of Black temporalities across Black regions in the US.

Rethinking Logical and Political Normativity

ABSTRACT The focus of the article is the notion of normativity in logic and politics and their possible intersections. The twentieth-century divide between the analytical and the continental idea of logic is explored, by noting that they both – with significant differences – can be seen as proposing a ‘bottom-up normativity’, which may have immediate political effects. Logical normativity postulates universality, and a connection between reality and reason able to orient actions universalistically. For a bottom-up conception (as specifically advanced by Deleuze’s logic of sense), the universalistic approach does not descend from above on an elusive reality but is a self-organization of multiple processes occurring in a horizon which is typically affected by political facts and choices.

Вневременность субъекта

The article deals with the problem of time and the property of the subject to leave time. In temporal existence, the subject moves together with surrounding things in the same stream of time. However, within itself the subject emerges into a transcendental quasi-space. He builds it himself in his mental world. The layer of immanence (in the temporal sense of the word) does not allow for understanding, does not allow for real thinking. A conversation in terms of immanence can only develop according to the “stimulus-response” type, without a plan and without addressing one’s own idea of truth, since truth requires timelessness. The concept of “objectification” introduced by Whorf, as well as the ideas of the temporal horizon of Bergson and Husserl are considered. The second part of the article examines the timelessness of meaning. Meaning “lives” in the timeless space of meanings. The normativity of logic also has a timeless character. Even when we listen to music, we step out of time and constitute its pattern, the logic of its unfolding. The subject of music is the coagulation of time into intelligible structures. Reflection is considered as belonging to the timeless layer of consciousness. We place our thinking among timeless entities: values, assessments, goals, projects, truths. A project of thought can unfold in time, this is an intuitive type of thinking, but it can also reach universal positions. Thus the subject is dual. It belongs to two ontological regions: temporal and atemporal. The last paragraph of the article briefly discusses Losev’s theory “On the Method of Infinitesimals in Logic”, which states that the subject perceives the world through derivatives in the sense of mathematical analysis, and then performs integration in order to thus obtain an atemporal concept of a thing. In conclusion, I staate that the mechanism for escaping time is still unclear, but the exit itself has been given to us. The subject’s relationship to transcendence is the subject’s exit from time. There would be no concept of time if there were no communion with the eternal.

Logic as a Science of Patterns?

I propose that logic may be seen as a science of patterns—however, not in the sense in which mathematics is a science of patterns, but rather in the sense in which physics is. The proposal is that logic identifies, explores, and fixes the inferential patterns which de facto govern our argumentative practices. It can be seen, I argue, as picking up the patterns and working from them toward the state of reflective equilibrium, where the laws it aims at are explicitly articulated. Due to the normativity of logic, this process is not quite the same as that in which a natural science works its way from data to its laws; however, there is no reason why it should be seen as proceeding via a mysterious "a priori analysis.” Instead, it should proceed in the intersubjective space in which the sciences are practiced.

The moral (bio)politics of the abnormal: Situating a Southwest China border town in global AIDS governance

This paper analyses the interaction of two models in the social process of global AIDS governance and explores the possibilities of innovation in the social response to risk. The two moral regimes by which to cope with problematized situations in the contemporary world are conceptualized as the “center” and the “border”. The center promotes a normative discourse in the name of defending society, reifying order and pursuing cost-effectiveness in operations. The border undertakes exploratory social action guided by a specific idea of “goodness”. While the two approaches engage in continuous battles, with integration and penetration between them, in the case of people living with HIV worldwide, they were first degraded into a separated biomedical pariah population, and then were brought under the strict medical regime of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART). This shift between abject exclusion and exceptional inclusion indicates the meta-structure of life governance in the contemporary world. China's border cities are key outposts of global AIDS governance that reflect how the institutional deployment of exclusion and inclusion extends from global to local. The “ zuo aizibing” (doing AIDS projects) in Biancheng, a Southwest China border town, embody typically as well as uniquely the complicated “center–border” entanglement. Border-organized “infected peer groups” are embedded in the local official governance system, manifesting as “front-line foot soldiers” serving the center by facilitating a smoother integration of the city's HIV-positive population into the public health monitoring system, where they are disciplined to become docile medical subjects. However, such groups, in adaptable symbiosis with this normative deployment, have also been able to independently open up entirely new fields of social action, allowing a humanitarian vision to be mediated, “translated”, and implemented. Through the transmission of knowledge, affection, and vitality, such groups have freed their HIV-positive peers, otherwise abandoned by the normative logic of AIDS governance, from stigmatization and from being limited by disease and treatment, to start pursuing new forms of life. As a global social experiment, the border, as revealed by AIDS, has far-reaching implications for exploring the inclusive and open potential of society itself.