Core Notions Research Articles

Socially Extended Scientific Knowledge.

A three-tiered account of social cognition is set out—along with the corresponding variety of social knowledge that results from this social cognition—and applied to the special case of scientific collaboration. The first tier is socially-facilitated cognition, which results in socially-facilitated knowledge. This is a form of cognition which, while genuinely social (in that social factors play an important explanatory role in producing the target cognitive success), falls short of socially extended cognition. The second tier is socially extended cognition, which generates socially extended knowledge. This form of cognition is social in the specific sense of the information-processing of other agents forms part of the socially extended cognitive process at issue. It is argued, however, that the core notion of socially extended cognition is individual in nature, in that the target cognitive success is significantly creditable to the socially extended cognitive agency of the individual. Socially extended cognition, in its core sense, thus generates individual knowledge. Finally, there is distributed cognition, which generates distributed knowledge. This is where the cognitive successes produced by a research team are attributable to a group agent rather than to individuals within the team. Accordingly, where this form of social cognition generates knowledge (distributed knowledge), the knowledge is irreducibly group knowledge. It is argued that by making clear this three-tiered structure of social scientific knowledge a prima facie challenge is posed for defenders of distributed scientific cognition and knowledge to explain why this form of social knowledge is being exhibited and not one of the two weaker (and metaphysically less demanding) forms of social knowledge.

Public Reason and the Justification of Punishment

Chad Flanders has argued that retributivism is inconsistent with John Rawls’s core notion of public reason, which sets out those considerations on which legitimate exercises of state power can be based. Flanders asserts that retributivism is grounded in claims about which people can reasonably disagree and are thus not suitable grounds for public policy. This essay contends that Rawls’s notion of public reason does not provide a basis for rejecting retributivist justifications of punishment. I argue that Flanders’s interpretation of public reason is too exclusionary: on it, public reason would rule out any prominent rationale for punishment. On what I contend is a better interpretation of public reason, whether retributivism would be ruled out as a rationale for punishment depends on whether a retributivist account can be constructed from shared political commitments in a liberal democracy. Some prominent versions of retributivism meet this requirement and so are consistent with public reason.

Prior infection of Galleria mellonella with sublethal dose of Bt elicits immune priming responses but incurs metabolic changes

Invertebrate immune priming has attracted wide attention of biologists in recent years because it challenges core notions about the disparate nature of acquired and innate immunity. However, the metabolic switch and energetic cost during eliciting immune priming are poorly investigated issues, which could widen and deepen our understanding of the physiological mechanism of immune priming. In this study, using sublethal dose of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) as an elicitor, we detected typical immune priming responses in Galleria mellonella. We found that the intensity of immune priming is positively correlated with the levels of antimicrobial peptides and phagocytosis ability of hemocytes. Subsequently, we employed LC-MS/MS-based untargeted metabolomics techniques to analyze the metabolic changes in the fat body of G. mellonella larvae during immune priming. The results showed that there were 74 and 56 significantly altered metabolites in positive and negative ion mode, respectively, after Bt priming. Most of the differential metabolites were enriched in the following metabolic pathways: amino acid biosynthesis, carbon metabolism, aminoacyl-tRNA biosynthesis and ABC transporters. The energetic cost of immune priming was depicted mainly in the slow growth of body mass and decreased levels of sucrose, lactose, D-ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate, Glycerate-3P and isocitric acid, which are enriched in carbon metabolism and involved in energy production. Meanwhile, correlation and interaction network analysis showed negative correlations between carbohydrates and metabolites involved in amino acid biosynthesis, suggesting that amino acids acted as the main energy source and helped the organisms synthesize immune effectors to participate in the immune priming response. Our results pave the way for uncovering the physiological mechanism of insect immune priming and discovering novel targets for Bt insecticide.

Harry and Philip

This article begins with a review of Philip Bromberg’s penultimate psychoanalytic essay, “Sullivan as Pragmatic Visionary, Operationist and OperRelationalist” (2014), in which he honors the founder of the interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition. His focus on Sullivan’s emotional experience—specifically his struggle to be fully himself—reveals both motives and impediments to his interpersonal theory and praxis. The discussion then turns to Philip himself, who—inspired by Sullivan—also privileges the quality of relatedness in the moment, but with a significant difference. Rather than distortions or gaps in reality that impede insight, Philip favors affect, honoring Sullivan’s core notion that the quality of relatedness is central to personal change. Philip’s life both in and out of the consulting room is a testament to this sensibility and is ultimately illustrated in the author’s own experiences with Bromberg as Supervisor, Mentor, and, finally, as Dear Friend.

History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms ed. by Yueqing Wang, Qinggang Bao, and Guoxing Guan

Reviewed by: History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms ed. by Yueqing Wang, Qinggang Bao, and Guoxing Guan Alice Simionato (bio) History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms. Edited by Yueqing Wang, Qinggang Bao, and Guoxing Guan and translated by Shuchen Xiang. Singapore: Springer, 2020. Pp. xii + 439. Paperback 64,99€, isbn 978-981-15-2574-2. Recent anglophone scholarship on Chinese philosophy provides students and scholars with a great variety of introductory materials, especially when it comes to encyclopedias and manuals on the history of Chinese philosophical traditions. It is therefore increasingly difficult for scholars to produce innovative studies on the subject that can provide a significant and original contribution to the field, especially when addressing both specialists and enthusiasts. In this context, The History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms by Nanjing University’s Wang Yueqing 王月清, Bao Qinggang 暴庆刚, and Guan Guoxing 管国兴 certainly represents a valuable and innovative contribution. Instead of presenting the history of Chinese thought by sectioning it in terms of thinkers or schools of thought, as it is traditionally done in encyclopedic works, the book considers the historical and conceptual evolution of specific key terms which characterize the evolution of those philosophical traditions which form the broad and diversified framework of Chinese philosophy. The book is composed of thirty-seven chapters (varying from 8 to 18 pages in length), each of which is devoted to a detailed discussion of a specific key term in both its historical and conceptual evolution. The great majority of chapters discuss the evolution of terms within the broad historical framework ranging from classical thought to the end of the Qing dynasty. The book presents a detailed discussion of a great variety of Chinese philosophical concepts, ranging from the most well-known core notions, such as dao 道 (“Way”, first chapter), xin 心 (“heart-mind”, chapter five), and cheng 诚(“sincerity”, chapter eight), to other fundamental yet less discussed concepts such as xingershang xingerxia 形而上形而下 (“above physical form and below physical form”, chapter twenty), liyu 理 欲 (“principle and desire”, chapter twenty-nine), and xiaoyao 逍遙 (“unfettered and effortless”, chapter thirty-five), among others. The evolution of each concept is presented by discussing how different philosophers from different traditions and historical periods have rendered its meaning. This approach is particularly effective with regards to discussions of terms which are often considered as monolithic in significance such [End Page 1] as li 理 (“coherence”, chapter thirteen) or qi 氣 (“vital energy”, chapter fourteen), among others. Importantly, the different meanings of each key term are explained both across different thinkers and within the same philosophical system (for example, Confucius’ multifaceted notion of tian 天 as both “almighty commander” and ziran 自然, “self-so”, p. 38). This type of categorization allows the reader to appreciate the articulate development of the most central notions of Chinese philosophy in relation to different contexts throughout the centuries. By means of nuanced and differentiated analysis, in turn, philosophical traditions emerge as developing in conversation among each other, rather than in isolation. As a consequence, the central concerns which characterize the history of Chinese thought are highlighted systematically, together with their conceptual and argumentative specificities. While the remarkable density of each chapter makes this book a valuable source for scholars working in the field of Chinese philosophy, the authors also aim at addressing the broad audience (p. vii). The scope of the book has informed the authors’ methodology: while the genealogical account of the terms considered provides a picture of their “historical lines of evolution”, they explain, thematic comparisons are also employed in order to “highlight the unique contents of these philosophies” (p. vii). In addition, the authors occasionally provide “insightful comparisons with Western philosophy”, which are meant to “bring forth the original and multidimensional meanings of these terms” (p. vii). So while the genealogical and the comparative accounts can serve as aiding tools for researchers at all stages, the explanatory connections with Western philosophy are aimed at broadening the narrative of Chinese philosophical discourse in order to aid non-experts (or scholars of Western philosophy) in appreciating Chinese thought “in its own natural habitat” (p. vii). This methodology, however, is not employed without issues, as it might be inevitable for works with such a broad and ambitious...

Calibrating the “Feminine” and the “Speculative” in Selective Short Stories of Vandana Singh

ABSTRACT Anchoring on the core notions spiraled out of a close reading of Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), this article intends to interpret four short stories of Vandana Singh from the anthology The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008) by using écriture feminine as a tool of analysis. The selected stories belonging to the genre of speculative fiction respectively oscillate around four women characters and leave us with an emerging pattern of searching for a lost “self.” The ingenious story telling with elements of the imaginary addresses subtle yet complicated gender issues. Apropos to this, compartmentalized into three primary sections this work develops an argument toward recognizing an unconventional and original literary tradition in the making that might partially realize the intricate nuances of woman’s writing within a South-Asian (Indian) context.

Governing progress: From cybernetic homeostasis to Simondon’s politics of metastability

In this article we analyse the idea of progress and show that, since its early-modern inception, it has relied on a twofold commitment. On the one hand, it rests on a project of mathematical modelisation of natural and social reality, deterministically conceived. On the other hand, it requires the production of a stable social order capable of implementing that model. This stance, we argue, is still dominant and defines the ‘(hyper-)modern condition’. Following Gilbert Simondon, we take the cybernetic notion of dynamic stability (‘homeostasis’) as paradigmatic of the hyper-modern condition. As we explain, this core notion has covered multiple epistemic domains, including the social sciences, and contributed to reformulate the modern idea of progress within the terms dictated by neoliberal governmentality. The connection we establish between cybernetics and neoliberalism will eventually allow us to use Simondon’s theory against both. In our view, Simondon’s concept of ‘metastability’ supports an alternative understanding of progress based on the ideas of social change and the government of normative invention, which includes the opening of social systems to a future beyond their own preservation.

Self-validation theory: An integrative framework for understanding when thoughts become consequential.

Self-validation theory (SVT) is introduced and presented as a series of six postulates. The core notion of SVT is that thoughts become more consequential for judgment and action as the perceived validity of the thoughts is increased. Instead of focusing on the objective accuracy of thoughts, self-validation research focuses on a subjective sense that one's thoughts are valid or appropriate to use. People come to rely on any thought more when they perceive that thought is likely to be true (cognitive validation) or because they feel good about the thought (affective validation). Perceptions of thought validity are influenced by thought-relevant as well as incidental factors (e.g., one's moods, sense of ease), and the impact of these factors can vary with their meaning. Individual and situational factors moderate when people rely on their assessments of validity and what thoughts are salient to validate. In short, SVT is a comprehensive and integrative framework from which to examine the use of thoughts across many seemingly diverse variables, outcomes, and domains in psychology. The theory is also relevant to understanding judgments in numerous applied contexts. By identifying moderators and mediators of thought validation processes and outcomes, SVT is capable of specifying when and why many different variables have an impact on judgments and actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A new outranking method for multicriteria decision making with complex Pythagorean fuzzy information

This article contributes to the advancement and evolution of outranking decision-making methodologies, with a novel essay on the ELimination and Choice Translating REality (ELECTRE) family of methods. Its primary target is to unfold the constituents and expound the implementation of the ELECTRE II method for group decision making in complex Pythagorean fuzzy framework. This results in the complex Pythagorean fuzzy ELECTRE II method. By inception, it is intrinsically superior to models using one-dimensional data. It is designed to perform the pairwise comparisons of the alternatives using the core notions of concordance, discordance and indifferent sets, which is then followed by the construction of complex Pythagorean fuzzy concordance and discordance matrices. Further, the strong and weak outranking relations are developed by the comparison of concordance and discordance indices with the concordance and discordance levels. Later, the forward, reverse and average rankings of the alternatives are computed by the dint of strong and weak outranking graphs. This methodology is supported by a case study for the selection of wastewater treatment process, and by a numerical example for the selection of the best cloud solution for a big data project. Its consistency is confirmed by an effectiveness test and comparison analysis with the Pythagorean fuzzy ELECTRE II and complex Pythagorean fuzzy ELECTRE I methods.

Can a River be Considered a Legal Person?

The focus of this study is an examination of what it means to be a legal person and the role that the law plays in bestowing the legal status of being a person. This study highlights the underpinning rationalities and human interest that establish a hierarchy between person, defined as “human”, at a superior level to everything else, defined as “nonhuman”. In this respect, there is a core notion concerning human exceptionalism based on the rational sovereignty that justifies and consolidates the mastery of nature. To understand the fundamental premises of legal personhood, it begins from the first usage of person in history and philosophy, since the concept of legal personhood has been established through historical and philosophical developments. Analysing the meaning of person through different conceptualisations can allow a deeper insight into the legal interpretation of personhood. As a result of such investigation, two main dualistic structures of legal personhood reveal: the person-property dualism and the human being-person dualism. Thus, legal personhood simultaneously includes personalisation and depersonalisation, and always operates in a hierarchical array. Although the division between persons and things in the concept of personhood is rigid, being a “person” or a “thing” is open to interpretation in different circumstances through legal practices of exclusion and inclusion. Recently, there have been an increasing number of court rulings and a tendency of legislation to recognise the legal personhood of natural entities as a legal way of conserving the environment. This leads to an interpretation that legal recognition is a matter of institutional interest and attempts. Nevertheless, legal practitioners mostly prefer to confer certain rights or the status of a legal person on nature without the consideration of legal personhood’s background as seen in the case discussed in this study - the Tierra Digna case in Colombia. While this study endeavours to demonstrate the anthropocentric standard view of legal personhood, its principal purpose is to indicate the malleable nature of legal personhood as a product of legal fiction. In this context, this study aims to conclude that law’s imaginary nature should be used for producing a new legal reasoning and for offering a real paradigm shift that is congruent with the plasticity of and the fluidity of nature.

The notions of “peoples”, “nations” and “mankind” in International Law

Today the competition among states to promote their international legal policy is intensifying and there is evident need for convincing interpretation of the core notions provided in the UN Charter and other universal treaties, yet not defined in these instruments. In light of this political and legal background, the present article explores the international law scope of the terms “nation” and “people” and whether all states are considered as “nations” under the terms of the UN Charter. The authors also investigate the concept of “mankind” from the standpoint of the law of treaties concluding that such a concept is not legally identical to the term “international community of states”.

Understanding Deep Learning with Statistical Relevance

AbstractThis paper argues that a notion of statistical explanation, based on Salmon’s statistical relevance model, can help us better understand deep neural networks. It is proved that homogeneous partitions, the core notion of Salmon’s model, are equivalent to minimal sufficient statistics, an important notion from statistical inference. This establishes a link to deep neural networks via the so-called Information Bottleneck method, an information-theoretic framework, according to which deep neural networks implicitly solve an optimization problem that generalizes minimal sufficient statistics. The resulting notion of statistical explanation is general, mathematical, and subcausal.

Cores and mechanisms in restricted housing markets

We consider two variants of Shapley and Scarf’s (1974) housing market model in which agents’ rights to consume own endowments are restricted but their rights to exchange endowments are unrestricted. In each of the two models, we propose a core notion to characterize allocations that are immune to coalition blocking under such restricted rights. In each model we prove that the corresponding core can be found by a strategy-proof variant of the Top Trading Cycle mechanism. Our results generalize the classical result in the housing market model that the core can be found by the strategy-proof Top Trading Cycle mechanism.

Pengejawantahan Pendekatan Storytelling dalam Pemahaman Membangun Diagram Alir Data

Throughout the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), establishment the software through various phases. System design is one of the most crucial aspects of the SDLC. The Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is a model to build the system. The purpose of the research was to make it easier for people to comprehend the diagram by carefully preparing DFD, then it created software according to the DFD design. Storytelling is the method employed, and it pertains to qualitative ways for creating language patterns. As a design reference, it needs to make the DFD pattern subsequently. The research mimics two scenarios to reflect previous research on the same principle. According to the findings of this study, there are two significant disparities. The first scenario concerns system user activity, whereas the second concerns software performance. Therefore, it corresponds to the core notion of input-process-output; narrative scenario 1 is more consistent and easier to design in the processed results created from sentence patterns to DFD patterns. Scenario 2, on the other hand, connects many process symbols to processes, complicating the DFD design. Finally, scenario 2 is beneficial for requirement's elicitation, whereas scenario 1 applies to business procedures.

Vector Optimization w.r.t. Relatively Solid Convex Cones in Real Linear Spaces

In vector optimization, it is of increasing interest to study problems where the image space (a real linear space) is preordered by a not necessarily solid (and not necessarily pointed) convex cone. It is well-known that there are many examples where the ordering cone of the image space has an empty (topological/algebraic) interior, for instance in optimal control, approximation theory, duality theory. Our aim is to consider Pareto-type solution concepts for such vector optimization problems based on the intrinsic core notion (a well-known generalized interiority notion). We propose a new Henig-type proper efficiency concept based on generalized dilating cones which are relatively solid (i.e., their intrinsic cores are nonempty). Using linear functionals from the dual cone of the ordering cone, we are able to characterize the sets of (weakly, properly) efficient solutions under certain generalized convexity assumptions. Toward this end, we employ separation theorems that are working in the considered setting.

Fostering Resilience of Smes to Supply Chain Disruptions: The Role of Relationships

The global spread of the recent coronavirus outbreak has disrupted supply chains in both unanticipated and unprecedented ways. In the wake of such numerous catastrophic incidents, the core notion of supply chain resilience has sparked the attention of countless researchers and practitioners. However, the supply chain resilience of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) remains rather underresearched to date. In such turbulent times, it is important to investigate the role of relationships in achieving supply chain resilience in the context of SMEs. Thus, the overall intention of this study is to explore the influence of supply chain relationships on the resilience of SME supply chains by exploring the impacts of both outsourcing and collaboration. A well-structured online questionnaire was administered by selecting respondents using stratified random sampling techniques. In order to measure all the variables, a 5-point Likert scale was used. The survey was administered to a total of 160 SMEs and 114 valid responses were returned (response rate of 71.25%). Quantitative data was analyzed using correlation and regression analysis with the help of SPSS tool. The results of the study revealed that both outsourcing, and collaboration positively influences supply chain resilience. Therefore, the study recommends SMEs to engage in outsourcing and collaborative processes to foster resilience in supply chains during turbulent times. To the best of the author’s knowledge the present study is one of the first study done regarding SME supply chain resilience in Sri Lanka. The study recommends SMEs to focus better on outsourcing techniques and collaborative procedures in order to nurture supply chain resilience. Therefore, the guidance of this study will provide future scholars and practitioners to pursue an effective study in the field. The present study was limited to quantitative methods to achieve the objectives of the study. Hence, the authors recommend future researchers to focus on qualitative methods that can aid in the advancement of knowledge. Keywords: Collaboration, COVID-19, Outsourcing, Small–Medium Enterprise (SME), Supply chain resilience.

Exploring participatory heritage governance after the EU Faro Convention

PurposeThis paper aims to analyse the key Faro notions of “heritage community” and “democratic participation” as defined in the Faro Convention, and how they challenge core notions of authority and expertise in the discipline and professional practice of cultural heritage.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines notions of “heritage community” and “democratic participation” as they are framed in the Faro Convention, and it briefly introduces two cases (Finland and Marseille) to explore their application. It then focusses on the implications of these two notions for heritage administration (expertise) in terms of citizen agency, co-creation of knowledge and forms of decision-making processes.FindingsThe Faro Convention favours an innovative approach to social, politic and economic problems using cultural heritage. To accomplish this, it empowers citizens as actors in developing heritage-based approaches. This model transforms heritage into a means for achieving socioeconomic goals and attributes to the public the ability to undertake heritage initiatives, leaving the administration and expert bodies as mediators in this process. To bring about this shift, Faro institutes the notion of “heritage communities” and fosters participative governance. However, how heritage communities practise participation may follow different paths and result in different experiences due to local and national political circumstances.Originality/valueThe Faro Convention opens up a window by framing cultural heritage within the realm of social and democratic instrumentality, above and beyond the heritage per se. But it also poses some questions regarding the rationale of heritage management (authority in governability), at least as understood traditionally under official heritage management discourses.

Geometric Decompositions of Surfaces with Spherical Metric and Conical Singularities

Abstract We prove that any compact surface with constant positive curvature and conical singularities can be decomposed into irreducible components of standard shape, glued along geodesic arcs connecting conical singularities. This is a spherical analog of the geometric triangulations for flat surfaces with conical singularities. The irreducible components include not only spherical triangles but also other interesting spherical polygons. In particular, we present the class of half-spherical concave polygons that are spherical polygons without diagonals and that can be arbitrarily complicated. Finally, we introduce the notion of core as a geometric invariant in the settings of spherical surfaces. We use it to prove a reducibily result for spherical surfaces with a total conical angle at least $(10g-10+5n)2\pi$.

Still challenging the pattern separation dogma: ‘quiero retruco’

In a famous Argentinean card game, a player with a good hand may call ‘truco’, to which his/her opponent may pass or raise the bet with ‘quiero retruco’. Rolls makes interesting arguments [1] in response to my claim of no pattern separation in the human hippocampus [2]. However, these arguments reflect long-standing misconceptions about the coding of human hippocampal memories and some misunderstandings about the human experiments and data. To his criticisms, I say ‘quiero retruco’, and highlight here that (i) there is currently no single solid evidence of pattern separation, that is, conjunctive coding at the single neuron level, in the human hippocampus (see [2] and Box 1 in [3]); (ii) on the contrary, evidence so far points to a lack of conjunctive hippocampal coding in humans, distinct to what has been described in the rat and monkey hippocampus [2–4]; and (iii) given the richness of human memory, the core notion of storing our experiences in separate, largely orthogonal (pattern-separated) hippocampal assemblies does not make sense.

Another way to look at counterfactuals

Abstract Counterfactuals such as If the world did not exist, we would not notice it have been a challenge for philosophers and linguists since antiquity. There is no generally accepted semantic analysis. The prevalent view, developed in varying forms by Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and others, enriches the idea of strict implication by the idea of a “minimal revision” of the actual world. Objections mainly address problems of maximal similarity between worlds. In this paper, I will raise several problems of a different nature and draw attention to several phenomena that are relevant for counterfactuality but rarely discussed in that context. An alternative analysis that is very close to the linguistic facts is proposed. A core notion is the “situation talked about”: it makes little sense to discuss whether an assertion is true or false unless it is clear which situation is talked about. In counterfactuals, this situation is marked as not belonging to the actual world. Typically, this is done in the form of the finite verb in the main clause. The if-clause is optional and has only a supportive role: it provides information about the world to which the situation talked about belongs. Counterfactuals only speak about some nonactual world, of which we only know what results from the protasis. In order to judge them as true or false, an additional assumption is required: they are warranted according to the same criteria that warrant the corresponding indicative assertion. Overall similarity between worlds is irrelevant.