Notion Of Implication Research Articles

The unbearable lightness of being implicated in conflict-affected societies: can teachers do anything about it?

PurposeIn this reflective essay, the authors explore how thinking with the notions of implication and complicity may encourage or hinder efforts to engage teachers in problematizing victim-perpetrator binaries in conflict-affected societies.Design/methodology/approachThis reflective essay draws on lessons learned from the authors’ long-time work with teachers in Cyprus and Israel. The authors suggest that the concept of implication provides a productive framework for thinking about teachers’ professional responsibilities in more complex and nuanced ways.FindingsThe reflections of the two authors highlight the challenges and possibilities of overcoming essentialist categories of “victims” and “perpetrators” in conflict-affected societies.Originality/valueThis essay shows the (im)possibilities of transforming the prevailing binaries in communities experiencing political conflict.

A Curator in the House of Memory: Restoration, Implication and the Post-Conflict Novel in Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man

ABSTRACT Aminatta Forna’s novel The Hired Man, on post-war Croatia, attests to the author's continued interest in transitional, post-conflict societies where mass atrocity and human rights violations such as forced disappearance and ethnic cleansing have taken place. Drawing on the conceptual framework of transitional justice and memory studies, this paper argues that the novel deepens and extends the concerns of post-conflict fiction in two main ways. Firstly, it explores the role of ordinary individuals as agents of restorative justice in small communities. The actual restoration of the house at the centre of the narrative transforms the building into a permanent site of memory that challenges collective amnesia and functions as a monument to coexistence on which to model future social relations. Secondly, the narrative provides an apt illustration of Rothberg’s notion of implication, foregrounding a model of indirect responsibility for historical injustice that problematises the figure of the naïve outsider through the foreign characters in the story. The narrative will work to engage these characters in collective restorative actions in the country’s troubled progress towards a fairer and more sustainable peace. The use of situational irony to enhance the theme of the indestructibility of the past will also be addressed.

A Formal Concept Analysis Approach to Cooperative Conversational Recommendation

We focus on the development of a method to guide the choice of a set of users in an environment where the number of features describing the items is high and user interaction becomes laborious. Using the framework of formal concept analysis, particularly the notion of implication between attributes, we propose a method strongly based on logic which allows to manage the users’ preferences by following a conversational paradigm. Concerning complexity, to build the conversation and provide updated information based on the users’ previous actions (choices) the method has polynomial delay.

Reasoning about functional and full hierarchical dependencies over partial relations

We study the implication problem for the combined class of functional and full hierarchical dependencies in the presence of SQL’s NOT NULL constraints. Two different notions of implication are addressed: one where a dependency is implied by the given set of dependencies plus the underlying schema, and one where a dependency is implied by the given set of dependencies alone. We establish axiomatizations for both notions of implication, and reveal deep relationships between them.

Strict Conditionals: a Negative Result

Jonathan Lowe has argued that a particular variation on C.I. Lewis’ notion of strict implication avoids the paradoxes of strict implication. In this paper it is argued that Lowe’s notion of implication does not achieve this aim. More over, a general argument is given to the effect that no other variation on Lewis’ notion of constantly strict implication describes the logical behavior of natur al language conditionals in a satisfactory way. 1 Indicative conditionals and strict implication In reaction to Russell’s interpretation of conditional sen tences as classical material implications, C.I. Lewis suggested that it would be more appropriate to interpret natural language conditionals as strict implications. He claimed t hat the truth-conditions of a sentence of the form ‘if p then q’ are given by the sentence ‘Necessarily, not p or q’ Lewis (1912). Russell and Lewis were speaking at cross purposes. Russell was mainly interested in the logical meaning of conditional expressions in the restricted context of mathematical proofs, whereas C.I. Lewis wanted to express the logical meaning of indicative conditionals in natural language in general. And it is true that in mathematical proofs, the meaning of conditional assertions can be taken to be expressed by the corresponding material implications. But the so-called paradoxes of material implicationto which C.I. Lewis drew Russell’s attention do show that material im plications do not capture the truth-conditions of conditional expressions as th ey are generally used in daily speech. Attempts have been made to relegate the paradoxes of material implication to pragmatics, by classifying the paradoxes of material implication as true assertions which violate some of the Gricean conversational implicatures. But the attempts that are made so far are generally regarded as unsatisfactory. 1

Structure implicative des propriétés, conséquences pour l'étude de la catégorisation

We show how the notion of implication between properties and the relevance principle shed new light on the results of Rosch and her colleagues (1975, 1976). To uncover our hypotheses, concerning relationships between properties, participants were asked to respond to propositions linking properties A and B, relative to birds, of the type “ If A, can it generally be said that B?” Results show that some properties are linked one to the other (quasi-equivalence, quasi-implication, or quasi-independence) and that these implicative links can be summarized by an implicative graph. The resulting property structure has a predictive character for participant response times.

Which notion of implication is the right one? From logical considerations to a didactic perspective

Implication is at the very heart of mathematical reasoning. As many authors have shown, pupils and students experience serious difficulties in using it in a suitable manner. In this paper, we support the thesis that these difficulties are closely related with the complexity of this notion. In order to study this complexity,we refer to Tarski's semantic truth theory,which contributes to clarifying the different aspects of implication: propositional connective, logically valid conditional, generalized conditional,inference rules. We will show that for this purpose, it is necessary to extend the classical definition of implication as a relation between propositions to a relation between open sentences with at least one free variable. This permits to become aware of the fact that, in some cases, the truth-value of a given mathematical statement is not constrained by the situation, contrary to the common standpoint that, in mathematics, a statement is either true or false. In the present paper, the didactic relevance of this theoretical stance will be illustrated by an analysis of two problematic situations and the presentation of some experimental results from our research on first-year university students' understanding of implication.

Implicative analysis for multivariate binary data using an imprecise Dirichlet model

Bayesian implicative analysis was proposed for summarizing the association in a 2×2 contingency table in possibly asymmetrical terms such as “presence of feature a implies, usually, presence of feature b” (“ a quasi-implies b” in short). Here, we consider the multivariate version of this problem: having n units which are classified according to q binary questions, we want to summarize the association between questions in terms of quasi-implications between features. We will first show how, at a descriptive level, the notion of implication can be weakened into that of quasi-implication. The inductive step assumes that the n units are a sample from a 2 q -multinomial population. Uncertainty about the patterns’ true frequencies is expressed by an imprecise Dirichlet model which yields upper and lower posterior probabilities for any quasi-implicative statement. This model is shown to have several advantages over the Bayesian models based on a single Dirichlet prior, especially when 2 q is large and many patterns are thus unobserved by design.

Minimization of a quadratic pseudo-Boolean function

We present a branch and bound algorithm for minimizing a quadratic pseudo-Boolean function f( x). At each node of the search tree the lower bound is computed in three phases and is equal to b 1 + b 2 + b 3. Computation of b 1 is based upon roof duality, b 2 uses the characterization of some positive quadratic posiforms associated with the directed cycles of the implication graph of Aspvall, Plass and Tarjan and b 3 is computed by searching in a posiform of degree 4 some subfunctions which cannot be equal to zero. These subfunctions are found by using the notion of implication between literals. Computational results on several hundred test problems with up to 100 variables demonstrate the efficiency of this lower bound.