Stringent Concept Research Articles

Can the constitutional state accommodate the administrative state? Rousseau versus Hegel

ABSTRACT This essay inquires whether a constitutional state, understood as one ruled not by natural persons but by laws and legal decisions that free persons can endorse, can accommodate the administrative state, understood as one wherein executive agencies exercise law-making, statute-interpreting, and sanction-levying powers. Drawing from Rousseau and Hegel, it distinguishes between two stringent models of the constitutional state – a democratic-republican model and one ordered to an autonomous concept of Law – and compares their abilities to accommodate an executive with a robust law-making and statute-interpreting authority. The essay concludes that, whereas the democratic-republican model is hostile to the administrative state, the Law-centred model is at ease with it and allows it to flourish within bounds. The Law-centred model is thus the only one to reconcile a stringent concept of the constitutional state with the executive power that state needs to fulfil its positive obligations to its citizens.

Sorge – Macht – Recht. Konzeptionelles in der Praxis der Pandemiebekämpfung

The coronavirus pandemic as an exceptional social situation demands social-philosophical answers. On the basis of care and power as relationship concepts, the following essay discusses several aspects of German pandemic law and its potential for the struc- turing of social relationships. It will turn out, that even if there is no stringent concept, many legal aspects are linked to the care for ourselves and others as well as to themes of power. So, they include a potential for a deeper understanding of social interaction in the current situation.

Covering Based Pessimistic Multigranular Rough Equalities and their Properties

The basic rough set theory introduced by Pawlak as a model to capture imprecision in data has been extended in many directions and covering based rough set models are among them. Again from the granular computing point of view, the basic rough sets are unigranular by nature. Two types of extensions to the context of multigranular computing are done; called the optimistic and pessimistic multigranulation by Qian et al in 2006 and 2010 respectively. Combining these two concepts of covering and multigranulation, covering based multigranular models have been introduced by Liu et al in 2012. Extending the stringent concept of mathematical equality of sets rough equalities were introduced by Novotny and Pawlak in 1985. Three more types of such approximate equalities were introduced by Tripathy in 2011. In this paper we study the approximate equalities introduced by Novotny and Pawlak from the pessimistic multigranular computing point of view and establish several of their properties. These concepts and properties are shown to be useful in approximate reasoning.

Fuzzy decision making and consensus: Challenges

Group decision making is part of every organizational life. It is a type of participatory process in which multiple decision makers acting collectively, analyze problems, consider and evaluate several alternatives, and select from among the alternatives a solution. In such a situation, an important issue is the level of agreement or consensus achieved among the group of decision makers before obtaining the solution. In the beginning, consensus was meant as a full and unanimous agreement. Regrettably, this stringent concept of consensus in many cases is a utopia. As a result, and from a pragmatic point of view, it makes more sense to speak about a degree of consensus and, here, the theory of fuzzy sets has delivered new tools for the analysis of such imprecise phenomena like consensus. Given the significance of reaching an accepted solution by all the decision makers, consensus is a major aim of group decision making problems and, in such a way, it has obtained a great attention in the literature. However, there still exist several dares which have to be tackled by the researchers. The purpose of this paper is to bring out several issues that represent challenges that have to be faced.

Quantum indirect estimation theory and joint estimate of all moments of two incompatible observables

We introduce the quantum indirect estimation theory, which provides a general framework to address the problem of which ensemble averages can be estimated by means of an available set of measuring apparatuses, e.g., estimating the ensemble average of an observable by measuring other observables. A main ingredient in this approach is that of informationally complete (infocomplete) measurements, which allow us to estimate the ensemble average of any arbitrary system operator, as for quantum tomography. This naturally leads to the more stringent concept of $AB$-informationally complete measurements, by which one can estimate jointly all the moments of two incompatible observables $A$ and $B$. After analyzing all general properties of such measurements, we address the problem of their optimality, and we completely solve the case of qubits, showing that a ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{x}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{y}$-infocomplete measurement is less noisy than any infocomplete one. We will also discuss the relation between the concept of $AB$ infocompleteness and the notion of joint measurement of observables $A$ and $B$.

The Pathogenesis of Lyme Neuroborreliosis: From Infection to Inflammation

This review describes the current knowledge of the pathogenesis of acute Lyme neuroborreliosis (LNB), from invasion to inflammation of the central nervous system. Borrelia burgdorferi (B.b.) enters the host through a tick bite on the skin and may disseminate from there to secondary organs, including the central nervous system. To achieve this, B.b. first has to evade the hostile immune system. In a second step, the borrelia have to reach the central nervous system and cross the blood-brain barrier. Once in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the spirochetes elicit an inflammatory response. We describe current knowledge about the infiltration of leukocytes into the CSF in LNB. In the final section, we discuss the mechanisms by which the spirochetal infection leads to the observed neural dysfunction. To conclude, we construct a stringent concept of the pathogenesis of LNB.

Maximal and Supremal Domains for Strategy-Proofness

In this paper, we pose the following question in a private-good model. To what extent can the single-peaked domain be enlarged while preserving the existence of rules satisfying strategy-proofness, symmetry and unanimity? This formulation is adopted for three reasons. First, it marks a clear distinction between the two existing approaches to the maximal domain question in the literature. Second, it restores the role of strategy-proofness, which is suppressed by efficiency in an earlier result (Ching and Serizawa, 1998). Third, a private-good model allows us to conduct a richer analysis of strategy-proof rules. We show that the weakly single-peaked domain is the unique maximal domain for strategy-proofness, symmetry and unanimity. The weakly single-peaked domain is marginally bigger than the single-peaked domain. A diagnosis of the result reveals that maximal domain can be a stringent concept. A less stringent concept is proposed: supermal domain. (Supremal domain is analogous to the concept of supremum in an open interval.) All supermal domains for strategy-proofness, symmetry and unanimity are shown to be strictly smaller than the convex domain, which is slightly bigger than the weakly single-peaked domain. These results indicate that the assumption of single-peakedness essentially cannot be dispensed with if one is interested in strategy-proofness.