Vague Properties Research Articles

The Return of the Landlord: Chinese Land Acquisition Conflicts as Illustrated by Peri-Urban Kunming

China’s many conflicts over land acquisition highlight China’s growing gap between rich and poor, between a small group of powerful land-hungry elites and the masses of powerless farmers. They show that despite the current stronger formal recognition of farmers’ land use rights and the introduction of devolution and participatory processes including direct village elections, land tenure security is weak. Vague property rights, weak legal procedures for state land acquisition and low legal compensation requirements can only partly explain the continuing land abuses. The fundamental problem is the price gap between arable land and construction land in combination with weak checks and balances on local elites. At present farmers lack adequate formal legal mechanisms to defend their rights when faced with such land acquisitions. As a result, they have tried to use non-legal, factual, and often violent means to protect their interests, with mixed results. The case of peri-urban Kunming shows that mere institutional changes such as enhancing the law’s procedures for acquisition and compensation, the introduction of direct village elections, the development of administrative law and political campaigns to punish abuses have so far not succeeded in enhancing tenure security. Only in areas where a fundamental economic change has occurred and farmers no longer solely depend on agricultural income have elections, petitions and protests been successful in changing practices and making local elites more accountable to the local population. This paper is based on prolonged fieldwork in peri-urban Kunming in Yunnan province during which local farmers, leaders, entrepreneurs and state enforcement officials were interviewed on ongoing land acquisition conflicts.

VAGUE GROUPS AND Ω-VAGUE GROUPS

Given a group G, we show how one can define a vague group structure on G via a chain of subgroups of G. We discuss how a group homomorphism f from a vague group X onto a group Y induces a vague group structure on Y with f satisfying the vague homomorphism property. The notion of Ω-vague groups is introduced, where Ω is a fuzzy subset. The direct product G1 × G2 of two vague groups and the internal vague direct product of subgroups of a vague group is introduced.

Cashing Out: Survival Crises Faced by Shareholding Cooperatives in Shanghai

Shanghai, a city with a high concentration of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), had about 11,500 converted shareholding cooperatives by the end of 2003. In recent years, the urban layout of Shanghai has required factories to be relocated in the suburbs to make space for new city development. However, how to use the compensation money triggered severe confrontations between employee shareholders and the management of some urban shareholding cooperatives. This article argues that the shareholding cooperative system does not necessarily clarify individual property rights. Vague property rights and the flaws in institutional designs of shareholding cooperatives alter the incentive structure of shareholders and results in inefficiency and distributional conflicts among current employees, retired shareholders, and management. Local governments, instead of assuming a hands-off stance, need to pay due attention to the development of shareholding cooperatives, especially in regard to the legal environment, guidance for further reforms, and assistance in conflict resolution.

Worldly Indeterminacy: A Rough Guide

This paper defends the idea that there might be vagueness or indeterminacy in the world itself--as opposed to merely in our representations of the world--against the charges of incoherence and unintelligibility. First we consider the idea that the world might contain vague properties and relations ; we show that this idea is already implied by certain well-understood views concerning the semantics of vague predicates (most notably the fuzzy view). Next we consider the idea that the world might contain vague objects ; we argue that an object is indeterminate in a certain respect (colour, size, etc.) just in case it is a borderline case of a maximally specific colour (size, etc.) property. Finally we consider the idea that the world as a whole might be indeterminate; we argue that the world is indeterminate just in case it lacks a determinate division into determinate objects.

Transvaluationism, common sense and indirect correspondence

The problem of reconciling the philosophical denial of ontological vagueness with common-sense beliefs positing vague objects, properties and relations is addressed. This project arises for any view denying ontological vagueness but is especially pressing for transvaluationism, which claims that ontological vagueness is impossible. The idea that truth, for vague discourse and vague thought-content, is an indirect form of language-thought correspondence is invoked and applied. It is pointed out that supervaluationism provides one way, but not necessarily the only way, of implementing the idea of indirect correspondence.

Methadone

What is the difference between heroin and methadone? Is this difference one of interpretation, where an 'opiate-like' substance is 'labelled' differently through social processes that arbitrarily describe methadone as 'legal' and 'therapeutic', and heroin as 'illegal' and 'harmful'? To study the nature of this difference, I follow two experiments in the United States and in France of methadone substitution, where medical practices attempt to replace heroin by methadone, and thereby to reduce the user's (illegal) drug use. In these trials, the experimenters ask precisely this question. The question of the nature of the difference between the substance's actions is further illustrated by the comparison between the substitution trials: when the experimenters describe methadone differently in different places and times, do they 'interpret' the drug differently, or is the drug itself different? I show that far too many elements vary from trial to trial to say that the 'interpretation' of the substance is all that varies. In order to explore the variation in detail, then, I draw on works about 'performance', and on the actor-network 'theory of action': what heroin and methadone do, but also also the very way in which they 'pass into action', is what varies in each trial. In the end, this question about difference is a question about action. In each trial, there is not from the start one substance with fixed or vague properties which one can then interpret in various manners. 'Substance' does not contain inherent actions from the start ('properties'). Rather, following the experimenters, it is possible to say that 'effects' are primary and that only at the end of the trial do the experimenters laboriously 'find substance' to effects.

Expressing constraint satisfaction problems in declarative modeling using natural language and fuzzy sets

The aim of this paper is to provide a new model of fuzzy or vague properties according to linguistic notions within the scope of declarative modeling and constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Some generic modifiers and generic fuzzy operators are applied on these properties. This model allows us to build a CSP according a pseudo-natural scene description. Solving this CSP provides possible scenes. Moreover, we propose a linguistic interpretation of negative properties instead of the classical logical negation. This negation process selects plausible properties as linguistic negation. Then, it sorts them to provide first the ones that have the best chance to be selected by the user.

SATURATEDNESS AND A HIERARCHY OF APPROXIMATE IDENTITIES

In this paper, 'identity' is eventually considered to be determined by a specified collection of 'properties' represented extensionally by subsets. Generally, the collection may contain fuzzy subsets representing vague properties, thus rendering vagueness to the concept of identity. Saturatedness condition, which in essence is a portion of Leibniz's principle of identity, has been dealt with in some detail. A hierarchy of identities is obtained. This hierarchy also indicates some relationship between the concepts 'identity' and 'property'. Some applications of the results to the modelling of indistinguishability in information systems have been indicated.

Fuzzy fault-tree analysis using failure possibility

In conventional probability-based fault-tree analysis, the vague property in many systems, especially, the man-machine system is often ignored. To overcome this disadvantage, the fuzzy set theory is applied to fault-tree analysis. The failure possibility defined by a triangular fuzzy number on the interval [0,1] is used to characterize the possible deviation of the basic events. The fuzzy operations according to the extension principle is used to calculate the failure possibility of the top event. Furthermore, a fuzzy importance index is proposed to demonstrate the contribution of a basic event to the safety improvement of the top event in a fuzzy environment.

The housing system of the former Soviet Union: Why do the soviets need housing markets?

Abstract The administrative‐command system that had been in full force in the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1990 had its own logic and internal consistency. It is now common knowledge that this economic system has flaws that led to a deepening secular decline over the past three decades. Because of ideological reasons, and an inadequate economic understanding of the capacity of their system to be liberalized, many reformers sought a third way between central planning and markets. The consensus today is that there is no third way. Among the former Soviet republics, Russia has just embarked on market‐oriented reforms and is facing a difficult and unstable transition because central planning mechanisms have ceased to function, but markets are not yet in place. This transition is particularly problematic for housing, which is a very severely distorted economic sector. The international evidence on market economies that has accumulated over the past 20 years shows that, when housing sector distortions exist, they are predominantly found on the supply side. In socialist economies, however, housing is part of the compensation provided by enterprises and other employers. As a result housing suffers from demand‐side distortions in addition to the supply‐side problems caused by the absence of land markets, vague property rights, and burdensome urban regulations. The housing sector is already so large and distorted in these highly urban economies that overall economic reforms cannot succeed without housing reforms. In addition to presenting an overview of Soviet housing, this paper provides comparative evidence indicating that, among all the distorted socialist housing systems, Russia's probably is the most impaired. The basic elements of a market‐oriented strategy to improve housing are briefly presented.

Models of the alternative set theory

Classical set theory is considered as the framework of contemporary mathematics. But there are aspects of our understanding of the real world about what it is not clear that they are described in Cantor's set theory in the best possible way. For example the formalization of some intuitive concepts such as the description of vague properties (which led to the theory of fuzzy sets) and the interpretation of the notion of infinitely small quantities (modelled by nonstandard models) is not quite simple in the classical set theory. Therefore it is natural to look for an alternative to Cantor's set theory which would enable us to formalize these considerations more naturally and which would be a sufficiently strong framework for mathematics at the same time.The alternative set theory which was created by P. Vopěnka (cf. [V]) is an attempt to construct a theory that could serve as an alternative to Cantor's set theory. The ideas of the alternative set theory make it possible to constitute a new approach to mathematics. An effort to formalize mathematically our intuitive concepts once more is made, and moreover it seems that one can obtain in the alternative set theory mathematical formalizations of concepts which up to now were not adequately formalized.In the alternative set theory we can build up all essential parts of mathematics. Development of the classical disciplines is described in [V]. Let us mention a few further results obtained in the alternative set theory: a connection between the discrete and the continuous on the basis of which it is possible to define topology (cf. [V]), investigation of motion (cf. [V]), construction of different types of σ-additive ultrafilters (cf. [S-V4]), classification of classes (measurement of vagueness of properties; cf. [Č-V]), possibility of definition of notions of nonstandard methods (cf. [S-V 1]) and valuations of ideals (cf. [M]). A series of articles has been written developing mathematics in the alternative set theory (for the full list of papers cf. [S]). For some remarks concerning the connection between the alternative set theory and nonstandard methods, the reader is refered to [S 4].

Languages of similarity

Studying the "quantum logic", one could observe that logical structures, like a language with its syntax and semantics, a consequence operation, etc., can be directly extracted from quantum theory. This way of constructing a language has no precedent in the history of formal logic. The procedure of "taking a well-known physical theory and distilling its logic", as Finkelstein [5] calls it, seems now to be sufficiently developed to apply it beyond the scope of quantum mechanics. The main characteristic feature of this procedure is that, roughly speaking, it reconstructs a syntax from a semantics: we identify some semantical objects within quantum theory, and infer the syntax of the corresponding language. It is the reverse of the common trends in formal logic, where we look for a semantics of a given syntactical structure. The main concern of this work is to find, in the "quantum-logical" manner, languages related to a "mini-theory" of similarity. It seems to be the first application of the quantum "reading off" procedure to a nonquantum theory.' We are still close to the quantum case, as a special similarity structure underlies quantum theory, too. Our considerations can be thus seen as a test of the quantum "reading off" procedure. This study of logical aspects of the notion of similarity is also of interest because this notion appears in some variants of the Kripkian modal semantics.2 After introducing basic notions of the "mini-theory" of similarity and illustrating them by examples (Section 2), we discuss in Section 3 the problem of determining a similarity structure by a set of properties. It is demonstrated that one must use vague properties to do this. This result is of crucial importance; because of it the languages of similarity we obtain have to be multi-valued. A set of objects with a similarity relation over it, together with the set of properties determining this similarity, form a structure resembling to some extent the basic structure of quantum theory. It makes it possible to apply here the same procedure as in the quantum case in order to find a language of the similarity "theory".

Natural language acquisition by a robot

“... nothing reveals our ignorance about a phenomenon more clearly than an attempt to define it in constructional terms.” (W. Grey Walter, The Development and Significance of Cybernetics) We present a model of language acquisition which demonstrates that considerable language competence can be acquired without presupposing innate linguistic factors. Vague or magical properties are avoided by describing the model as a design for a robot using clearly defined algorithms and mechanisms which can be simulated or constructed. Described first is the development of a simplified semantic system using a minimum of cognitive apparatus operating in a restricted environment. This works in conjunction with an algorithm to develop grammatical competence. No innate grammatical knowledge is needed; only interaction with an environment and a native speaker of the language is required. Grammatical competence is portrayed in terms of a new syntactic model, whose power is demonstrated by a game “simulation” in which the players make connections allowed by the syntactic rules to generate and parse English sentences. The paper closes with a second game which simulates the robot and its “parent” by a team of human players. This simulation shows how the robot develops its semantic and syntactic systems through its experience in the world.