Two Senses of “Probability”

Author(s):  
Wayne C. Myrvold

The word “probability” has long been used in (at least) two distinct senses. One sense has to do with a rational agent’s degree of belief, commonly called credence in the philosophical literature. The other sort of probability is thought to be characteristic of a physical system, such as a roulette wheel; these are “in the world” rather than in our heads. This concept is called chance. It would be a mistake to think of these as rivals for the title of the single correct interpretation of probability. Rather, they are both useful concepts, with different roles to play. This chapter is an introduction to these concepts and their relations. It includes a discussion of the proper formulation and justification of a principle that links the two concepts, the Principal Principle. It is argued that neither of these concepts is dispensable. This raises the question of whether there is a notion of probability that can play the role of objective chance and is compatible with deterministic laws of physics.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 171-174
Author(s):  
Tarare Toshida ◽  
Chaple Jagruti

The covid-19 resulted in broad range of spread throughout the world in which India has also became a prey of it and in this situation the means of media is extensively inϑluencing the mentality of the people. Media always played a role of loop between society and sources of information. In this epidemic also media is playing a vital role in shaping the reaction in ϑirst place for both good and ill by providing important facts regarding symptoms of Corona virus, preventive measures against the virus and also how to deal with any suspect of disease to overcome covid-19. On the other hand, there are endless people who spread endless rumours overs social media and are adversely affecting life of people but we always count on media because they provide us with valuable answers to our questions, facts and everything in need. Media always remains on top of the line when it comes to stop the out spread of rumours which are surely dangerous kind of information for society. So on our side we should react fairly and maturely to handle the situation to keep it in the favour of humanity and help government not only to ϑight this pandemic but also the info emic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Andrew C. A. Elliott

Gambling is an ancient human activity. We indulge ourselves by allowing ourselves to experience the dangers and thrills of chance in a somewhat controlled way. The history of lotteries and related games is explored. The chances of drawing various poker hands are laid out. The role of probability in horse racing is described, and how the odds quoted are not strictly statements of probability, but terms on which business is to be done. Political prediction betting markets give us a further interpretation of probability as a way of expressing strength of opinion in a quantifiable, albeit flawed way. Wagers encourage boasters to put their money where their mouth is, and so to quantify their degree of belief.


Author(s):  
John A. Taber

Two principal strains of ethical thought are evident in Indian religious and philosophical literature: one, central to Hinduism, emphasizes adherence to the established norms of ancient Indian culture, which are stated in the literature known as the Dharmaśāstras; another, found in texts of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism alike, stresses the renunciation of one’s familial and social obligations for the sake of attaining enlightenment or liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The Dharmaśāstras define in elaborate detail a way of life based on a division of society into four ‘orders’ (varṇas) – priests, warriors, tradesmen and servants or labourers – and, for the three highest orders, four ‘stages of life’ (āśramas). Renunciation is valid only in the final two stages of life, after one has fulfilled one’s responsibilities as a student of scripture and as a householder. The various traditions that stress liberation, on the other hand, advocate total, immediate commitment to the goal of liberation, for which the householder life presents insuperable distractions. Here, the duties of the householder are replaced by the practice of yoga and asceticism. Nevertheless, specific ethical observances are also recommended as prerequisites for the achievement of higher knowledge through yoga, in particular, nonviolence, truthfulness, not stealing, celibacy and poverty. The liberation traditions criticized the system of the Dharmaśāstras for being overly concerned with ritual and external forms of purity and condoning – indeed, prescribing – the killing of living beings in Vedic sacrifices; but it was only in the Dharmaśāstras that the notion of action solely for duty’s sake was appreciated. The Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gītā (Song of God) represents an effort to synthesize the two ideals of renunciation and the fulfilment of obligation. It teaches that one should integrate yoga and action in the world. Only when acting out of the state of inner peace and detachment that is the culmination of the practice of yoga can one execute one’s duty without regard for the consequences of one’s actions. On the other hand, without the cultivation of inner yoga, the external forms of renunciation – celibacy, mendicancy, asceticism – are without significance. It is inner yoga that is the essence of renunciation, yet yoga is quite compatible with carrying out one’s obligations in the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-532
Author(s):  
Michael Wheeler

AbstractThe Turing Test is routinely understood as a behaviourist test for machine intelligence. Diane Proudfoot (Rethinking Turing’s Test, Journal of Philosophy, 2013) has argued for an alternative interpretation. According to Proudfoot, Turing’s claim that intelligence is what he calls ‘an emotional concept’ indicates that he conceived of intelligence in response-dependence terms. As she puts it: ‘Turing’s criterion for “thinking” is…: x is intelligent (or thinks) if in the actual world, in an unrestricted computer-imitates-human game, x appears intelligent to an average interrogator’. The role of the famous test is thus to provide the conditions in which to examine the average interrogator’s responses. I shall argue that Proudfoot’s analysis falls short. The philosophical literature contains two main models of response-dependence, what I shall call the transparency model and the reference-fixing model. Proudfoot resists the thought that Turing might have endorsed one of these models to the exclusion of the other. But the details of her own analysis indicate that she is, in fact, committed to the claim that Turing’s account of intelligence is grounded in a transparency model, rather than a reference-fixing one. By contrast, I shall argue that while Turing did indeed conceive of intelligence in response-dependence terms, his account is grounded in a reference-fixing model, rather than a transparency one. This is fortunate (for Turing), because, as an account of intelligence, the transparency model is arguably problematic in a way that the reference-fixing model isn’t.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Jerald D. Gort

AbstractAfter reflecting on the ambiguous role of religion in terms of violence, Jerald D. Gort in this article outlines, first, the conditions for true reconciliation among peoples (acknowledgement of Christian complicity; no cheap reconciliation; no utopian enthusiasm; no fatalistic view of human capacity); then, second, he outlines the initiatives ofthe World Council of Churches (WCC) toward justice and reconciliation in the world. Such initiatives involve the struggle against injustice on the one hand and a practice of the "wider ecumenism" (dialogue of histories, theologies, spiritualities, and life) on the other.


Author(s):  
Franz Mathis

AbstractThere is no doubt that industrialization was the main cause of modern economic welfare. The reasons for more or less industrialization in various regions of the world have been discussed widely for decades. However, a closer examination reveals that none of the controversial arguments and explanations put forward stand the test of empirical scrutiny. What has previously been ignored is the central role of large cities in provoking industrialization. Given all the other preconditions necessary for industrialization, it was finally the mass markets of large cities that made industrial mass production profitable for potential entrepreneurs. Thus, wherever large cities and urban agglomerations emerged in the world, industrialization followed suit. In a global and comparative perspective, industrialization was not so much a matter of countries but rather a matter of regions dividing the world into highly urbanized, industrialized and more prosperous regions on the one side, and still primarily rural, preindustrial and poorer regions on the other..


Phainomenon ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Roberto J. Walton

Abstract This article is an attempt to clarify the role of pregivenness by drawing on the accounts afforded by Eugen Fink both in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation and in the complementary writings to this study. Pregivenness is first situated, along with givenness and non-givenness, within the framework of the system of transcendental phenomenology. As a second step, an examination is undertaken of the dimensions of pregivenness in the natural attitude. Next, nonpregivenness in the transcendental sphere is examined with a focus upon the way in which indeterminateness does not undermine the possibility of a transcendental foreknowledge in the natural attitude, and on the other hand implies the productive character of phenomenological knowledge. After showing how, with the reduction, the pregivennes of the world turns into the pregivenness of world-constitution, the paper addresses the problems raised by the nonpregivenness both of the depth-levels and the reach of transcendental life. By unfolding these lines of inquiry, transcendental phenomenology surmounts the provisional analysis of constitution at the surface level as well as the limitation of transcendental life to the egological sphere. Finally, it is contended that Fink’s account of pregivenness overstates apperceptive or secondary pregivenenness because is does not deal with the pregivenness that precedes acts and is the condition of possibility for primary passivity. Reasons for the omission of impressional or primary pregivenness are suggested.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 357
Author(s):  
Yuanchun Li ◽  
Landysh G. Latfullina ◽  
Elvira F. Nagumanova ◽  
Alsu Z. Khabibullina

<p>The article raises the issue of translating the works of national literatures through an intermediate language since most of the works of the peoples of Russia find their readers in the world thanks to the Russian language. The urgency of this problem is obvious in modern conditions when the interest in Turkic-speaking literature is growing, and many Russian poets, like in the Soviet era, see themselves as the translators from national languages. On the example of the translation of the poem «tɵshtǝgechǝ bu kɵn – sǝer Һǝm iat …» (“the day is like a dream”) of the contemporary poetess Yulduz Minnullina both the strengths and the weaknesses of the modern translation school are considered. The word for word translation can lead to the unification of differences between literatures when the dominant language (the Russian language) imposes certain aesthetic principles on the original text. The most important aspect of the topic of interest is the consideration of the role of interlinear translation in the establishment of interliterary dialogue. Through interlinear translation a foreign work, endowed with its special world of ideas, images, national and artistic traditions, serves as the basis for dialogical relations that are indispensable for both the Russian-speaking reader who discovers the “other” literature, and the very work that is included in the dialogue in the “large time”. At the same time, the elimination of differences between literatures occurs when the translator, through the Russian language, by means of line-by-line translation, introduces the features of his own consciousness into a foreign work. In this case, the translation simplifies the content of the literature, equalizes the artistic merits, thereby projecting the life of the work onto communication, rather than dialogue.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Komal Prasad Phuyal

Prema Shah’s “A Husband” and Rokeya S. Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” present two complementary versions of women’s world: the real in Shah and the imagined in Hossain aspire to make the other complete. The worldview that each author projects in their texts reasserts the latent spirit of the other one. The embedded interconnectedness between the authors under discussion reveals their unique association and bond of women’s creative unity towards paving a road for the upliftment of women in general. The paper seeks to find out the historical forces leading to the formation of a certain type of bond between these two authors from different historical and socio-cultural realities. Shah locates a typical Nepali woman in the protagonist in the patriarchal order while Hossain pictures the contemporary Bengali Islamic society and reverses the role of men and women. Hossain’s ideal world and Shah’s real world form two complementary versions of each other: despite opposite in nature, each world completes the other. Sultana moves to the world of dream to seek a new order because Nirmala’s world exercises every form of tortures upon the women’s self. Shah exposes the social reality dictating upon the women’s self while Hossain’s protagonist escapes into the world of dream where women control the social reality effectively and successfully. Overall, Shah and Hossain complement each other’s world by presenting two alternative versions of the same reality, creating the feminist utopia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-272
Author(s):  
Svitlana Pilishek

The article deals with peculiarities of development and manifestation of multiple ethnicity of personality in conditions of polyethnic and multilingual environment that serves as a basis for transformation of both personality’s outlook and ethnic identity as a result of learning the second language. The current research is focused on studying the texts of autobiographic novels by Nelson Mandela (“A Long Walk to Freedom”) and Peter Abrahams (“Tell Freedom”) written in South African variant of English. Identification of original channels of culturally marked lexis that has been identified in the texts of autobiographies mentioned above has made it possible to confirm the facts multiple ethnicity that the authors possess. Language as a complex, evolutionary, hierarchically built megasystem undergoes changes at all levels while existing in a particular cultural and historical environment. The character and dynamics of such changes are predetermined by a range of factors including language contacts. The flexibility and cumulative character of the language system make it possible for the language to borrow culturally marked lexis from the “other” language. Such processes are predetermined by the fact that any language exists in close connection to the envorinment – the people; a language is a means of reality objectivation, a reflection of personality’s world. A personality learns another language, uses it in everyday life, absorbs elements of national cultures that are manifested in language through culturally marked lexis, builds own language picture of the world, and creates a network of multiple ethnicities that find their reflection in language. Interaction between a personality and representatives of other ethnic societies within a particular environment highlights both ethnic integrative and differentiating role of language.


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