Explication as a Three-Step Procedure: the case of the Church-Turing Thesis

In recent years two different axiomatic characterizations of the intuitive concept of effective calculability have been proposed, one by Sieg and the other by Dershowitz and Gurevich. Analyzing them from the perspective of Carnapian explication, I argue that these two characterizations explicate the intuitive notion of effective calculability in two different ways. I will trace back these two ways to Turing’s and Kolmogorov’s informal analyses of the intuitive notion of calculability and to their respective outputs: the notion of computorability and the notion of algorithmability. I will then argue that, in order to adequately capture the conceptual differences between these two notions, the classical two-step picture of explication is not enough. I will present a more fine-grained three-step version of Carnapian explication, showing how with its help the difference between these two notions can be better understood and explained.

You Say it Best When You Say Nothing At All: “[the Rule of Law]”

In this paper, I consider the way that ‘the Rule of Law’ is, or is not, deployed in both theoretical conceptions and apex courts' decisions. Where many early Rule of Law conceptions did not use ‘the Rule of Law’ and contemporary Western apex courts sometimes discuss the concept without uttering the phrase, I raise a question: when talking about the Rule of Law, is it possible, and is it useful, to not invoke the phrase ‘the Rule of Law’? By exploring accounts in which the phrase is not invoked, and through considering the benefits that flow from not mentioning ‘the Rule of Law’, I illuminate the circumstances in which it is, and is not, appropriate to do so. I conclude that, where there already exists an intuitive notion of the Rule of Law, the Rule of Law can be discussed best by not mentioning ‘the Rule of Law’.

A Self-Reflexive Verista Metareference and Autofiction in Luigi Capuana’s Narrative

With a Preface by Edwige Comoy Fusaro, this volume is one of few monographs on Italian post-Risorgimento author Luigi Capuana, and the first one written in English in more than forty years. Narratology and critical theory are combined with more ‘traditional’, historical-philological criticism to offer a radical rereading of the author’s narrative. Central to this study is the seemingly counter-intuitive notion of artistic self-reflexivity, which represents an innovative take on an author like Capuana, who has long been ‘canonised’ as a verista.

Object and Number

To put our antinativist intuitions in perspective, the next three chapters examine in greater detail whether some aspects of knowledge are in fact innate. Chapter 3 reviews infants’ early understanding of the physical world. For example, can a newborn tell that his mother is a single object, not a collection of parts? We will see that people’s notion of an object is complex—we assume that objects are cohesive (moving objects don’t spontaneously disintegrate in mid-air), that they move only by contact, and once contacted, they move continuously (rather than come “on” and “off,” or venture off a different path). Moreover, our intuitive notion of an “object” is demonstrably far richer than what our senses suggest. Remarkably, newborn infants know the same and so do several other species. Infants (and nonhuman animals) also have an implicit notion of number. When presented with small sets of objects (up to about four), young infants can implicitly track their precise number, and they can even add and subtract. Another numeric system allows humans and nonhumans alike to recognize the numericities of large sets by comparing their ratios (e.g., 6 vs. 12 objects). The early emergence of these capacities and their parallels in nonhuman species suggests that they are likely grounded in ancient evolutionarily principles that are innate.

Discharges, Poor-Performer Quits, and Layoffs as Valued Exits: Is It Really Addition by Subtraction?

We contend that a variety of types of employee exits from the firm are presumed to be a net positive and are thus valued by management, resulting in a potentially important new way to think about these leavers. For each of three valued exit (VE) types (discharges, poor-performer quits, and layoffs) we examine incidence, construct similarities and differences, and antecedents. We also summarize and critique the literature on VE consequences for the organization. In doing so we discuss how an underlying tension must accompany the analysis of VEs. Specifically, the intuitive notion of addition by subtraction must be considered relative to important contextual considerations and to evidence that the operational disruption created by VE departures may at times mitigate or even outweigh the VE benefits. Underlying our analysis is the stipulation that the formal consideration of VEs is in its infancy and is thus laden with conceptual and methodological challenges that scholars must address if we are to benefit from this new approach to employee exits from the firm.

A Segment-specific Metric for Quantifying Participation in Harmony

Despite substantial phonological research into segmental co-occurrence patterns, there is currently no systematic way of calculating the gradient degree to which a segment participates in a harmony system, across its co-occurrences with all other segments. In this paper, I adopt the statistical concept of relative risk as a measure of participation in harmony. I compute both O/E values and the relative risk measure for vowels in corpora of three languages with front/back harmony: Chuvash, Tatar, and Mari. I show that relative risk corresponds to the intuitive notion of how much a vowel participates in harmony, viewed based on how regularly it occurs in disharmonic contexts. I then consider the implications of the results, given what is known about categorical trends of participation in front/back harmony systems in other languages. For example, the relative risk values show that [i] generally participates less in the harmony system than most other vowels in all of these languages, and that marked vowels are typically highly harmonic. As such, this measure can illuminate gradient language-internal and cross-linguistic patterns in harmony participation that are not apparent from more categorical descriptions or entirely clear from O/E values.

Homo creators: deconstruction of the diverging way of thinking

The problem with generating advertising ideas, metaphors, narrative strands for video commercials, podcasts, and nontrivial script languages are on the copywriter’s agenda almost every day. The mass-produced creative approach is quite difficult, as far as “the Muse is mute” being an unachievable goal. The proposed article attempts to analyze the stages of creative impulse from the point of view of the psychological structure of associative thinking intuitive notion impulsive insights, and its correlation with the structure of consciousness.The article analyzes the convergent, and divergent pathways of the neural ensembles of the brain at all modeled spontaneous, or planned stages of the Muse’s first indications (‘AHA! ‘moment or sudden creative insight). The structure of non-trivial advertising images and original ideas in catching psycho-triggers; principles of brain’s working performance in an inspired moment; the whole creative process in challenging situations – the author tries to answer these and other question, to draw some conclusions against the present neuropsychological background.

Resisting the Intelligence Almost Successfully: Wallace Stevens's ‘Academic’ Style

While the sweeping referentiality of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound might seem to form the clearest connection between modernist innovation and academic work, this essay argues that it is in fact Wallace Stevens's erudite irony that most precisely anticipates the current set of relations between innovative poetry and the discipline of literary criticism. Stevens's work can thus be analysed as an intellectual collaboration not with a particular scholar or discipline but with the development of discourses specifically concerned about the value of hermeneutics. In particular, his poetry looks towards academic anxieties about the world in which the humanities now live: one that relentlessly demands educational pragmatism. This anticipation takes the form of a persistent concern regarding the artistic capabilities of abstract cogitation, something he puts into uneasy contact with a more intuitive notion of ‘natural’ positivism. This contact, in turn, manages to resist both the remnants of Romanticism and fin-de-siècle discussions about educational rationalization via a similar form of reflexive critical thinking. By foregrounding the tension between the ‘real’ and thinking about reality, Stevens turns his readers into co-workers, as both struggle to carve out a place for the difficult, impractical effort of interrogating what we can know about the world.

Relative plausibility and a prescriptive theory of evidence assessment

While the theory of relative plausibility is presented by Allen and Pardo (2019) as a descriptive theory of the proof process, this commentary discusses their theory as a possible starting point for a prescriptive theory of evidence assessment. Generally, naturalness and simplicity are necessary for the success of such a theory. The theory of relative plausibility is very promising in this respect, as its key concept is the straightforward and intuitive notion of explanation, according to which an explanation is an answer to a “why” question. Still, both the explanatory and the comparative dimensions of relative plausibility are in need of elaboration if one wants to give advice on evidence assessment in terms of Allen and Pardo’s framework. For one thing, it is necessary to examine the epistemological status of the various explanatory criteria regarding their potential as guides to truth or likelihood. Only epistemic (i.e., truth-conductive) criteria should be included in recommendations to fact-finders. Moreover, given the author’s interpretation of the ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ standard, it is unclear what the comparative dimension amounts to in criminal trials. At least a comparison of the kind involved in the author's account of civil trials standards is absent in their interpretation of BARD. If the comparative dimension of relative plausibility is relevant at all in criminal trials, it must be clarified what is to be compared.

One example of formal coherence

The aim of this paper is to present one case of probabilistic formalization of our intuitive notion of coherence. To that end, we will have to provide answers for the questions, what are all relevant relations between beliefs, as far as coherence is concerned, and of course, what is intuitive coherence. After we settle those questions, we will try to show how, by applying certain probabilsitic theories of confirmation to those relations, we can arrive at a basic probabilistic theory of coherence. We will point out certain problems of that theory. At the end of the paper, we will sum up the differences between intuitive and probabilistic coherence, and we will try to provide reasons why the successful formalization of this relation, should be a desired result in epistemology.