In this paper the truth is studied in the frame of autonomous systems theory. The method of the truth verification is worked out in its functional aspect. The verification is based on comparison of the predicted inner state of the autonomous agent, that is the cognitive subject, to the achieved inner state of the agent. The state is achieved as the result of performing the action in the real world—the agent’s environment. The action design is created on the basis of (...) the agent’s model of the world. The truth is defined as the adequacy of the model of the real world in the context of the goal that is assumed to be reached as the effect of the performed action. The concepts of the cognitive subject, the truth bearings and the knowledge are redefined. The classical problems of aletheiology and epistemology are discussed in the light of the proposed approach. The cybernetic construct of an autonomous agent allows the researcher to consider a wide class of cognitive entities, which, in the previous approaches, have been limited only to human beings as cognitive subjects. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to make progress on the theoretical discussions about marketing systems in relation to the construction of the concept of equilibrium. An argumentative basis was developed in relation to the service-dominant logic, as well as propositions based on the theory of stakeholders, on distributive justice and on the discussion of externalities to consider the product as an agent of the marketing system. In addition, a product typology that sees life as a material basis for delivering (...) a performance developed, arguing that systems based on this kind of materiality require a different moral consideration. (shrink)

The author's unified system concept" evolves as a result of a new approach to the unification of physics and biology. Phenomena can be regarded either as cyclical and recurrent or as unique and structural, but from a wider perspective, every event can be taken as a phase in a recurrent process. Such a relativity allows us to consider the universe as constituted by nothing but recurrent, self-maintaining processes, some being the objects of physics and others of biology but both united (...) as processes in a totality. Of particular interest are the author's discussions of the dependence and independence of the organism on its surroundings and of the relation of the cyclical and the unique to time.--M. F. (shrink)

본 논문에서는 간양이 1980년대 중반부터 최근까지 구축한 담론의 핵심 요소인 전통재구축과 그것을 기반으로 하여 형성된 체제구상의 논리를 분석하여 그 특성을 규명하고, 향후 전망을 제시한다. 간양은 1980년대 중반에 ‘과거로부터 전승되어 계승이나 배척하는 대상이 아닌 미래를 지향하면서 현재에 부단히 창조되고 진전되는 가치’로서의 ‘전통’ 개념을 제시함으로써 전통에 대한 전향적 접근방식을 보였다. 1990년대에는 시민개인을 주체로 하는 대중민주주의 확립을 주장하고, 자본주의적 체제전환 국면에서 등장한 자유주의의 보수적이고 귀족주의적 성격을 지적하는 등 현존 체제에 대한 비판적 사유의 계기를 던져주었다. 그리고 2005년 무렵에는 현대자본주의의 부작용을 억제하고 해결하는 사회주의가 중국의 (...) 소프트파워가 되어야 함을 주장하면서 체제에 대한 비판적 사유를 이어갔다. 2005년 무렵 간양은 전통에 대한 전향적 사유와 체제에 대한 비판적 사유를 결합하여 중국 체제전환의 성과를 평가하고 그 연장선상에서 중국의 나아갈 길을 제시한다. 여기서 간양은 중국의 경제성장을 이루는 동력에는 공자⋅마오쩌둥⋅덩샤오핑으로 상징되는 세 가지 전통이 있었다고 주장하면서, 이들의 결합 양상을 ‘새로운 시대의 통삼통’으로 명명한다. 여기서 간양은 마오쩌둥 시대의 지방분권적 경제 체제 구축이 덩샤오핑 시대의 개혁이 성공하는 데 사회적 토대로 작용했다고 주장하고, 화교자본의 중국성장에 대한 기여를 공자의 전통으로 설명하면서, 세 전통의 연속성을 강조한다. 그리고 중국의 나아갈 길을 ‘유가사회주의공화국’으로 제시하면서 소프트웨어로서의 사회주의가 근간이 되는 민주주의공화국 수립을 주장하고, ‘유가사회주의공화국’에 중국의 정식 국호인 중화인민공화국의 실질적 함의로서의 위상을 부여한다. 여기서는 유가나 전통에 대한 간양의 독특한 개념정의가 발견된다. ‘새로운 시대의 통삼통’과 ‘유가사회주의공화국’ 담론에서 간양은 전통을 과거에 형성되어 현재까지 전승되어 내려오는 유산이 아닌 현재 사회의 골간을 이루고 발전적 미래를 만드는 핵심적 가치라는 개념으로 사용한다. 또한 유가는 고전적 유가 경전에 근거를 둔 이론적 내용이 아닌 중국을 대표하는 상징 개념으로 사용된다. 그런데 간양의 전통관과 체제인식에서는 이중성도 발견된다. ‘새로운 시대의 통삼통’ 논리에서 간양은 화교자본이나 중국의 성장을 긍정적으로만 평가하고 그 과정에서 드러나는 문제에 대해서는 언급하지 않아 비판성을 탈각했다. 또한 전통관의 측면에서도 중국의 고전 문명과 현대 문명 간의 연속성과 중국적 문명의 창조를 주장하는 색채를 점점 짙게 드러내어 1980년대의 전향적 전통관에서 점점 멀어지고 있다. 이러한 경향이 최근 들어 동시에 강하게 등장하는 것으로 보아 향후 간양의 담론은 중국의 독자성을 강화하는 문명건설의 방향으로 진행되는 동시에 체제비판의 계기는 점점 약해질 것으로 전망된다. (shrink)

By offering an analysis of different conceptions of corruption connected to the political regime and contingency in which they developed, the article retrieves a systemic meaning of political corruption. Through the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Machiavelli, it reconstructs a dimension of political corruption particular to popular governments and also engages with recent neo-republican and institutionalist attempts at redefining political corruption. The article concludes that we still lack a proper conception of systemic corruption comparable to the (...) one of the Ancients because we are yet unable to account for the role procedures and institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning and what this means for liberal democratic regimes. (shrink)

PDF version This talk explores three concepts of system in engineering: systems theory, systems approach, and systems engineering. They are exemplified in three dimensions of engineering: science, design, and management. Unifying the three system concepts is the idea of function: functional abstraction in theory, functional analysis in design, and functional requirements in management. Signifying what a system is for, function is a purposive notion absent in physical science, which aims to understand nature. It is prominent in engineering, which aims to (...) transform nature for serving the wants and needs of people. (shrink)

I examine the main anticosmopolitan Rawslian argument, the ‘basic structure argument.’ It holds that distributive justice only applies to existing basic structures, there are only state basic structures, so distributive justice only applies among compatriots. Proponents of the argument face three challenges: 1) they must explain what type of basic structure relation makes distributive justice relevant only among compatriots, 2) they must explain why distributive justice (as opposed to allocative or retributive) is the relevant regulative concept for basic structures, and (...) 3) they must put forth a plausible concept of distributive justice. I show that Rawlsians support what I will call the ‘division of labor thesis’ to answer the first two challenges. Briefly, the division of labor thesis holds that distributive justice only becomes relevant where members of a division of labor jointly produce some socioeconomic product. To meet the third challenge, Rawlsians seem to accept what Elizabeth Anderson calls the ‘modern systemic concept of distributive justice’ – the idea that distributive justice organizes entire economic systems with respect to their distributive consequences or the relationships they maintain. I argue that if Rawlsians accept the systemic concept, they should reject the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument. (shrink)

The notion of “hierarchy” is one of the most commonly posited organizational principles in systems neuroscience. To this date, however, it has received little philosophical analysis. This is unfortunate, because the general concept of hierarchy ranges over two approaches with distinct empirical commitments, and whose conceptual relations remain unclear. We call the first approach the “representational hierarchy” view, which posits that an anatomical hierarchy of feed-forward, feed-back, and lateral connections underlies a signal processing hierarchy of input-output relations. Because the representational (...) hierarchy view holds that unimodal sensory representations are subsequently elaborated into more categorical and rule-based ones, it is committed to an increasing degree of abstraction along the hierarchy. The second view, which we call “topological hierarchy", is not committed to different representational functions or degrees of abstraction at different levels. Topological approaches instead posit that the hierarchical level of a part of the brain depends on how central it is to the pattern of connections in the system. Based on the current evidence, we argue that three conceptual relations between the two approaches are possible: topological hierarchies could substantiate the traditional representational hierarchy, conflict with it, or contribute to a plurality of approaches needed to understand the organization of the brain. By articulating each of these possibilities, our analysis attempts to open a conceptual space in which further neuroscientific and philosophical reasoning about neural hierarchy can proceed. (shrink)

The technical literature actively discusses ideas for creating digital twins to solve a wide range of problems that arise for enterprises of various kinds. Advances in the areas of information technology and the development of the necessary software really make it possible to obtain important new results through the creation of digital twins. This paper proposes the concept of building a network of digital twins, used to solve a number of actual problems in complex telecommunication systems. Two applications are considered (...) examples of such tasks. The first application is the organization of information feedback for enterprises involved in the life cycle of a telecommunication network: “elaboration of modernization principles, development of equipment, design, construction, and operation.” The second application is monitoring traffic, including its atypical behavior, in order to avoid the recurrence of erroneous actions in case of emergency situations. Another important feature of the digital twin network is that it will become an effective tool for conducting interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

The Civil Code of Lithuania (1964), in force until 2000, did not regulate the objects of civil rights, thus Chapter V of Part III of Book I of the Civil Code of Lithuania is a significant novelty. Several approaches to an abstract definition of the objects of civil rights still exists in the legal doctrine: whether the object of civil rights and the object of the civil relationship coincide; is the object of civil rights an element of the civil relationship (...) and can separate objects (e.g. actions) be considered as the objects of civil rights. Some authors consider such discussion useless to the practical implementation of the law, however, other authors emphasise that the lack of attention of the theory to this subject causes methodological problems while analysing the functional and systemic links among different types of civil relationships. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to analyse the link between the concepts of the object of civil rights and the object of civil relationship, the link between the objects of civil rights and property objects and the types of objects of civil rights in order to reveal the system of objects of civil rights. The subject-matter of the research is the analysis of legal regulation and legal doctrine of the objects of civil rights and their types and their interrelation with the property objects in order to identify the abstract definition of the object of civil rights and examine the system of objects of civil rights. (shrink)

The number of studies related to natural and artificial mechanisms of learning rapidly increases. However, there is no general theory of learning that could provide a unifying basis for exploring different directions in this growing field. For a long time the development of such a theory has been hindered by nativists' belief that the development of a biological organism during ontogeny should be viewed as parameterization of an innate, encoded in the genome structure by an innate algorithm, and nothing essentially (...) new is created during this process. Noam Chomsky has claimed, therefore, that the creation of a non-trivial general mathematical theory of learning is not feasible, since any algorithm cannot produce a more complex algorithm. This study refutes the above argumentation by developing a counter-example based on the mathematical theory of algorithms and computable functions. It introduces a novel concept of a Universal Learning System (ULS) capable of learning to control in an optimal way any given constructive system from a certain class. The necessary conditions for the existence of a ULS and its main functional properties are investigated. The impossibility of building an algorithmic ULS for a sufficiently complex class of controlled objects is shown, and a proof of the existence of a non-algorithmic ULS based on the axioms of classical mathematics is presented. It is argued that a non-algorithmic ULS is a legitimate object of not only mathematics, but also the world of nature. These results indicate that an algorithmic description of the organization and adaptive development of biological systems in general is not sufficient. At the same time, it is possible to create a rigorous non-algorithmic general theory of learning as a theory of ULS. The utilization of this framework for integrating learning-related studies is discussed. (shrink)

This article compares Honneth’s attempt to revise socialist thinking on women’s subordination in the family with feminist work on the topic. Both identify economism as the reason why socialism has historically failed to come up with an adequate account of women’s oppression in the family. However, their attempts to overcome economism proceed in different directions. Feminists overcome economism by expanding and enriching ideas of the economic and value producing activity and applying these reworked categories to women’s reproductive labour. Honneth overcomes (...) economism by suspending materialist explanation and focussing on emancipatory ethical dynamics implicit in the family. In comparison to feminist work, Honneth’s ethicised account of gender and family is as reductive as the economism it aims to surmount. First, his progressive historiography engenders a Whiggish narrative of the steady expansion of women’s social freedom in the family that downplays ambiguous and negative historical developments related to the changing nature of patriarchy. Second, his reified archetype of the family obscures the systemic causes of persistent gendered asymmetries within households. Finally, his Hegelian endorsement of institutionally expressed normativity leads in a reformist political direction and away from the radical, deep-democratic options that socialist feminists deem necessary to counteract women’s subordination. (shrink)

What does it mean to assert or deny the existence of a legal system? How can one determine whether a given law belongs to a certain legal system? What kind of structure do these systems have, that is--what necessary relations obtain between their laws? The examination of these problems in this volume leads to a new approach to traditional jurisprudential question, though the conclusions are based on a critical appraisal, particularly those of Bentham, Austin, Kelsen, and Hart.

. A new approach to the formalization of concepts used in legal reasoning such as obligation and cause is presented. The formalization is based on the linguistic use of the concepts both in legal language and in ordinary language, and has been motivated by work on a legal expert system with a natural language interface. Particularly for the concept of obligation this yields quite different results from those obtained by the usual approach of deontic logic: So‐called paradoxes are avoided, quantification (...) over obligations becomes possible, no restriction to a “single‐agent system” is required, and collisions of obligations can be formulated. (shrink)

The multidimensional environments providing the stimuli for normal and abnormal human behavior have been characterized by a variety of environmental tensors, the time rates of change of which yield quantitative measures of various aspects of environmental dynamics. A general response tensor is introduced to describe the behavior of living organisms to any desired degree of complexity. Tensor measures of such psychiatric concepts as reactivity, adaptability, responsiveness, instinctiveness and suggestibility are mathematically defined in terms of the response and environment tensors. Based (...) on clinical and experimental observations, postulates are then made regarding the dynamic relationships between the external responses and the internal drives of the self-system at different levels of consciousness. Lemmas and theorems are deduced pertaining to behavioral and environmental interactions in a psychomedical context, and a nonlinear mechanism for stochastically learned behavior patterns is proposed. (shrink)

The systems view on life and its emergence from complex chemistry has remarkably increased the scientific attention on metabolism in the last two decades. However, during this time there has not been much theoretical discussion on what constitutes a metabolism and what role it actually played in biogenesis. A critical and updated review on the topic is here offered, including some references to classical models from last century, but focusing more on current and future research. Metabolism is considered as intrinsically (...) related to the living but not necessarily equivalent to it. More precisely, the idea of “minimal metabolism”, in contrast to previous, top‐down conceptions, is formulated as a heuristic construct, halfway between chemistry and biology. Thus, rather than providing a complete or final characterization of metabolism, our aim is to encourage further investigations on it, particularly in the context of life's origin, for which some concrete methodological suggestions are provided. Also see the video abstract here:https://youtu.be/DP7VMKk2qpA. (shrink)

We develop a category theoretical scheme for the comprehension of the information structure associated with a complex system, in terms of families of partial or local information carriers. The scheme is based on the existence of a categorical adjunction, that provides a theoretical platform for the descriptive analysis of the complex system as a process of functorial information communication.

The concept of health is not only a specific criterion for evaluation of water quality delivered by a distribution system but also a suitable paradigm for overall functioning of the hydraulic and structural components of the system. This article views health, despite its complexities, as the only criterion with suitable depth and breadth to allow a holistic assessment of system performance. Although many decisions relating to the planning and design of water distribution systems do implicitly consider human health, engineers and (...) planners seldom explicitly adopt a “health mindset” overall and, thus, miss the richness and possibilities of a health framework for a wider range of system evaluations, considerations, and trade-offs. This article argues why a breakdown in a healthy system will so frequently result in stresses experienced by humans and briefly reviews the concepts of human health and system health and provides specific examples of a significant interaction between the two. (shrink)

The representation of knowledge in the law has basically followed a rule-based logical-symbolic paradigm. This paper aims to show how the modeling of legal knowledge can be re-examined using connectionist models, from the perspective of the theory of the dynamics of unstable systems and chaos. We begin by showing the nature of the paradigm shift from a rule-based approach to one based on dynamic structures and by discussing how this would translate into the field of theory of law. In order (...) to show the full potential of this new approach, we start from an experiment with NEUROLEX, in which a neural network was used to model a corpus of French Council of State decisions. We examine the implications of this experiment, especially those concerning the limits of the model used, and show that other connectionist models might correspond more adequately to the nature of legal knowledge. Finally, we propose another neural model which could show not only the rules which emerge from legal qualification (NEUROLEX's goal), but also the way in which a legal qualification process evolves from one concept to another. (shrink)

This book explores noteworthy approaches to modal syllogistic adopted by medieval logicians including Abélard, Albert the Great, Avicenna, Averröes, Jean Buridan, Richard Campsall, Robert Kilwardby, and William of Ockham. The book situates these approaches in relation to Aristotle's discussion in the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and other parts of the Organon, but also in relation to the thought of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Boethius on the one hand, and to modern interpretations of the modal syllogistic on the other. Problems explored (...) include: Aristotle's doctrine of modal conversion, the pure and mixed necessity-moods, modal ecthesis, the pure and mixed contingency-moods, and Aristotle's use of counter-examples. Medieval logicians brought various concepts to bear on these problems, including the distinction between per se and per accidens terms, the notion of essential predication, the distinction between ut nunc and simpliciter propositions, the distinction between de dicto and de re modals, and the notion of ampliation. All these are examined in this book. (shrink)

The informal business sector has made enormous contributions to Nigeria's economic growth and development, but this sector is not given the necessary attention to transforming these businesses toward sustainability. This study explores the depth of informal business sector practices in Nigeria. It underscores the inputs of stakeholders in the transformation of businesses in the Nigerian informal sector to increase tax remittances and employment generation for job security in the Nigerian economy. Also, it underpins value chain performances to transform the informal (...) sector and rescue it from liquidation through voluntary company arrangements, administration, merger, takeover, and acquisition schemes. The study adopts a conceptual review. The research relies on extant literature relating to the antecedence of informal business sector activities in Nigeria. It relies on reports from tertiary data sources such as academic articles, books, newspapers, the Internet, and website sources. It further explores the views of researchers, covering the informal sector development and the support of the provisions of the social services in Nigeria. There is the absence of a model for the transformation and sustainability of the informal sector enterprises in Nigeria. This study recommends a model approach to address informal sector enterprises' issues and challenges necessary to transform the businesses into a formal status while supporting their sustainability and resilience. (shrink)

This paper offers a contribution to debates around integrative aspects of systems biology and engages with issues related to the circumstances under which physicists look at biological problems. We use oral history as one of the methodological tools to gather the empirical material, conducting interviews with physicists working in systems biology. The interviews were conducted at several institutions in Brazil, Germany, Israel and the U.S. Biological research has been increasingly dependent on computational methods, high-throughput technologies, and multidisciplinary skills. Quantitative scientists (...) are joining biological departments and collaborations between physicists and biologists are particularly vigorous. This state of affairs raises a number of questions, such as: What are the circumstances under which physicists approach biological problems in systems biology? What kind of interdisciplinary challenges must be tackled? The paper suggests that, concerning physicists’ move to work on biological systems, there are common reasons to move, the transition must be understood in terms of degrees, physicists have a rationale for simplifying systems, and distinct conceptions of model and modeling strategies are recurrent. We identified problems regarding linguistic clarity and integration of epistemological aims. We conclude that cultural unconformities within the systems biology community have important consequences to the flow of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

What is the conception of the human body underlying the Transhumanismproject? This question guides the present analysis undertaken from a philosophicalinterdisciplinary perspective. Inspired by Le Breton and Morin’s hypotheses about the complexity of the human body, we criticize mechanisticconception of the living body underlying the Transhumanism project. Implications ofthe Transhumanism project for personal identity are proposed based on hypotheses ofcomplex systems theory as a starting point for critical reflection on a possible gloomyfuture envisioned by the unnatural/artificial development of the transhuman (...) body. (shrink)

This work contrasts Giovanni Sartor’s view of inferential semantics of legal concepts with a probabilistic model of theory formation. The work further explores possibilities of implementing Kemp’s probabilistic model of theory formation in the context of mapping legal concepts between two individual legal systems. For implementing the legal concept mapping, we propose a cross-categorization approach that combines three mathematical models: the Bayesian Model of Generalization, the probabilistic model of theory formation, i.e., the Infinite Relational Model first introduced by Kemp et (...) al. and its extended model, i.e., the normal-IRM proposed by Herlau et al.. We apply our cross-categorization approach to datasets where legal concepts related to educational systems are respectively defined by the Japanese- and the Danish authorities according to the International Standard Classification of Education. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a conceptual framework of the cross-categorization approach that, inspired by Sartor, attempts to explain reasoner’s inferential mechanisms. (shrink)

The present paper stems from the biosemiotic modelling of individual artificial cognition proposed by Ferreira and Caldas (2012) but goes further by introducing the concept of Umwelt Overlap. The introduction of this concept is of fundamental importance making the present model closer to natural cognition. In fact cognition can only be viewed as a purely individual phenomenon for analytical purposes. In nature it always involves the crisscrossing of the spheres of action of those sharing the same environmental bubble. Plus, the (...) incorporation of that concept is vital to understand the complex semiosis that sustains collective tissues, societies, regulating collective cognition and consequently cooperative action. The concept of Umwelt Overlap broadens the range of applicability of the previous model to several distinct domains allowing for example for its application to multi-agent cooperative autonomous systems. In this paper a Middle Size League RoboCup soccer team is used as an example of a possible application. (shrink)

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The complex-systems (...) approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

Although there has been much recent discussion on mechanisms in philosophy of science and social theory, no shared understanding of the crucial concept itself has emerged. In this paper, a distinction between two core concepts of mechanism is made on the basis that the concepts correspond to two different research strategies: the concept of mechanism as a componential causal system is associated with the heuristic of functional decomposition and spatial localization and the concept of mechanism as an abstract form of (...) interaction is associated with the strategy of abstraction and simple models. The causal facts assumed and the theoretical consequences entailed by an explanation with a given mechanism differ according to which concept of mechanism is in use. Research strategies associated with mechanism concepts also involve characteristic biases that should be taken into account when using them, especially in new areas of application. (shrink)

Pet animal management is subject to varied husbandry practices and the resulting consequences often impact negatively on animal welfare. The perceptions held by someone who proposes to keep an animal regarding the ease or difficulty with which its biological needs can be provided for in captivity are key factors in whether that animal is acquired and how well or poorly it does. We propose a system to ‘score’ animals and assign them to categories indicating the ease or difficulty with which (...) they can be kept as pets in accordance with welfare and public health and safety considerations. The ‘EMODE’ (‘Easy’, ‘Moderate’, ‘Difficult’, ‘Extreme’) system has two fundamental components: animal welfare—which considers the ‘five freedoms’ principles; and public health and safety—which considers management associated with risks from disease or injury to the keeper and to others. EMODE incorporates two tiers of assessment and guidance, and may offer a reasonable guide for the majority of relevant animals. EMODE Tier 1 provides a primary and general assessment of animals by class or group, and EMODE Tier 2 provides a secondary refined assessment of animals by species or breed. EMODE offers a user-friendly and versatile foundation concept for the future development of guidance for the layperson who may be considering acquiring a pet or for certain personnel when considering assigning species to restrictive lists of suitable animals, for example, ‘positive lists’ as used by governments to control animals in trade and keeping. (shrink)