Background: Equity as a basic human right builds the foundation of all areas of primary healthcare, especially prenatal care. However, it is unclear how pregnant women and their care providers perceive the equitable prenatal care. Objective: This study aimed to explore Iranian women’s and care providers’ perceptions of equitable prenatal care. Research design: In this study, a qualitative approach was used. Individual in-depth unstructured interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of pregnant women and their care providers. Data were analyzed (...) using inductive content analysis method. Participants and research context: A total of 10 pregnant women and 10 prenatal care providers recruited from six urban health centers across Ahvaz, a south western city in Iran, were participated in the study. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Ethics Committee affiliated to Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences. The ethical principles of voluntary participation, confidentiality, and anonymity were considered. Findings: Analysis of participants’ interviews resulted in seven themes: guideline-based care, time-saving care, nondiscriminatory care, privacy-respecting care, affordable comprehensive care, effective client–provider relationships, and caregivers’ competency. Conclusion: The findings explain the broader and less discussed dimensions of equitable care that are valuable information for the realization of equity in care. Understanding and focusing on these dimensions will help health policy-makers in designing more equitable healthcare services for pregnant women. (shrink)

"Certainty" occupies an important place in Wittgenstein’s epistemology: it does not belong to the category of knowledge but constitutes its foundation. In his view, knowledge boils down to language games, and language games are based on indubitable certainties. According to Wittgenstein, scepticism is meaningless, and if there is no certainty, then even doubt would be meaningless. Wittgesntein maintains that [relative] doubt and knowledge are epistemic categories, whereas absolute doubt and certainty are non-epistemic categories. Epistemic categories are meaningful and when expressed (...) by means of statements could be either true or false. In contrast, non-epistemic categories are meaningless and when expressed by means of statements the properties of truth and falsehood do not apply to them. The aim of the present paper is two fold: 1- Providing an explanation of the status of certainty in comparison to categories such as doubt and knowledge in Wittgenstein’s thought; 2- Providing a critical assessment of Wittgenstein's approach to certainty through the prism of critical rationalism. The main arguments of the paper are as follows: 1. Although Wittgenstein considers certainty to be meaningless and therefore not on a par with epistemological categories, he regards it as an objective concept that functions as the foundation upon which all human knowledge is based; 2. Wittgenstein's efforts to show the objectivity of certainty have not been entirely successful, partly due to his reliance on a defective notion of ‘objectivity’ and partly as a result of the prominence he assigns to the category of ‘meaning’ at the expense of the category of ‘truth’. (shrink)

The later Wittgenstein presents all kinds of knowledge in the form of language games based on forms of life. One of the implications of his later views is that certain language games and forms of life are incommensurable. Since each person can know the world only through his/her own form of life and language game, those who subscribe to entirely different language games cannot have a proper understanding of the forms of life of others. They are not able to critique (...) and evaluate their knowledge of reality unless they abandon their own customary forms of life and internalize other forms of life that they want to know about, that is, to become a member of a society based on those different forms of life. In contrast, Popper emphasizes the objective nature of knowledge by considering external reality as a major criterion of objectivity. Popper maintains that the growth of human knowledge takes place through a never-ending process of critical evaluation of previous knowledge claims and a continuous supply of new conjectures for capturing reality and their critical appraisal incessantly. In this article, following a brief description of the philosophical approaches of Wittgenstein and Popper (Sections 1 and 2), and a brief explanation of the anti-relativist attitude of critical rationalism (Section 3), we turn to a critical assessment of Wittgenstein's relativist approach through the prism of Critical Rationalism (Section 4). The last chapter of the article (Section 5) is dedicated to a brief recap of the topics discussed in the earlier sections. (shrink)

The sixteenth-century Cossacks became the favourite topic of Ukrainian authors of the nineteenth century who dealt with national and individual identity issues. Nikolai Gogol, the celebrated Russian author who had Ukrainian origin and was born in a Cossack village, wrote the epic romance of Taras Bulba, which narrated the story of Cossacks and their struggle for preserving their independence. While the work has been previously studied under the light of postcolonial theoretical framework, using the concepts developed by Homi Bhabha to (...) scrutinize the situation and the destiny of the two main hybrid characters, Taras Bulba’s sons, takes a step further and reveals the deeply ingrained anxiety and ambivalence in the Cossack mentality. The article focuses on the two main hybrid characters who choose divergent paths upon encountering the conflict brought to them by the imperial power. (shrink)

QBism is one of the main candidates for an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to QBism, the quantum state or the wavefunction represents the subjective degrees of belief of the agent assigning the state. But, although the quantum state is not part of the furniture of the world, quantum mechanics grasps the real via the Born rule which is a consistency condition for the probability assignments of the agent. In this paper, we evaluate the plausibility of recent criticism of (...) QBism. We focus on the consequences of the subjective character of the quantum state, the issue of realism and the problem of the evolution of the quantum state in QBism. In particular, drawing upon Born’s notion of invariance as the mark of the real, it is argued that there is no essential difference between Einstein’s program of ‘the real’ and QBists’ realism. Also, it will be argued that QBism can account for the unitary evolution of the quantum state. (shrink)

Individualism leading to more consumerism seems to be a bit of truism nowadays in the media. The USA is particularly indicted for being too individualistic and consumerist. Past research has mostly indicated a positive relationship between the two. However, past research has not suggested a negative association between individualism and consumerism. This paper offers support for such a negative relationship by showing that an individual’s ethical values can temper the consumerist nature of individualists. Data were collected in the USA and (...) Taiwan. Structural equation models demonstrate that our hypothesized model fits our data well. A key result over the global sample is the stability of the linear path from individualism to work ethic to consumer ethic to consumerism. The two-nation comparison also supports differences in how Taiwanese and Americans differ in their belief that consumption benefits society. (shrink)

A widely held assumption is that hallucinations are not a type of perception. Coupled with the idea that hallucinations possess phenomenal character, this assumption raises a problem for naive realism, which maintains that phenomenal character is at least partly constituted by perceived worldly objects. Naive realists have typically responded by adopting a disjunctive view of phenomenal character. But in what follows, I argue that to resolve the conflict we should instead reject the idea that hallucinations are not a type of (...) perception. I argue that this idea is supported by six alleged differences between hallucination and perception, but these differences are all accommodated for in a particular type of perception, picture perception. Drawing on picture perception’s resources, I offer an account of hallucinations which construes them as a type of perception, and does so in a way that that preserves their idiosyncrasies and varieties, and in a way compatible with naive realism. (shrink)

Russell once said that “Vagueness and precision alike are characteristics which can only belong to a representation, of which language is an example. They have to do with the relation between a representation and that which it represents. Apart from representation, whether cognitive or mechanical, there can be no such thing as vagueness or precision; things are what they are, and there is an end of it” (1923). In other words, expressions like ontological vagueness (and even ontological precision) are category (...) mistakes and therefore make no sense. Half a century later, as the view began to emerge that some vagueness could be intelligibly ascribed to the world, Dummett opined that “It is not apparently absurd to suppose ... that the physical world is in itself such that the most precise description of it that even omniscience would yield might yet involve the use of expressions having some degree of vagueness” (1981). Evans had already questioned the idea of worldly vagueness, arguing that it was inconsistent (1978). A quarter of a century later, however, many papers had been written in defense of the intelligibility and possibility of this once nonsense and then contradictory claim. This chapter is one of them, albeit from a different viewpoint. The aim of this chapter is twofold: firstly, to consider the intelligibility of vague ontology, and secondly, to discuss the most famous argument against vague ontology, i.e., Evans’ argument. To this end, in Sect. 11.2 we present some commonsensical considerations on vague ontology. In Sect. 11.3, we look at some supervaluationist theories and the kind of vague ontology they accommodate before arguing that this kind of ontology is inconsistent with commonsense. Section 11.4 outlines a version of supervaluationism that can accommodate the commonsensical considerations discussed in Sect. 11.2. The outlined view is an ontological variation of Kit Fine’s characterization of vagueness as incompleteness (1975). It will be argued that the view is more effective than other versions of supervaluationism at accommodating commonsensical and metaphysical considerations. In the following section, we consider vague identity. Based on the view outlined in Sect. 11.4, there may be vague identity in some special cases. In Sect. 11.6 we focus on Evans’ argument and argue that it can be blocked in the first step. (shrink)

A central debate in the philosophy of virtual reality (VR) focuses on the reality of virtual items. Broadly, there are two main disagreements. Some views accept a metaphysical orientation to VR, and disagree on the reality of virtual items. For instance, David Chalmers (Disputatio 9(46):309-352, 2017, Disputatio 11(55):453- 486, 2019, 2022) defends digitalism, the view that virtual items are real digital items. Neil McDonnell & Nathan Wildman (Disputatio 11(55):371-397, 2019), by contrast, defend fictionalism, which maintains that virtual items are unreal (...) fictions. Other views, like Grant Tavinor’s (2021), reject the metaphysical orientation, argu- ing that focusing on the reality of virtual items is a mistake. In what follows I evalu- ate these two disagreements. I argue that experiences of virtual items depend on episodes of picture perception. Recognizing this reveals that the current debates are either easily resolved in favor of one view, or are not disagreeing about the reality of virtual items, but about what virtual items are. (shrink)

This work underscores the importance of answering the question: who are organizational stakeholders? It argues that stakeholder theory is a normative management theory, and there is a need to differentiate between stakeholder and non-stakeholder firms. It further argues that the overall organizational stakeholder orientation indicates how narrowly or broadly organizations define their stakeholders. Therefore, this work attempts to provide a stakeholder salience scheme for stakeholder organizations, i.e., organizations with accommodative and proactive stakeholder orientations. In the process, this work reviews key (...) scholarly contributions and points out some potential weaknesses in these contributions with an aim to develop a new stakeholder typology. This work contributes to the existing literature by: introducing a contingent variable, i.e., organizational strategy, in a stakeholder typology scheme; reaffirming the normative aspect of stakeholder theory by placing normative considerations at the center of stakeholder salience typology; and improving the descriptive validity of stakeholder theory by adding a new stakeholder variable, i.e., organization, in the presented stakeholder salience typology scheme. (shrink)

Generally, there are two interpretative approaches to quantum theory: psi-ontic and psi-epistemic. According to the psi-ontic interpretations, quantum theory does/should describe or represent what...

Tesettür kavramı temel mahiyeti ve amacı açısından İslam dini kapsamında değerlendirilecek dini bir pratiktir. İslam’da kadının giyim konusundaki sınırlarının belirlenmesi, bedenin gizlenmesi açısından tesettür kavramı önem taşımaktadır. Fakat modernleşme ekseniyle değişme ve gelişmeler gösteren tesettür anlayışının, tüketim kültürü ve moda ile birleşen, bu modern çağın gereklerine ayak uyduran yeni bir tesettür anlayışı ve imajıyla karşı karşıya kaldığı görülmektedir. Özellikle gençlerin giyim tercihlerinde tesettürün modernleşme dinamiklerinden etkilenmesi söz konudur. Bu çalışmada tesettürlü gençlerin giyim tercihlerinde tesettür algısının, tüketim kültürü ve moda ile (...) bütünleşmesi sonucu ortaya çıkan “tesettür modası” ile olan münasebeti ve temelde tesettürün özsel ve şekilsel değişiklikleri ile bu değişikliklere sebep olan faktörlerin etkisi ortaya konulmuştur. Teorik ve uygulamalı bir anket ile gençlerin tesettür tercihi ve algısının değişim ve dönüşüm nedenleri, bu dönüşüme etki eden unsurlar sorgulanmıştır. (shrink)

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʼ; philosophy, Islamic.

This article explores the various ways in which Muslims, in the past and the present, think about God. The article canvasses a range of views on questions and puzzles pertaining to the essence and attributes of God, the basis of God's Justice, the transcendence of God, and our ability to know and understand God. We encounter a diverse, and at times radically divergent range of views on how best to understand divinity within the tradition of Islam. Given the various conceptions (...) of divinity, available within the tradition, I develop an argument for the view that God is best understood as love. The view that God is love, I contend, emerges directly from the Quran, which is a document that sits at the very heart of the Islamic tradition. (shrink)

We investigate computable subshifts and the connection with effective symbolic dynamics. It is shown that a decidable Π01 class P is a subshift if and only if there exists a computable function F mapping 2ℕ to 2ℕ such that P is the set of itineraries of elements of 2ℕ. Π01 subshifts are constructed in 2ℕ and in 2ℤ which have no computable elements. We also consider the symbolic dynamics of maps on the unit interval.

This thesis is an attempt to investigate the relation between the views of Wittgenstein as presented by Kripke and Donald Davidson on meaning and linguistic understanding. Kripke’s Wittgenstein, via his sceptical argument, argues that there is no fact about which rule a speaker is following in using a linguistic expression. Now, if one urges that meaning something by a word is essentially a matter of following one rule rather than another, the sceptical argument leads to the radical sceptical conclusion that (...) there is no such thing as meaning anything by any word. According to the solution Kripke’s Wittgenstein proposes, we must instead concentrate on the ordinary practice of meaning-attribution, that is, on the conditions under which we can justifiably ascribe meaning to each other and the utility such a practice has in our life. Davidson has also argued that following rules is neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining success in the practice of meaning something by an utterance. According to his alternative view of meaning, a speaker’s success in this practice is fundamentally a matter of his utterance being successfully interpreted by an interpreter in the way the speaker intended. On the basis of these remarks, Davidson raises objections to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and solution. In this thesis, I will argue that Davidson has failed to fully grasp the essentially sceptical nature of the argument and solution proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein. I will argue that as a result of this Davidson’s objections and his alternative solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument are mistaken. These criticisms are pursued via an investigation of Davidson’s problematic reading of Quine’s sceptical arguments for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. Having criticized Davidson’s actual response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein, I will claim that Davidson’s best option for resisting the sceptical problem is to adopt a form of non-reductionism about meaning. Claudine Verheggen’s recent claim that Davidson’s use of the notion of triangulation will help to establish non-reductionism will be argued to be a failure. I will urge that the main obstacle in defending a non-reductionist view is the problem of accounting for the nature of self-knowledge of meaning and understanding. After discussing Davidson’s account of self-knowledge and Crispin Wright’s objection to this account, I will argue that, although Wright’s objection is ultimately unsuccessful, Davidson’s account fails for other reasons. Finally, I tentatively suggest that the resources for an alternative response to the sceptical problem can possibly be extracted from Davidson’s account of intending, which has some features suggestive of a judgement-dependent account of meaning and intention. (shrink)

Work values and the loyalty (commitment to hard work, profession, and principles) of 762 managers in Kuwait were investigated. The results indicated that managers scored high on work values and loyalty. Furthermore, there was a high positive correlation between the two measures. Demographic and organizational variables had significant influence on managerial orientations. Specifically, expatriates and female managers showed a high commitment to work values and loyalty.

al-ḥalqah 1. Fī dirāsat ʻilm al-manṭiq -- al-ḥalqah 2. al-Manṭiq -- al-ḥalqah 3. Manṭiq al-ishārāt.

Ḥuqūq al-Islām.--Ḥuqūq al-vālidain.--Ādāb al-maʻ̄ashirat.--Ag̲h̲lāt̤ al-ʻulūm.

A graph’s entropy is a functional one, based on both the graph itself and the distribution of probability on its vertex set. In the theory of information, graph entropy has its origins. Hex-derived networks have a variety of important applications in medication store, hardware, and system administration. In this article, we discuss hex-derived network of type 1 and 2, written as HDN 1 n and HDN 2 n, respectively of order n. We also compute some degree-based entropies such as Randić, (...) ABC, and G A entropy of HDN 1 n and HDN 2 n. (shrink)