Veeraswamy, JD; Gogineni, Babu As part of the Adopt a Dalit Village Project the following awareness programs were organized to help bring the Dalits of Ravulapally out of a life of superstition and to point them to a life of scientific temper. This was done through various activities, all of which were aimed to provide an overall boost to the human development of the community, by involving them in their own growth, in such a manner as to build capacity and (...) capability within the community. (shrink)

We look at two fundamental logical processes, often intertwined in planning and problem solving: inference and update. Inference is an internal process with which we uncover what is implicit in the information we already have. Update, on the other hand, is produced by external communication, usually in the form of announcements and in general in the form of observations, giving us information that might not have been available (even implicitly) before. Both processes have received attention from the logic community, usually (...) separately. In this work, we develop a logical language that allows us to describe them together. We present syntax, semantics and a complete axiom system; we discuss similarities and differences with other approaches and mention how the work can be extended. (shrink)

Epistemic logic with its possible worlds semantic model is a powerful framework that allows us to represent an agent’s information not only about propositional facts, but also about her own information. Nevertheless, agents represented in this framework are logically omniscient: their information is closed under logical consequence. This property, useful in some applications, is an unrealistic idealisation in some others. Many proposals to solve this problem focus on weakening the properties of the agent’s information, but some authors have argued that (...) solutions of this kind are not completely adequate because they do not look at the heart of the matter: the actions that allow the agent to reach such omniscient state. Recent works have explored how acts of observation, inference, consideration and forgetting affect an agent’s implicit and explicit knowledge; the present work focuses on acts that affect an agent’s implicit and explicit beliefs. It starts by proposing a framework in which these two notions can be represented, and then it looks into their dynamics, first by reviewing the existing notion of belief revision, and then by introducing a rich framework for representing diverse forms of inference that involve both knowledge and beliefs. (shrink)

La fenomenología de la razón escudriña todos los procesos racionales que intervienen en la aprehensión del objeto real y de su constitución, y las consiguientes relaciones noético-noemáticas. Sólo la razón pura colegida, primero como fuerza que depura los procesos de la evidencia y las posiciones del sujeto, y sólo la razón entendida también como proceso que ratifica la verificabilidad del darse el objeto y de todos los demás procesos y relaciones, se revela como la única instancia posible capaz de asegurar (...) la validez del conocimiento y del objeto del conocimiento. Por otro lado, la razón juega un papel decisivo en lo que respecta al sujeto de razón. Ésta es la nota constitutiva y respectiva del ser humano, el poder que lo separa del entramado de facticidades y contingencias de las que se compone la realidad, de suerte que éste no es un factum más entre todas las objetividades, tal como postulan la psicología y las ciencias naturales. El hombre es un ser mundano, está efectivamente en el mundo. Ahora bien, “su ser en” y “su estar en” son modificados por el poder de la razón. Su modo de ser mundano es serlo racionalmente. Únicamente de este modo el Umwelt deviene Lebenswelt.The phenomenology of reason inspects all rational processes involved in the apprehension of real object and its constitution, and the respective noetic-noematic relationships. Only the pure reason comprehended, first of all, as a strength which purifies the mentioned processes, the evidence and the subject positions. Secondly the reason, also comprehended as a process which confirms the object verificability which gives itself and the other processes and relationships, appears as the only possible power, which is able to guarantee the validity of the knowledge, and so the object of knowledge. On the other hand, the reason plays a very important role in the subject of the reason. This is the constitutive and respective note of the human being, the power that separates it from the labyrinth of facts and contingencies which makes up reality, so that this isn’t a fact among all objectivities, as postulated by psychology and natural sciences. The human being is a worldly being; he is really in the world. Now then, “his being-in” and “his staying-in” are modified by the strength of the reason. His way of being worldly is being rationaly. Only in this way the “Umwelt” becomes “Lebenswelt”. (shrink)

It is shown that the axioms Cubitt and Sugden (1994; Economic J. 104: 798) impose on a theory of rationally justifiable play (TRJP) do not prevent the possibility that two players necessarily disagree concerning the probability they ascribe to the choice of a third player. This appears to indicate that those axioms are not sufficient for defining a `reasonable' TRJP. In addition, for the case in which a player's beliefs are statistically independent, conditions for a TRJP are suggested under which (...) the existence of a quasi-strict equilibrium is sufficient, but the existence of a consistent n-pair is not, for defining a TRJP meeting those requirements. (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference— and key axioms of the system merely postulate "deductive closure". In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence (...) we also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current ' awareness' set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a ' dynamification' of existing awareness logics. (shrink)

This work proposes an understanding of deductive, default and abductive reasoning as different instances of the same phenomenon: epistemic dynamics. It discusses the main intuitions behind each one of these reasoning processes, and suggest how they can be understood as different epistemic actions that modify an agent’s knowledge and/or beliefs in a different way, making formal the discussion with the use of the dynamic epistemic logic framework. The ideas in this paper put the studied processes under the same umbrella, thus (...) highlighting their relationship and allowing a better understanding of how they interact together. (shrink)

Philosophy affected the birth of Latin America in two ways. First it inspired the famous men who started the independence movements, which led to the definitive liberation from the Spanish yoke. Once the revolution was over, philosophy influenced the development of the legal and political systems that were created to organize the life of the new states.

Frente a la posición escolástica dominante hasta d siglo XVIII que consideraba el mal como ausencia de ser. Kant denuncia el mal como realidad existente, no meramente lógica, cuyo carácter negativo proviene de su oposición al deber moral. Kant nos va a decir que el mal es contraposición real, no simplemente una carencia. Este carácter ontológico del mal pone en tela de juicio la visión moderna del Progreso: éste no es el desenlace natural del devenir humano, ya que es posible (...) también progresar en el mal, como abundante ha probado la historia, incluso la reciente. De ahí la necesidad de replantearse el ser del hombre, a la luz de su responsabilidad trascendental. Si hay razones para el optimismo, no descansan en una fe ciega en el hombre, sino en su capacidad moral para superar su propia inclinación al mal. In opposition to the scholastic view dominant until the 18"' Century, that evil was but the absence of being, Kant maintains chat evil is actual reality, not merely logical, and that its negate character lies in its opposition co moral duty. Kant asserts that evil is real contrariety, not simply deficiency. This ontological character of evil challenges the modern idea of progress: Progress is not the •natural• course of events, since it is also possible to progress in evil, as history –events recent hit story- has proved abundantly. Therefore the question of the being of man must be reformulated in the light of his transcendental responsibility Whether there are reasons for optimism, they cannot be based on the faith in man, bur on his moral capability to overcome his own tendency to evil. (shrink)

Con el objetivo de esbozar una ontología del presente, este artículo sigue las transformaciones de la antropología en México en busca de sus condiciones políticas y epistémicas de enunciación. El gobierno mexicano del siglo XIX dedicó mútliples esfuerzos poblar correctamente el territorio, es decir, con una población sana, educada y civilizada. A principios del siglo XX, las políticas indigenistas promovieron la aculturación de los pueblos indígenas, pero esta aculturación fue luego denunciada como etnocida por una nueva generación de antropólogos, defensores (...) del indigenismo autogestivo y, más tarde, de la valorización de las identidades como capital humano por la metodología neoliberal. El evolucionismo científico dio paso a un paradigma comunicacional, fundamento epistémico de muchas políticas contemporáneas. Es la encarnación misma del tema foucaltiano de la muerte del Hombre como forma de saber, y la ilustración de una nueva episteme. (shrink)