This paper addresses how communication processes among investors affect stock prices formation, especially emerging predictability of stock prices, in financial markets. An agent based model, called the word of mouth model, is introduced for analyzing the problem. This model provides a simple, but sufficiently versatile, description of informational diffusion process and is successful in making lucidly explanation for the predictability of small sized stocks, which is a stylized fact in financial markets but difficult (...) to resolve by traditional models. Our model also provides a rigorous examination of the under reaction hypothesis to informational shocks. (shrink)

Recently, we proposed an agent-based model called the word of mouth model to analyze the influence of an information transmission process to price formation in financial markets. Especially, the short-term predictability of asset return was focused on and an explanation in the view of information transmission was provided to the question why the predictability was much clearly observed in the small-sized stocks. This paper, to extend the previous study, demonstrates that the word of (...) class='Hi'>mouth model also has a consistency with other important financial stylized facts. This strengthens the possibility that the information transmission among investors plays a crucial role in price formation. Concretely, this paper addresses two famous statistical features of returns; the leptokurtic distribution of return and the autocorrelation of return volatility. The reasons why these statistical facts receive especial attentions of researchers among financial stylized facts are their statistical robustness and practical importance, such as the applications to the derivative pricing problems. (shrink)

Economies are complicated systems encompassing micro behaviors, interaction patterns, and global regularities. Whether partial or general in scope, studies of economic systems must consider how to handle difficult real-world aspects such as asymmetric information, imperfect competition, strategic interaction, collective learning, and the possibility of multiple equilibria. Recent advances in analytical and computational tools are permitting new approaches to the quantitative study of these aspects. One such approach is Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), the computational study of economic processes (...) modeled as dynamic systems of interacting agents. This chapter explores the potential advantages and disadvantages of ACE for the study of economic systems. General points are concretely illustrated using an ACE model of a two-sector decentralized market economy. Six issues are highlighted: Constructive understanding of production, pricing, and trade processes; the essential primacy of survival; strategic rivalry and market power; behavioral uncertainty and learning; the role of conventions and organizations; and the complex interactions among structural attributes, institutional arrangements, and behavioral dispositions. (shrink)

The power trading system has the characteristics of nonlinearity, dynamics, and complexity. Part of the business data in the trading system needs to be exposed to numerous external business systems. The traditional centralized power trading model has some problems, such as low data security and trust crisis of regulators. Blockchain technology provides prominent ideas for solving these problems. Firstly, the improved AdaBoost algorithm is used to predict the supply and demand gap of power trading nodes. Secondly, based on the (...) fact that the information on the blockchain is only open to the power supply side, a two-stage game model of asymmetric information between the power supply side and the power user is constructed to capture the price competition behavior between them in order to find the Nash equilibrium price in two stages. Finally, the US PJM market electricity market data are used to carry out an example analysis to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm and model. (shrink)

Predicting stock movements is a valuable research field that can help investors earn more profits. As with time-series data, the stock market is time-dependent and the value of historical information may decrease over time. Accurate prediction can be achieved by mining valuable information with words on social platforms and further integrating it with actual stock market conditions. However, many methods still cannot effectively dig deep into hidden information, integrate text and stock prices, and ignore the temporal dependence. Therefore, to solve (...) the above problems, we propose a transformer-based attention network framework that uses historical text and stock prices to capture the temporal dependence of financial data. Among them, the transformer model and attention mechanism are used for feature extraction of financial data, which has fewer applications in the financial field, and effective analysis of key information to achieve an accurate prediction. A large number of experiments have proved the effectiveness of our proposed method. The actual simulation experiment verifies that our model has practical application value. (shrink)

In recent years, the field of AI & Law has increasingly focused on predicting legal judgments, particularly in civil cases. While traditional neural network methods are highly effective at automatically learning patterns from large datasets, they often suffer from a lack of interpretability. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework for legal judgment prediction, based on large language models (LLMs). This framework combines legal knowledge (e.g., legal rules), represented through first-order logic rules, with deep neural networks (DNNs), (...) using a discrepancy loss to minimize prediction differences between the two components. By integrating the logic module during end-to-end training, knowledge is effectively transferred to the model parameters. Additionally, we develop a Chain-of-Thought prompt that uses LLMs to extract fact elements from legal cases. These elements act as logical variables within the rules, supporting the reasoning process in the logic module and improving overall interpretability. To validate the effectiveness of this framework, we conduct extensive experiments on a large dataset of private lending cases. The results demonstrate that the framework not only improves predictive performance but also enhances the interpretability of judgment predictions. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to justify the belief that there are biological normative mechanisms that fulfill non-trivial causal roles in the explanations (as formulated by researchers) of actions and behaviors present in specific systems. One example of such mechanisms is the predictive mechanisms described and explained by predictive processing (hereinafter PP), which (1) guide actions and (2) shape causal transitions between states that have specific content and fulfillment conditions (e.g. mental states). Therefore, I am guided by a specific (...) theoretical goal associated with the need to indicate those conditions that should be met by the non-trivial theory of normative mechanisms and the specific models proposed by PP supporters. In this work, I use classical philosophical methods, such as conceptual analysis and critical reflection. I also analyze selected studies in the field of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neurology, information theory and biology in terms of the methodology, argumentation and language used, in accordance with their theoretical importance for the issues discussed in this study. In this sense, the research presented here is interdisciplinary. My research framework is informed by the mechanistic model of explanation, which defines the necessary and sufficient conditions for explaining a given phenomenon. The research methods I chose are therefore related to the problems that I intend to solve. In the introductory chapter, “The concept of predictive processing”, I discuss the nature of PP as well as its main assumptions and theses. I also highlight the key concepts and distinctions for this research framework. Many authors argue that PP is a contemporary version of Kantianism and is exposed to objections similar to those made against the approach of Immanuel Kant. I discuss this thesis and show that it is only in a very general sense that the PP framework is neo-Kantian. Here we are not dealing with transcendental deduction nor with the application of transcendental arguments. I argue that PP is based on reverse engineering and abduction inferences. In the second part of this chapter, I respond to the objection formulated by Dan Zahavi, who directly accuses this research framework of anti-realistic consequences. I demonstrate that the position of internalism, present in the so-called conservative PP, does not imply anti-realism, and that, due to the explanatory role played in it by structural representations directed at real patterns, it is justified to claim that PP is realistic. In this way, I show that PP is a non-trivial research framework, having its subject, specific methods and its own epistemic status. Finally, I discuss positions classified as the socalled radical PP. In the chapter “Predictive processing as a Bayesian explanatory model” I justify the thesis according to which PP offers Bayesian modeling. Many researchers claim that the brain is an implemented statistical probabilistic network that is an approximation of the Bayesian 7 rule. In practice, this means that all cognitive processes are to apply Bayes' rule and can be described in terms of probability distributions. Such a solution arouses objections among many researchers and is the subject of wide criticism. The purpose of this chapter is to justify the thesis that Bayesian PP is a non-trivial research framework. For this purpose, I argue that it explains certain phenomena not only at the computational level described by David Marr, but also at the level of algorithms and implementation. Later in this chapter I demonstrate that PP is normative modeling. Proponents of the use of Bayesian models in psychology or decision theory argue that they are normative because they allow the formulation of formal rules of action that show what needs to be done to make a given action optimal. Critics of this approach emphasize that such thinking about the normativity of Bayesian modeling is unjustified and that science should shift from prescriptive to descriptive positions. In a polemic with Shira Elqayam and Jonathan Evans (2011), I show that the division they propose into prescriptivism and Bayesian descriptivism is apparent, because, as I argue, there are two forms of prescriptivism, i.e. the weak and the strong. I argue that the weak version is epistemic and can lead to anti-realism, while the strong version is ontic and allows one to justify realism in relation to Bayesian models. I argue that a weak version of prescriptivism is valid for PP. It allows us to adopt anti-realism in relation to PP. In practice, this means that you can explain phenomena using Bayes' rule. This does not, however, imply that they are Bayesian in nature. However, the full justification of realism in relation to the Bayesian PP presupposes the adoption of strong prescriptivism. This position assumes that phenomena are explained by Bayesian rule because they are Bayesian as such. If they are Bayesian in nature, then they should be explained using Bayesian modeling. This thesis will be substantiated in the chapters “Normative functions and mechanisms in the context of predictive processing” and “Normative mechanisms and actions in predictive processing”. In the chapter “The Free Energy Principle in predictive processing”, I discuss the Free Energy Principle (hereinafter FEP) formulated by Karl Friston and some of its implications. According to this principle, all biological systems (defined in terms of Markov blankets) minimize the free energy of their internal states in order to maintain homeostasis. Some researchers believe that PP is a special case of applying this principle to cognition, and that predictive mechanisms are homeostatic mechanisms that minimize free energy. The discussion of FEP is important due to the fact that some authors consider it to be important for explanatory purposes and normative. If this is the case, then FEP turns out to be crucial in explaining normative predictive mechanisms and, in general, any normative biological mechanisms. To define the explanatory possibilities of this principle, I refer to the discussion of its supporters on the issue they define as the problem of continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. A critical analysis of this discussion and the additional arguments I have formulated have allowed me to revise the explanatory ambitions of FEP. I also reject the belief that this principle is necessary to explain the nature of predictive mechanisms. I argue that the principle formulated and defended by Friston is an important research heuristic for PP analysis. 8 In the chapter “Normative functions and mechanisms in predictive processing”, I start my analyzes by formulating an answer to the question about the normative nature of homeostatic mechanisms. I demonstrate that predictive mechanisms are not homeostatic. I defend the view that a full explanation of normative mechanisms presupposes an explanation of normative functions. I discuss the most important proposals for understanding the normativity of a function, both from a systemic and teleosemantic perspective. I conclude that the non-trivial concept of a function must meet two requirements which I define as explanatory and normative. I show that none of the theories I have invoked satisfactorily meets both of these requirements. Instead, I propose a model of normativity based on Bickhard's account, but supplemented by a mechanistic perspective. I argue that a function is normative when: (1) it allows one to explain the dysfunction of a given mechanism; (2) it contributes to the maintenance of the organism's stability by shaping and limiting possible relations, processes and behaviors of a given system; and when (3) (according to the representational and predictive functions) it enables explaining the attribution of logical values of certain representations / predictions. In such an approach, a mechanism is normative when it performs certain normative functions and when it is constitutive for a specific action or behavior, despite the fact that for some reason it cannot realize it either currently or in the long-term. Such an understanding of the normativity of mechanisms presupposes the acceptance of the epistemic hypothesis. I argue that this hypothesis is not cognitively satisfactory, and therefore the ontic hypothesis should be justified, which is directly related to adopting the position of ontic prescriptivism. For this reason, referring to the mechanistic theory of scientific explanations, I formulate an ontical interpretation of the concept of a normative mechanism. According to this approach, a mechanism or a function is normative when they perform such and such causal roles in explaining certain actions and behaviors. With regard to the normative properties of predictive mechanisms and functions, this means that they are the causes of specific actions an organism carries out in the environment. In this way, I justify the necessity of accepting the ontic hypothesis and rejecting the epistemic hypothesis. The fifth chapter, “Normative mechanisms and actions in predictive processing”, is devoted to the dark room problem and the related exploration-exploitation trade-off. A dark room is the state that an agent could be in if it minimized the sum of all potential prediction errors. I demonstrate that, in accordance with the basic assumption of PP about the need for continuous and long-term minimization of prediction errors, such a state should be desirable for the agent. Is it really so? Many authors believe it is not. I argue that the test of the value of PP is the possibility of a non-trivial solution of this problem, which can be reduced to the choice between active and uncertainty-increasing exploration and safe and easily predictable exploitation. I show that the solution proposed by PP supporters present in the literature does not enable a fully satisfactory explanation of this dilemma. Then I defend the position according to which the full explanation of the normative mechanisms, and, subsequently, the solution to the dilemma of exploration and exploitation, involves reference to the existence of constraints present in the environment. The constraints 9 include elements of the environment that make a given mechanism not only causal but also normative. They are therefore key to explaining the predictive mechanisms. They do not only play the role of the context in which the mechanism is implemented, but, above all, are its constitutive component. I argue that the full explanation of the role of constraints in normative predictive mechanisms presupposes the integration of individual models of specific cognitive phenomena, because only the mechanistic integration of PP with other models allows for a non-trivial explanation of the nature of normative predictive mechanisms that would have a strong explanatory value. The explanatory monism present in many approaches to PP makes it impossible to solve the problem of the dark room. Later in this chapter, I argue that the Bayesian PP is normative not because it enables the formulation of such and such rules of action, but because the predictive mechanisms themselves are normative. They are normative because they condition the choice of such and such actions by agents. In this way, I justify the hypothesis that normative mechanisms make it possible to explain the phenomenon of agent motivation, which is crucial for solving the dark room problem. In the last part of the chapter, I formulate the hypothesis of distributed normativity, which assumes that the normative nature of certain mechanisms, functions or objects is determined by the relations into which these mechanisms, functions or objects enter. This means that what is normative (in the primary sense) is the relational structure that constitutes the normativity of specific items included in it. I suggest that this hypothesis opens up many areas of research and makes it possible to rethink many problems. In the “Conclusion”, I summarize the results of my research and indicate further research perspectives. (shrink)

In an article published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the government and its allies ought to activelyundermine groups that espouse conspiracy theories deemed “demonstrably false.” They propose infiltrating such groups in order to “cure” conspiracy theorists by treating their “crippled epistemology” with “cognitive diversity.” They base their proposal on an analysis of the “causes” of such conspiracy theories, which emphasizes informational and reputational cascades. Some may regard their proposal as outrageous and anti-democratic. (...) I agree. However, in this article I merely argue that their argument is flawed in at least the following ways: their account of the popularity of conspiracy theories is implausible, and their proposal relies on misleading “stylized facts,” including a caricature of those who doubt official narratives and a deceptive depiction of the relevant history. (shrink)

In this contribution we analyze how the actions of rational agents feed back on their beliefs. We present two agent-based computer simulations studying complex social interactions in which agents that follow utility maximizing strategies thereby deteriorate their own long-term quality of beliefs. We take these results as a starting point to discuss the complex relationship between rational action couched in terms of maximizing utility and the emergence of informational inequalities.

This paper proposes a new financial market model based on the analysis of the minority game model. The agent in this model forms a network through information sharing, and the agent uses the minority game model to realize the evolution of the system. To better describe the financial market, we also adopt a prior connection strategy for the model. The network formed by the agent has the characteristics of a scale-free network, and as the (...) initial network connection probability increases, the growth rate of the corresponding agent’s average connection degree increases and then decreases after reaching the peak. (shrink)

Public companies in the US stock market must annually report their activities and financial performances to the SEC by filing the so-called 10-K form. Recent studies have demonstrated that changes in the textual content of the corporate annual filing can convey strong signals of companies’ future returns. In this study, we combine natural language processing techniques and network science to introduce a novel 10-K-based network, named Lazy Network, that leverages year-on-year changes in companies’ 10-Ks detected using a neural (...) network embedding model. The Lazy Network aims to capture textual changes derived from financial or economic changes on the equity market. Leveraging the Lazy Network, we present a novel investment strategy that attempts to select the least disrupted and stable companies by capturing the peripheries of the Lazy Network. We show that this strategy earns statistically significant risk-adjusted excess returns. Specifically, the proposed portfolios yield up to 95 basis points in monthly five-factor alphas, outperforming similar strategies in the literature. (shrink)

Many scholars have conducted in-depth research on the evaluation and prediction of scholars’ scientific impact and meanwhile discovered various factors that affect the success of scholars. Among all these relevant factors, scholars’ ages have been universally acknowledged as one of the most important factors for it can shed light on many practical issues, e.g., finding supervisors, discovering rising stars, and research funding or award applications. However, due to the inaccessibility or the privacy issues of acquiring scholars’ personal data, there is (...) little research to explore the true ages of scholars currently. Alternatively, scholars’ publications’ information can be obtained through various digital libraries. Inspired by this fact, we propose a novel scholar’s age prediction method based on their articles’ information. Our method first classifies factors that affect scholars’ ages into intuitive and complex types according to their computational complexity and then apply machine learning algorithms to predict the ages of scholars based on these factors. The experimental results on the real dataset demonstrate that our method can effectively predict the true ages of scholars. Given that there is no completely accurate dataset because of the continuous publication of academic papers, we then apply our method on the incomplete dataset. Nevertheless, our method still has high prediction accuracy in such situations. (shrink)

Although mouse‐tracking has been taken as a real‐time window on different aspects of human decision‐making processes, whether purely semantic information affects response conflict at the level of motor output as measured through mouse movements is still unknown. Here, across two experiments, we investigated the effects of semantic knowledge by predicting participants’ performance in a standard keyboard task and in a mouse‐tracking task through distributional semantics, a usage‐based modeling approach to meaning. In Experiment 1, participants were shown word pairs (...) and were required to perform a two‐alternative forced choice task selecting either the more abstract or the more concrete word, using standard keyboard presses. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task, yet this time response selection was achieved by moving the computer mouse. Results showed that the involvement of semantic components in the task at hand is observable using both standard reaction times (Experiment 1) as well as using indexes extracted from mouse trajectories (Experiment 2). In particular, mouse trajectories reflected the response conflict and its temporal evolution, with a larger deviation for increasing word semantic relatedness. These findings support the validity of mouse‐tracking as a method to detect deep and implicit decision‐making features. Additionally, by demonstrating that a usage‐based model of meaning can account for the different degrees of cognitive conflict associated with task achievement, these findings testify the impact of the human semantic memory on decision‐making processes. (shrink)

This paper mainly analyzes the theories related to the financial risk of the company and combines the principles of principal component analysis, particle swarm optimization algorithm, and artificial neural network to derive the financial risk index system of the company. To improve the accuracy of financial risk prediction, principal component analysis and particle swarm algorithm are applied to optimize the BP neural network model, the input data of the prediction model is improved, and the optimal initial weights (...) and thresholds are given to the BP neural network by using particle swarm algorithm search, whereby the financial risk prediction model of particle swarm optimization BP neural network is constructed. The empirical results show that the model constructed by BP neural network not only has a high accuracy rate for static financial risk evaluation but also has a better prediction effect. After training and testing, the BP neural network-based enterprise financial risk evaluation model can accurately determine the existing financial situation of enterprise financial management and has a good prediction effect. Our research method is a fusion of the processing of the two methods, which belongs to the first integration of results. (shrink)

This work investigates one of the most widespread yet elusive ideas about our experience of art: the idea that there is something cognitively valuable in engaging with great artworks, or, in other words, that we learn from them. This claim and the age-old controversy that surrounds it are reconsidered in light of the psychological and neuroscientific literature on learning, in one of the first systematic efforts to bridge the gap between philosophical and scientific inquiries on the topic. The work has (...) five chapters. Chapter 1 lays down its conceptual bases: it explains what learning is taken to be in the current philosophical debate and it points out how Bayesian cognitive science (particularly in its predictive processing formulations) might be well-suited to capture the kind of learning involved in our engagement with the arts. The following chapters test this latter hypothesis with respect to particular art forms, namely literature and literary language (Chapter 2), narrative (Chapter 3), and visual art, music and motor activities (Chapter 4). The fine-grained discussions conducted in each of these areas will enable us to see that the relationship between art and learning is indeed fundamental and pervasive. The final chapter (Chapter 5) examines the consequences of this fact for our understanding of the role of art in our epistemic practices, its ultimate usefulness and value, and its place in the interdisciplinary study of the human mind. The upshot is a novel and wide-ranging picture, both philosophically informed and empirically sound, that bypasses many of the problems and dead ends of the current philosophical debate on the topic and captures the deep sense in which art and learning are interrelated. (shrink)

Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson analyzed a large‐scale web‐scraping corpus (the Google 1T dataset) and reported that word length is independently predicted from average information content (surprisal) calculated by a 2‐ to 4‐gram model (hereafter, longer‐span surprisal) across 11 Indo‐European languages, namely, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish. However, a recent article by Meylan and Griffiths suggested the importance of preprocessing for studies with large‐scale corpora and reanalyzed the same databases. After their preprocessing, the (...) results in Piantadosi et al. were not replicated in Czech, Romanian, and Swedish. Additionally, a German‐specific study by Koplenig, Kupietz, and Wolfer showed that the strict analysis did not replicate the result in Piantadosi et al. for that language with the preprocessing suggested by Meylan and Griffiths in a large‐scale but less noisy database. These three studies provide evidence from 11 Indo‐European languages and one Afro‐Asiatic language, Hebrew, as relevant in this debate. However, we do not have evidence from other linguistic groups. This study provides evidence about Japanese based on a strict preprocessing of Google's web‐scraping database. The results show that Japanese word length can be predicted independently by 2‐ to 4‐gram surprisal. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To defend this thesis, we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic decision making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to account for all the available data on phonemic decision making. The modular Race model (...) (Cutler & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by some recent results, however. We therefore present a new modular model of phonemic decision making, the Merge model. In Merge, information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account for the data through a process of competition between lexical hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of language processing and conclude that modular models are particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech recognition. Key Words: computational modeling; feedback; lexical processing; modularity; phonemic decisions; reading; speech recognition; word recognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evidence-Based Medicine and EvaluativismTim Thornton (bio)KeywordsPhilosophy, psychiatry, values, causalThe rise of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in psychiatry has brought, in its train, a concentration on the validity of psychiatric taxonomy to augment the previous focus on reliability (in the medical sense of inter-subject agreement). This is not surprising. If EBM is to be a trustworthy guide to future events, such as patient recovery, it must be based (...) on projectible predicates (Goodman 1983). Not all the predicates that apparently fit past observations would produce true predictions for the future. Furthermore, there is reason to think that employing projectible predicates goes a long way to satisfy the (widespread if contested) aim of being based on a nomological science (Papineau 1986). Thus, the successful implementation of EBM within psychiatry requires the successful articulation of a valid psychiatric taxonomy.This connection helps to explain why fears about the application of EBM to psychiatry often turn on fears about the application of the criteriological model of diagnosis to individuals. In her commentary in this issue, Gloria Ayob has examined some of the arguments concerning the application of EBM to individuals. In this brief commentary, I examine a different potential source of disquiet focused on the underlying nature of psychiatric taxonomy.Dimensions for Psychiatric TaxonomyIn their recent paper, Peter Zachar and Kenneth Kendler suggest a number of different dimensions according to which rival conceptions of psychiatric taxonomy can be mapped. These include (1) causalism–descriptivism, (2) essentialism– nominalism, (3) objectivism–evaluativism, (4) internalism–externalism, (5) entities–agents, and (6) categories–continua (2007, 557). At the heart of the objectivism-evaluativism dimension is the question:Is deciding whether or not something is a psychiatric disorder a simple factual matterY (objectivism), or does it inevitably involve a value-laden judgment (evaluativism)?(Zachar and Kendler 2007, 558)Objectivists argue that the concept of disorder is a simple or plain factual matter by contrast with an evaluation. The apparently evaluative connotations of disorder, they argue, can either be reduced to, or explained away in, more basic terms, which are not themselves essentially evaluative. Thus, for example, the attempt to explain disorder in statistical terms is a form of objectivism. The more plausible attempt to explain disorder through the idea of a biological or proper function is also usually presented as a form of objectivism. (The most famous proponent of a biological approach, however, Jerome Wakefield, adds to an objectivist-aspiring core an explicit value in the form of harm [End Page 175] [Wakefield 1999].) Whether or not it can be successful as a form of objectivism, in addition to whether an analysis in biological terms is possible, depends on whether the account of function can fully discharge any initial evaluative or normative assumptions.There seems to be good evidence that current psychiatric taxonomy, at least, contains values. John Sadler, for example, makes a powerful case for this in his substantial work Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis (2005). Sadler, furthermore, addresses in some detail a further set of questions concerning the kinds and nature of the values involved. I outline just one further question about the nature of values involved.Zachar and Kendler contrast the presence of values with objectivism. Objectivity has at least two relevant senses reflecting contrasts with two senses of subjectivity. It—objectivity—might mean requiring no special subject for the conception and framing of relevant judgments. (This mirrors primary, by contrast with secondary qualities, and Williams' idea of an absolute conception [Williams 1978]). Or, it might mean disciplining and providing a contrast between correctness and incorrectness, or truth and falsity, for the relevant judgments. This contrasts with subjective whimsy.Although it seems relatively straight forward that the conception and framing of value judgments requires that subjects have a particular kind of mind, that still leaves open the other issue. Are value judgments disciplined by anything or does the "truth" of a value judgment collapse back into its being sincerely made?Evaluativism in Psychiatric Taxonomy and EBMThis question relates to the application of EBM to psychiatry in this way. On a disciplined account, psychiatric taxonomy can aim to get right the mixture or, better, the compound of simple facts and values... (shrink)

User location prediction in location-based social networks can predict the density of people flow well in terms of intelligent transportation, which can make corresponding adjustments in time to make traffic smooth, reduce fuel consumption, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and help build a green cycle low-carbon transportation green system. This paper proposes a Markov chain position prediction model based on multidimensional correction. Firstly, extract corresponding information from the user’s historical check-in position sequence as a position-position conversion map. Secondly, the (...) influence of check-in period, space distance, and other factors on the position prediction is linearly weighted and merged with the position prediction of the n-order Markov chain to construct MDC-MCM. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation of MDC-MCM using the dataset collected from Brightkite. Experimental results show that compared with other advanced location prediction technologies, MDC-MCM achieves better location prediction results. (shrink)

In this paper, a new FEPA portfolio forecasting model is based on the EMD decomposition method. The model is based on the special empirical modal decomposition of financial time series, principal component analysis, and artificial neural network to model and forecast for nonlinear, nonstationary, multiscale complex financial time series to predict stock market indices and foreign exchange rates and empirically investigate this hot area in financial market research. The combined forecasting model proposed in this paper (...) is based on the idea of decomposition-reconstruction synthesis, which effectively improves the model’s prediction of internal financial time series. In this paper, we select the CSI 300 Index and foreign exchange rate as the empirical market and data and establish seven forecasting models to make predictions about the short-term running trend of the closing price. The interval EMD decomposition algorithm is introduced in this paper, considering both high and low prices to be contained in the input and output. By analyzing the closing price, high and low prices of the stock index at the same time, the volatility of this interval time series of the index and its trend can be better captured. (shrink)

Social networks have become an important way for users to find friends and expand their social circle. Social networks can improve users’ experience by recommending more suitable friends to them. The key lies in improving the accuracy of link prediction, which is also the main research issue of this study. In the study of personality traits, some scholars have proved that personality can be used to predict users’ behavior in social networks. Based on these studies, this study aims to (...) improve the accuracy of link prediction in directed social networks. Considering the integration of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction into the link prediction model of social networks, a four-dimensional link prediction model is proposed. Through comparative experiments, it is proved that the four-dimensional social relationship prediction model proposed in this study is more accurate than the model only based on similarity. At the same time, it is also verified that the matching degree of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction intensity in the model can help improve the accuracy of link prediction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evidence-Based Medicine and EvaluativismTim Thornton (bio)KeywordsPhilosophy, psychiatry, values, causalThe rise of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in psychiatry has brought, in its train, a concentration on the validity of psychiatric taxonomy to augment the previous focus on reliability (in the medical sense of inter-subject agreement). This is not surprising. If EBM is to be a trustworthy guide to future events, such as patient recovery, it must be based (...) on projectible predicates (Goodman 1983). Not all the predicates that apparently fit past observations would produce true predictions for the future. Furthermore, there is reason to think that employing projectible predicates goes a long way to satisfy the (widespread if contested) aim of being based on a nomological science (Papineau 1986). Thus, the successful implementation of EBM within psychiatry requires the successful articulation of a valid psychiatric taxonomy.This connection helps to explain why fears about the application of EBM to psychiatry often turn on fears about the application of the criteriological model of diagnosis to individuals. In her commentary in this issue, Gloria Ayob has examined some of the arguments concerning the application of EBM to individuals. In this brief commentary, I examine a different potential source of disquiet focused on the underlying nature of psychiatric taxonomy.Dimensions for Psychiatric TaxonomyIn their recent paper, Peter Zachar and Kenneth Kendler suggest a number of different dimensions according to which rival conceptions of psychiatric taxonomy can be mapped. These include (1) causalism–descriptivism, (2) essentialism– nominalism, (3) objectivism–evaluativism, (4) internalism–externalism, (5) entities–agents, and (6) categories–continua (2007, 557). At the heart of the objectivism-evaluativism dimension is the question:Is deciding whether or not something is a psychiatric disorder a simple factual matterY (objectivism), or does it inevitably involve a value-laden judgment (evaluativism)?(Zachar and Kendler 2007, 558)Objectivists argue that the concept of disorder is a simple or plain factual matter by contrast with an evaluation. The apparently evaluative connotations of disorder, they argue, can either be reduced to, or explained away in, more basic terms, which are not themselves essentially evaluative. Thus, for example, the attempt to explain disorder in statistical terms is a form of objectivism. The more plausible attempt to explain disorder through the idea of a biological or proper function is also usually presented as a form of objectivism. (The most famous proponent of a biological approach, however, Jerome Wakefield, adds to an objectivist-aspiring core an explicit value in the form of harm [End Page 175] [Wakefield 1999].) Whether or not it can be successful as a form of objectivism, in addition to whether an analysis in biological terms is possible, depends on whether the account of function can fully discharge any initial evaluative or normative assumptions.There seems to be good evidence that current psychiatric taxonomy, at least, contains values. John Sadler, for example, makes a powerful case for this in his substantial work Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis (2005). Sadler, furthermore, addresses in some detail a further set of questions concerning the kinds and nature of the values involved. I outline just one further question about the nature of values involved.Zachar and Kendler contrast the presence of values with objectivism. Objectivity has at least two relevant senses reflecting contrasts with two senses of subjectivity. It—objectivity—might mean requiring no special subject for the conception and framing of relevant judgments. (This mirrors primary, by contrast with secondary qualities, and Williams' idea of an absolute conception [Williams 1978]). Or, it might mean disciplining and providing a contrast between correctness and incorrectness, or truth and falsity, for the relevant judgments. This contrasts with subjective whimsy.Although it seems relatively straight forward that the conception and framing of value judgments requires that subjects have a particular kind of mind, that still leaves open the other issue. Are value judgments disciplined by anything or does the "truth" of a value judgment collapse back into its being sincerely made?Evaluativism in Psychiatric Taxonomy and EBMThis question relates to the application of EBM to psychiatry in this way. On a disciplined account, psychiatric taxonomy can aim to get right the mixture or, better, the compound of simple facts and values... (shrink)

Based on the research of currency crisis pressure index, bank crisis pressure index, and asset bubble crisis pressure index, this paper introduces an external shock pressure index reflecting the impact of global economic changes on economy and synthesizes systemic financial crisis pressure based on the above four pressure indexes; then, all the alternative early warning indicators and the systemic risk pressure index constructed in this paper were tested for Granger causality. We build financial systemic risk pressure (...) indexes, including currency crisis pressure banking crisis pressure index, bubble crisis pressure index, and external shock pressure index to predict financial crises. Finally, four indicators that have a significant impact on the systemic financial crisis pressure index were selected, namely, the stock price index change rate, industrial added value growth rate, domestic and foreign real deposit interest rate differential, and foreign direct investment as a percentage of GDP. A dynamic Logit model with lagging binary variables is constructed, and compared with the traditional static Logit line, the actual dynamic fitting effect is better than the static Logit model. The dynamic Logit model is used to predict the early warning status of systemic financial crisis in 2020, and the forecast of various early warning indicators is realized by the ARIMA model. The final prediction results show that the probability of a systemic financial crisis in China in 2020 is extremely low, almost zero. This is in line with the overall improvement in the international economic situation in 2020 and the steady growth of the domestic economy. (shrink)

Basic characteristic of Islamic heritage law, principally it has accepted the two-to-one ratio between the male and the female children/siblings in division of heritage. In Islamic inheritance law, the main/basic reason why the share of the male is twice the share of the female is no “value” judgments given to female/women in creation and gender in Islam, on the contrary, are real realities related with the roles and financial obligations that man and woman have undertaken, in other words, related (...) with “socio-economic structure/fact” in the family and society structure foreseen by Islam. As a matter of fact, “need principle” is based on in division and succession of heritageand a fair arrangement has been made in accordance with the rights and responsibilities of the husband and wife in Islamic Law. In some classical tafsīr books, the concept of “degree” in the verse “... Men have a degree (right) over women” (Al-Baqara 2/228) mentioning the mutual rights and responsibilities of women and men; and the expression of “lil al-dhakari mithlu haẓẓ al-unthayain” in the verse –the inheritance of man is the share of two women– (Al-Nisā 4/11) mentioning the inheritance shares of boys and girls is interpreted against the woman by disregarding the intended purpose and socio-economic contexts of these verses. As a result of this interpretation, the share of men in inheritance is twice the share of women in Islamic law is ontologically (existential/creation) based on a justification that “man is superior to woman”. In this article/study, an analyticallook atthe interpretations in some classical tafsīr books on the axis of “daraja/degree” and “lil al-dhakari mithlu haẓẓ al-unthayain” that today sheds light on the sociological-historical background of depriving the daughter from the heritage will be made. Summary: Just as there is no way to determine a person’s sex, it is not either possible by reason to have such an opportunity. - With the possibility of medical intervention nowadays - sex is determined by the discretion of the Supreme Creator rather than will. Indeed, it is mentioned in the Qur’ān: To Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth; He creates what he wills. He gives to whom He wills female [children], and He gives to whom He wills males (Al-Shūrā 42/49.)In addition to human biological sex, there is also social gender. Indeed, the term “sex” refers to being biologically female or male, while the term "gender" refers to the social and cultural identity of a woman or man, or the social roles that occur in the historical process.Accordingly, while it is not possible to determine biological sex (in normal circumstances in advance), determining gender is shaped by the cultural will of individuals and societies. As a matter of fact, gender is shaped according to the religions, customs and cultures of the societies and it shows differences according to time, culture and family structure. In this context, in the pre-Islamic Arab society, the gender of the girl or the woman was shaped by the custom of the ritual and customs. Indeed, it is a known fact that during the period of Jahiliyyah, in terms of social gender, the girl/woman has been deprived of many social and economic rights, especially heritage. The Qur’ān has brought the girls who, in the period of Jahiliyyah, were oppressed in terms of gender, deprived of many social and economical rights, treated as second class human, embarrassed of themselves and buried alive, to the same position as man. In this context, as it is in every field in the direction of social structure and social conditions of that day, also in the field of inheritance law, a number of regulations were made in the Qur’ān and the Sunnah being the main sources of Islam. The divisions of the inheritance were connected with religious and legal rules and the shares of the inheritance of the sons and daughters were determined by naṣṣ (verses and hadiths).However, in Islamic inheritance law, as a requirement of the structure of family and society accepted by Islam, in principle, “two-to-one” measures have been adopted between male and female children. As a matter of fact, in this aspect, it is mentioned in the Qur’ān: Allah instructs you concerning your children: for the male, what is equal to the share of two females (Al-Nisā 4/11.)On one hand, the principle that Islamic law brings between boys and girls; Seems to be an inequality in terms of the arrangement in which "the inheritance share of the male child is twice the share of the female child", while on the other hand, within the border of in the family foreseen by Islam, this regulation has not been seen as an injustice and inequity by Muslim societies, because in Islamic family law, a man is obliged to ensure the livelihood of the family after marriage. He is also obliged to give his wife her mahr when marrying.In Islamic inheritance law, “necessity principle” is taken as the basis of responsibility that women and man have undertaken in family and society. Therefore, even though giving nothing at all to those who are not in need and giving less to those who are in less need, giving too much to those who are in much need might seem contrary to the principle of equality, it is a necessity of the principle of justice and fairness. As a matter of fact, while "law equality, necessity in sharing" principle, law is arranged according to people's qualifications, goods and wealth sharing is divided according to the needs of people. In this context, there has been a fair division in Islamic heritage law based on the necessity, (distributive) justice and fairness principle. Indeed, the French philosopher Roger Garaudy (1913-2012), who chose /converted to Islam, evaluates the following about the proportion of male child in the Qur'an to that of female child: “When we consider that in the Arab society all the obligations of the family and of the care of the parents and of all the things that we call ‘social security’ today are put on the shoulders of the husband, the hereditary male child's share must be twice as high as the female child’s is”.As Garaudy argues, the difference in the inheritance of women and men in Islamic inheritance law is not a legal discrimination/inequality, but a form of divisiveness stemming from a need based on the role and responsibility that women and men have undertaken in the family and society. Therefore, giving nothing to those who need nothing, giving little to those who need little, and giving a lot to those who need a lot,even though may seem contradictious to the principle of equality, it becomes a necessity of equity and (distributive) justice principle. In this case, in Islamic inheritance law, the basic reason why the share of the male child is twice the share of the female child, is social and economic reasons and it is possible to rank them as follows:1) According to Islamic law, women are not obliged to make their own economic livelihoods. The woman’s economic responsibility belongs to her father or brothers before marriage, and then to her husband after marriage. 2) When a woman is married she is not responsible for herself or other family members’ livelihood. The male is obliged to make a living for himself, his wife and his children.3) While married, the male is obliged to give the wife mahr. The woman has no such responsibility.As it is understood from the above explanations, in Islamic inheritance law, the basic reason why the share of the male child is twice the share of the female child is not about the ontologically “value” based on creation and sex given to the woman (girl child) in Islam. On the contrary, it is the real facts concerning the family and society structure that Islam predicts, the roles and financial obligations that man and woman have undertaken, namely “socio-economic structure/fact”.In some commentaries in classical commentary books, the rights and responsibilities of women and men are referred to, like: the word “degree” mentioned in: …but the men have a degree over them [in responsibility and authority (Al-Baqara 2/228), and the talk about the inheritance shares of boys and girls in: for the male, what is equal to the share of two females (Al-Nisā 4/11). Eventually, the concepts “lil al-dhakari mithlu haẓẓ al-unthayain” have been associated with the gender of the woman/girl child ontologically (based on social fact) by ignoring the referent purpose and socio-economic contexts of these verses. As a result of these interpretations, it was desired that the Islamic law principle of inheritance share of male child being twice the share of female child, ontologically, should be based on a justification that “man is superior to woman”.In this study, some of the era’s dominant culture classical interpretations grounding women's inheritances share on her gender and based on the axis of the concepts of "degree" and “lil al-dhakari mithlu haẓẓ al-unthayain” in the related verses of the Qur'ān will be elaborated. (shrink)

The construction of a financial risk prediction model has become the need of the hour due to long-term and short-term violations in the financial market. To reduce the default risk of peer-to-peer companies and promote the healthy and sustainable development of the P2P industry, this article uses a model based on the LightGBM algorithm to analyze a large number of sample data from Renrendai, which is a representative platform of the P2P industry. This article explores the base (...) LightGBM model along with the integration of linear blending to build an optimal default risk identification model. The proposed approach is applicable for a large number of multi-dimensional data samples. The results show that the prediction accuracy rate of the LightGBM algorithm model on the test set reaches 80.25%, which can accurately identify more than 80% of users, and the model has the best prediction performance in terms of different performance evaluation indicators. The integration of LightGBM and the linear blending approach yield a precision value of 91.36%, a recall of 75.90%, and an accuracy of 84.36%. The established LightGBM algorithm can efficiently identify the default of the loan business on the P2P platform compared to the traditional machine learning models, such as logistic regression and support vector machine. For a large number of multi-dimensional data samples, the LightGBM algorithm can effectively judge the default risk of users on P2P platforms. (shrink)

This paper presents a new solution to the well-known exchange paradox, or what is sometimes referred to as the two-envelope paradox. Many recent commentators have analyzed the paradox in terms of the agent’s biased concern for the contents of his own arbitrarily chosen envelope, claiming that such bias violates the manifest symmetry of the situation. Such analyses, however, fail to make clear exactly how the symmetry of the situation is violated by the agent’s hypothetical conclusion that he ought (...) to switch envelopes on the assumption that his own envelope contains some specific amount of money. In this paper, I offer an explanation of this fact based on the idea that the agent’s deliberations are not only constrained by the epistemic symmetry reflected in the agent’s uniform ignorance as to the contents of the two envelopes, but also by a deeper methodological symmetry that manifests itself in the intuition that the two envelopes constitute equally legitimate sources of potential information. I interpret this intuition as implying that the agent’s final decision should reflect a point of rational equilibrium arrived at through an iterated process of counterfactual self-reflection, whereby the agent takes account of what he would have thought had he instead chosen the other envelope. I provide a formal model of this method of counterfactual self-reflection and show, in particular, that it cannot issue in the paradoxical conclusion that the agent ought to switch regardless of how much money is in his envelope. In this way, by correcting for the bias in the agent’s reasoning, the paradox is resolved. (shrink)

With the development of communication and computer technology, the application of big data technology has become increasingly widespread. Reasonable, effective, and fast retrieval methods for querying information from massive data have become an important content of current research. This article provides an image retrieval method based on the weighted nearest neighbor label prediction for the problem of automatic image annotation and keyword image retrieval. In order to improve the performance of the test method, scientific experimental verification was implemented. The (...) nearest neighbor weights are determined by maximizing the training image annotation, and experiments are carried out from multiple angles based on the Mahalanobis metric learning integration model. The experimental results show that the proposed tag correlation prediction propagation model has obvious improvements in accuracy, recall rate, break-even point, and overall average accuracy performance compared with other widely used algorithm models. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that Case-based decision theory, proposed by Gilboa and Schmeidler :605–639, 1995), can explain the aggregate dynamics of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, as observed in the experiments performed by Camera and Casari. Moreover, we find CBDT provides a better fit to the dynamics of cooperation than does the existing Probit model, which is the first time such a result has been found. We also find that humans aspire to a payoff above the mutual (...) defection outcome but below the mutual cooperation outcome, which suggests they hope, but are not confident, that cooperation can be achieved. Finally, our best-fitting parameters suggest that circumstances with more details are easier to recall. We make a prediction for future experiments: if the repeated PD were run for more periods, then we would be begin to see an increase in cooperation, most dramatically in the second treatment, where history is observed but identities are not. This is the first application of Case-based decision theory to a strategic context and the first empirical test of CBDT in such a context. It is also the first application of bootstrapped standard errors to an agent-based model. (shrink)

The financial risk information diffuses through various kinds of social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Individuals transmit the financial risk information which can migrate among different platforms or forums. In this paper, we propose a financial risk information spreading model on metapopulation networks. The subpopulation represents a platform or forum, and individuals migrate among them to transmit the information. We use a discrete-time Markov chain approach to describe the spreading dynamics’ evolution and deduce the outbreak threshold (...) point. We perform numerical simulation on artificial networks and discover that the financial risk information can be promoted once increasing the information transmission probability and active subpopulation fraction. The weight variance and migration probability cannot significantly affect the financial risk spreading size. The discrete-time Markov chain approach can reasonably predict the above phenomena. (shrink)

In view of the poor recommendation performance of traditional resource collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms, this article proposes a collaborative filtering recommendation model based on deep learning for art and MOOC resources. This model first uses embedding vectors based on the context of metapaths for learning. Embedding vectors based on the context of metapaths aggregate different metapath information and different MOOCs may have different preferences for different metapaths. Secondly, to capture this preference drift, the model introduces an attention (...) mechanism, which can improve the interpretability of the recommendation results. Then, by introducing the Laplacian matrix into the prior distribution of the hidden factor feature matrix, the relational network information is effectively integrated into the model. Finally, compared with the traditional model using the scoring matrix, the model in this article using text word vectors effectively alleviates the impact of data sparsity and greatly improves the accuracy of prediction. After analyzing the experimental results, compared with other algorithms, the resource collaborative filtering recommendation model proposed in this article has achieved better recommendation results, with good stability and scalability. (shrink)

The epistemology of computer simulations has become a mainstream topic in the philosophy of technology. Within this large area, significant differences hold between the various types of models and simulation technologies. Agent-based and multi-agent systems simulations introduce a specific constraint on the types of agents and systems modelled. We argue that such difference is crucial and that simulation for the artificial sciences requires the formulation of its own specific epistemological principles. We present a minimally committed epistemology which (...) relies on the methodological principles of the Philosophy of Information and requires weak assumptions on the usability of the simulation and the controllability of the model. We use these principles to provide a new definition of simulation for the context of interest. (shrink)

Scientists and engineers seek to understand how real-world systems work and could work better. Any modeling method devised for such purposes must simplify reality. Ideally, however, the modeling method should be flexible as well as logically rigorous; it should permit model simplifications to be appropriately tailored for the specific purpose at hand. Flexibility and logical rigor have been the two key goals motivating the development of Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), a completely agent-based modeling method characterized by (...) seven specific modeling principles. This perspective provides an overview of ACE, a brief history of its development, and its role within a broader spectrum of experiment-based modeling methods. (shrink)

In order to understand the transmission of a disease across a population we will have to understand not only the dynamics of contact infection but the transfer of health-care beliefs and resulting health-care behaviors across that population. This paper is a first step in that direction, focusing on the contrasting role of linkage or isolation between sub-networks in (a) contact infection and (b) belief transfer. Using both analytical tools and agent-based simulations we show that it is the structure (...) of a network that is primary for predicting contact infection—whether the networks or sub-networks at issue are distributed ring networks or total networks (hubs, wheels, small world, random, or scale-free for example). Measured in terms of time to total infection, degree of linkage between sub-networks plays a minor role. The case of belief is importantly different. Using a simplified model of belief reinforcement, and measuring belief transfer in terms of time to community consensus, we show that degree of linkage between sub-networks plays a major role in social communication of beliefs. Here, in contrast to the case of contract infection, network type turns out to be of relatively minor importance. What you believe travels differently. In a final section we show that the pattern of belief transfer exhibits a classic power law regardless of the type of network involved. (shrink)

Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is an essential component of legal assistant systems, which aims to automatically predict judgment results from a given criminal fact description. As a vital subtask of LJP, researchers have paid little attention to the numerical LJP, i.e., the prediction of imprisonment and penalty. Existing methods ignore numerical information in the criminal facts, making their performances far from satisfactory. For instance, the amount of theft varies, as do the prison terms and penalties. The major challenge is how (...) the model can obtain the ability of numerical comparison and magnitude perception, e.g., 400 < 500 < 800, 500 is closer to 400 than to 800. To this end, we propose a judicial knowledge-enhanced magnitude-aware reasoning architecture, called NumLJP, for the numerical LJP task. Specifically, we first implement a contrastive learning-based judicial knowledge selector to distinguish confusing criminal cases efficiently. Unlike previous approaches that employ the law article as external knowledge, judicial knowledge is a quantitative guideline in real scenarios. It contains many numerals (called anchors) that can construct a reference frame. Then we design a masked numeral prediction task to help the model remember these anchors to acquire legal numerical commonsense from the selected judicial knowledge. We construct a scale-based numerical graph using the anchors and numerals in facts to perform magnitude-aware numerical reasoning. Finally, the representations of fact description, judicial knowledge, and numerals are fused to make decisions. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and select several competitive baselines. The results demonstrate that the macro-F1 of NumLJP improves by at least 9.53% and 11.57% on the prediction of penalty and imprisonment, respectively. (shrink)

The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal knowledge embedded in word vectors is important for cognitive modeling using distributional semantic models. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to identify the knowledge encoded in (...) class='Hi'>word vectors by conducting a computational experiment using Binder et al.'s (2016) featural conceptual representations based on neurobiologically motivated attributes. In an experiment, these conceptual vectors are predicted from text‐based word vectors using a neural network and linear transformation, and prediction performance is compared among various types of information. The analysis demonstrates that abstract information is generally predicted more accurately by word vectors than perceptual and spatiotemporal information, and specifically, the prediction accuracy of cognitive and social information is higher. Emotional information is also found to be successfully predicted for abstract words. These results indicate that language can be a major source of knowledge about abstract attributes, and they support the recent view that emphasizes the importance of language for abstract concepts. Furthermore, we show that word vectors can capture some types of perceptual and spatiotemporal information about concrete concepts and some relevant word categories. This suggests that language statistics can encode more perceptual knowledge than often expected. (shrink)

The car-sharing system is a popular rental model for cars in shared use. It has become particularly attractive due to its flexibility; that is, the car can be rented and returned anywhere within one of the authorized parking slots. The main objective of this research work is to predict the car usage in parking stations and to investigate the factors that help to improve the prediction. Thus, new strategies can be designed to make more cars on the road and fewer (...) in the parking stations. To achieve that, various machine learning models, namely vector autoregression, support vector regression, eXtreme gradient boosting, k-nearest neighbors, and deep learning models specifically long short-time memory, gated recurrent unit, convolutional neural network, CNN-LSTM, and multilayer perceptron, were performed on different kinds of features. These features include the past usage levels, Chongqing’s environmental conditions, and temporal information. After comparing the obtained results using different metrics, we found that CNN-LSTM outperformed other methods to predict the future car usage. Meanwhile, the model using all the different feature categories results in the most precise prediction than any of the models using one feature category at a time. (shrink)

Digital currency is considered a form of currency which is used in the digital world such as digital forms or electronic devices. Several terms are synonyms for digital currency like digital money, electronic money, and cyber cash. Accurate prediction of the digital currency is an urgent necessity due to its impacts on the economic community. The electronic economy is very dangerous and must be approached with great caution, so as to avoid or minimize the risks that occur in such cases. (...) Deep neural network algorithm was improved to predict the Bitcoin price and then achieve the main goal of reducing financial risks to proceed with electronic business, and good estimation was achieved by using informative data such as transactions and currency return. The proposed method extracted features of related Bitcoin and used the informative ones. Transaction plan considered building nodes in terms of network. Development of deep learning algorithms opens the horizons for the development of electronic businesses that use digital currency. The proposed method achieved worthy results in terms of accuracy and correct prediction and offers the prospect of other research in this area. (shrink)

Bayesian paradigm has been widely acknowledged as a coherent approach to learning putative probability model structures from a finite class of candidate models. Bayesian learning is based on measuring the predictive ability of a model in terms of the corresponding marginal data distribution, which equals the expectation of the likelihood with respect to a prior distribution for model parameters. The main controversy related to this learning method stems from the necessity of specifying proper prior distributions for all unknown parameters (...) of a model, which ensures a complete determination of the marginal data distribution. Even for commonly used models, subjective priors may be difficult to specify precisely, and therefore, several automated learning procedures have been suggested in the literature. Here we introduce a novel Bayesian learning method based on the predictive entropy of a probability model, that can combine both subjective and objective probabilistic assessment of uncertain quantities in putative models. It is shown that our approach can avoid some of the limitations of the earlier suggested objective Bayesian methods. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of hybrid war. Based on the fact that the military actions can be represented as the particular process, it is proposed to analyze the phenomenon on the technological approach. In addition, the study of the phenomenon does not occur within the traditional "democratic paradigm", and based on the assertion that in modern Ukraine the model of social and political order with an oligarchs in the center was formed. All state institutions and (...) segments of civil society are in a tough financial and economic dependence from the social group of oligarchs. The goals, objectives, principles, directions, forms, methods and techniques of conducting hybrid warfare are discussed. The general and the particular to the phenomena of the conventional war and the hybrid war is determined. Focuses on the complex nature of the phenomenon, its layered structure. In this connection, emphasizes the fact that the main actors of the war at different levels perform different roles, which is fixed by experts who analyze the situation. In particular, Ukraine can be considered as the subject of a hybrid war at the regional level, but it also becomes the purpose and the object as to the subjects of higher geopolitical level. In general, the phenomenon of hybrid war characterized by a lack of principles in building of the technological process. In the specific case of Ukraine, the lack of clear principles in the organization of the process dictated by economic interests of oligarchic clans that joined the struggle for the redistribution model in securing ownership of tools and means of production. Other elements of the process of the hybrid war are serve the implementation of the corporate interests of the oligarchs. In addition, the Ukrainian oligarchic structures are the link, the conductor for the interests of oligarchic structures of higher global level. The main tool in this struggle is the information - the main resource of the era, on which the oligarchs try to win a monopoly. Thus, we can talk about the oligarchic discourse of the hybrid war in Ukraine, as invariably present oligarchic component in all its elements. (shrink)

Computational drug repositioning has been proven as a promising and efficient strategy for discovering new uses from existing drugs. To achieve this goal, a number of computational methods have been proposed, which are based on different data sources of drugs and diseases. These methods approach the problem using either machine learning- or network-based models with an assumption that similar drugs can be used for similar diseases to identify new indications of drugs. Therefore, similarities between drugs and between diseases (...) are usually used as inputs. In addition, known drug-disease associations are also needed for the methods as prior information. It should be noted that those associations are still not well established due to the fact that many of marketed drugs have been withdrawn and this could affect the outcome of the methods. In this study, we propose a novel method named RLSDR to find new uses of drugs. More specifically, it relies on a semi-supervised learning model, Regularized Least Square, thus it does not require definition of non-drug-disease associations as previously proposed machine learning-based methods. In addition, the similarity between drugs measured by chemical structures of drug compounds and the similarity between diseases which share phenotypes can be represented in a form of either similarity network or similarity matrix as inputs of the method. Moreover, instead of using a gold-standard set of known drug-disease associations, we construct an artificial set of the associations based on known disease-gene and drug-target associations. Experiment results demonstrate that RLSDR achieves better prediction performance on the artificial set of drug-disease associations than that on the gold-standard ones in terms of area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve. In addition, it outperforms two representative network-based methods irrespective of the prior information of drug-disease associations. Novel indications for a number of drugs are also identified and validated by evidences from a different data resource. (shrink)

Sentiment analysis aims to predict sentiment polarities (positive, negative or neutral) of a given piece of text. It lies at the intersection of many fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, and Data Mining. Sentiments can be expressed explicitly or implicitly. Arabic Sentiment Analysis presents a challenge undertaking due to its complexity, ambiguity, various dialects, the scarcity of resources, the morphological richness of the language, the absence of contextual information, and the absence of explicit sentiment words in an (...) implicit piece of text. Recently, deep learning has obviously shown a great success in the field of sentiment analysis and is considered as the state-of-the-art model in Arabic Sentiment Analysis. However, the state-of-the-art accuracy for Arabic sentiment analysis still needs improvements regarding contextual information and implicit sentiment expressed in different real cases. In this paper, an efficient Bidirectional LSTM Network (BiLSTM) is investigated to enhance Arabic Sentiment Analysis, by applying Forward-Backward encapsulate contextual information from Arabic feature sequences. The experimental results on six benchmark sentiment analysis datasets demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over the state-of-art deep learning models and the baseline traditional machine learning methods. (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as a set (...) of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

This poster presents results from applying agent-based modeling to an exploration of risk attitudes and rational decision making in the context of group interaction. We are also interested in the place of agent-based modeling and computational philosophy within the computational humanities. Computational philosophy has not typically been included in Digital Humanities; computational work has been done using philosophy texts as a source for analysis (Kinney 2022; Malaterre et al. 2021; Fletcher et al. 2021; Zahorec et al. (...) 2022), but there are few examples of philosophical arguments being made based on computation (Zahorec et al. 2022). Modeling is largely accepted as a computational humanist method (McCarty 2004; So 2022), but typically models are based on data rather than designed simulations as a method analogous to a thought experiment (Mayo-Wilson / Zollman 2021). Agent-based modeling is not as common in computational humanities, but we are interested in its potential; for instance, see work modeling correspondence networks to better understand lost information and biases in correspondence data sets (Buarque / Vogl 2023), or work simulating past human societies (Romanowska et al. 2021). Our project explores Lara Buchak’s theory of risk-weighted rational decision making by extending it to the context of group populations and interactions. Buchak has proposed risk-weighted expected utility maximization, which incorporates individual risk attitudes into the standard expected utility (EU) calculation based on utility and probability of outcomes (Buchak 2017). This theory provides an explanation for differences of behavior seen in human populations, while still allowing those different choices to be rational. Buchak’s theory has previously only been applied to individual decision making; our work uses agent-based modeling to develop and analyze simulations which incorporate a variety of risk attitudes (risk avoidance and risk seeking) into game theoretic interactions. This project is a collaboration between a philosopher and a research software engineer; we have worked together to develop simulations that implement agents with risk attitudes making risky choices. This presentation focuses on results from an implementation of a hawk/dove game with multiple risk attitudes and risk attitude adjustment. In the hawk/dove game cooperation, or playing dove, is better for the population, but acting aggressively, or playing hawk, is better for an individual if they are in a neighborhood of doves. To set up the game, we place agents on a grid and have them play against each of their neighbors, and accumulate payoffs based on the success of their plays. We define risk attitudes 0 through 9, where that number corresponds to the minimum number of neighbors playing dove for an agent to play hawk. An agent with risk attitude 0 is most risk seeking and always plays hawk; an agent with risk attitude 1 will play hawk if at least one neighbor plays dove; an agent with risk attitude 9 always takes the safe choice and plays dove; an agent with risk attitude 4 or 5 is risk neutral (breaking ties in different ways), which corresponds to expected utility. In this simulation we randomly set agent initial risk attitudes, and then every ten rounds agents compare their payoffs with their neighbors and adopt the most successful risk attitude in their neighborhood. The simulation is coded to stop once risk attitude adjustments stabilize. We define 13 different population states based on primary and second majority of risk averse, risk inclined, or risk moderate, and analysis of over 1 million runs indicate that while it’s more likely to stabilize with the population having become majority risk inclined, that is not the only outcome; we also see cases where the population stabilizes as risk neutral, risk avoidant, and many cases with no clear majority. This diversity of stable populations provides support for the argument that no one risk attitude is uniquely rational, but rather that risk attitudes are conventional. This matches what we observe in the real world: that different populations have different risk attitudes. Our simulations include numerous parameters to vary grid size; adjustment frequency, strategy, and wealth comparison; neighborhood sizes for observing previous choice, playing against, and comparing payoffs for adjusting risk attitudes; and different distributions for initializing risk attitudes. Analysis of parameters and adjusted risk attitudes shows that the strongest correlations are the initial distribution of risk attitudes, which tend to be preserved. * * * This poster was accepted and presented at the DH2024 conference in Washington, D.C. (shrink)

In addition to ordinary conversations among relatively small numbers of individuals, human societies have public conversations. These are diffuse, ongoing discussions about various topics, which are largely sustained by journalistic activities. They are conversations about news – what is happening now – that members of various groups (such as the residents of a certain country, a certain town, or practitioners of a certain profession) need to know about in their capacity as members of those groups, and about how to react (...) to the news. Our topic in this chapter is a type of resistance to evidence that can arise at the level of these public conversations, rather than at the level of individual agents. We call it “relevance-based resistance to evidence”. A public conversation exhibits this kind of evidence resistance when it becomes overly focused on topics that members of the group that the conversation concerns do not in fact need to know about qua members of the group – topics which are, in a word, irrelevant. We argue that the risks of such relevance-based knowledge resistance are significantly amplified by certain structural features of online discourse. (shrink)

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: (...) beliefs for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns. (shrink)

This work formalizes an informant-based structured argumentation approach in a multi-agent setting, where the knowledge base of an agent may include information provided by other agents, and each piece of knowledge comes attached with its informant. In that way, arguments are associated with the set of informants corresponding to the information they are built upon. Our approach proposes an informant-based notion of argument strength, where the strength of an argument is determined by the credibility of its (...) informant agents. Moreover, we consider that the strength of an argument is not absolute, but it is relative to the resolution of the conflicts the argument is involved in. In other words, the strength of an argument may vary from one context to another, as it will be determined by comparison to its attacking arguments (respectively, the arguments it attacks). Finally, we equip agents with the means to express reasons for or against the consideration of any piece of information provided by a given informant agent. Consequently, we allow agents to argue about the arguments’ strength through the construction of arguments that challenge (respectively, defeat) or are in favour of their informant agents. (shrink)

Epidemiological models have played a central role in the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when urgent decisions were required and available evidence was sparse. They have been used to predict the evolution of the disease and to inform policy-making. In this paper, we address two kinds of epidemiological models widely used in the pandemic, namely, compartmental models and agent-based models. After describing their essentials—some real examples are invoked—we discuss their main strengths and weaknesses. Then, on the basis of this analysis, (...) we make a comparison between their respective merits concerning three different goals: prediction, explanation, and intervention. We argue that there are general considerations which could favour any of those sorts of models for obtaining the aforementioned goals. We conclude, however, that preference for particular models must be grounded case-by-case since additional contextual factors, as the peculiarities of the target population and the aims and expectations of policy-makers, cannot be overlooked. (shrink)