The characteristic asymmetry in ascribing intentionality, known as the Knobe effect, is widely thought to result from the moral evaluation of the side effect. Existing research has focused mostly on elucidating the ordinary meaning of the notion of intentionality, while less effort has been devoted to the moral conditions associated with the analyzed scenarios. The current analysis of the moral prop-erties of the main and side effects, as well as of the moral evaluations of the relationship between them, sheds new light on the influence of moral considerations on the attribution of intentionality in the Knobe effect. The moral evaluation of the relationship between the main and side effects is significant in that under certain circumstances it cancels asymmetry in intentionality ascription.
The hierarchical fragmentation of a molecular cloud is modelled as a random process by the Monte Carlo method. It is proposed that the IMF for stár formation is bimodal. The probability of the fragmentation in each mode is a function of the initial cloud mass and defined critical mass, which can be derived from the surface
density and temperature of cloud. The modelled IMF is compared with the empirically determined function and the best fit was found for critical masses of 0.3 M^ for low-mass mode and 2.0 M„ for
high-mass mode of star formation.
This paper proposes a specialized LP-algorithm for a sub problem arising in simple Profit maximising Lot-sizing. The setting involves a single (and multi) item production system with negligible set-up costs/times and limited production capacity. The producer faces a monopolistic market with given time-varying linear demand curves.
It is shown that the sum and the product of two commuting Banach space operators with Dunford’s property $\mathrm (C)$ have the single-valued extension property.
When 20-year-old Guo Jingming published his first novel Enchanted City, in 2003, a myth was immediately created. The symbols communicated both by the novel and by the author provoked a deep identification among the readers, who were, for the most part, middle and high school students of the urban middle stratum. Guo Jingming, as many were to proclaim, had given representation to the sensibility of a whole generation. But what were the specific conditions that spurred the emergence of such a sensibility? What was the social dimension that lay beneath the construction of Guo Jingming’s myth? In order to answer these questions, my essay interprets Guo Jingming’s parable in the framework of the material and ideological reality of the “socialist market economy.” It does so, firstly, examining the circumstances that contributed to constitute the subjectivity of the first generation of urbanites who were born under the “one-child policy” and attended the competitive and selective national school system. Secondly, it seeks to reconstruct the parable of Guo Jingming as a writer and a phenomenon of mass culture, who, being produced and promoted by the Chinese culture industry, contributed in turn to the dissemination and promotion of the “new” dominant ideology of the Chinese “socialist market.”
An important cognitive feature –shared only by humans and a few other species– is self-consciousness. It has been defined as “the possession of the concept of the self and the ability to use this concept in thinking about oneself”. Self-consciousness undoubtedly depends on some kind of self-representation, although the nature of this self-representation in intelligent beings is still unknown. In recent years, several cognitive scientists have proposed self-representation models. Nevertheless, usually these models only represent the current state of consciousness. In this paper, we introduce the time dimension to extend self-representation models in order to represent the development of individual self-representation over time.
Another important cognitive feature of both humans and animals is that they have a sense of belonging. It has been defined as “the process by which an individual understands that other beings are like himself (herself)”. We focus on the social side of self-consciousness and self-representation by defining self-consciousness as a specialization of the sense of belonging.
In this paper, we use modular artificial neural networks for implementation. To test models, we implemented a simulator with modular neural networks composed of self-organized maps (SOM) and time delayed neural networks (TDNN). In this multi-agent system, agents were equipped with a simplified model of sensory perception, personality, sense of belonging and self-consciousness. Agent interaction is tested in different hypothetical social scenarios. The simulator structure and its MANN components are described in detail. The relation between a sense of belonging and self-consciousness is also discussed. Quantitative results are analyzed and conclusions stated.
Large housing estates make up an essential portion of the housing stock in the urban structure of Polish cities. It was expected that large housing estates in Poland might experience social decline in the 1990s, but several research projects conducted in the estates did not identify any increase in social degradation. This article examines the social structure of the residents of large housing estates in Poland and identifies the main trends in current social changes. The time frame of ongoing transformations in the social structure was set around the turn of the 21st century. This analysis is based on Polish 1988 and 2002 National Census data, the Polish PESEL population database (2011), and the author’s survey data (2010–2012). Research was conducted in seven housing estates in fi ve Polish cities or towns (Poznań, Kraków, Tarnów, Dzierżoniów, and Żyrardów) and focused on analysing the sizes and types of households and their economic situation and the social structure of the estates. Results showed that large housing estates continue to have a heterogeneous social structure and to resist social deprivation processes. Depending on the period when a particular estate was built it is possible to observe distinctive features of housing estates, such as social structure renewal in housing estates from the 1950s and 1960s, residential ageing in those from the 1970s, and the risk of an exodus of young residents from estates from the 1980s. Those shared problems may soon become decisive for the future development of large estates.
All representations of the Other, adopt similar strategies, which emphasize the difference between the Other and Self, and are recognized as symbolic expressions of supposed superiority of Self over the Other, thus serving to legitimize any attempts to civilize or rule the Other. Such strategies, often applied by the West to describe the uneven East- West relations in the colonial literary discourse, can also be found in contemporary Chinese literary representations of “minority nationalities.” Representations of landscape are among the most important symbols that are used in the process of “othering” of the non-Self, and are especially relevant for Chinese representations of Tibet. The article examines the representation of Tibetan landscape in Chinese and Tibetan literatures, from the 1980s, written by both Han and Tibetan authors. Han writers have used the Tibetan landscape as a symbolic expression of the imaginary distance between themselves and Tibetans, while Tibetan authors stress the aspects that can help in an identification with the environment. The analysis reveals the symbolic function of landscape in relation to the newly (re)constructed Tibetan identity within the context of the multiethnic China at the end of the 20th century.