Narrating a Fantasmatic Unity: On the Contemporary Sinophone Discourse of China’s Civilizational Subjectivity

A powerful discourse centered on China’s civilizational subjectivity has emerged in the Sinophone intellectual world since the early 2000s. Among many promoters of this intellectual trend, Gan Yang, together with his slogan of the “fusion of three traditions,” is indeed most influential. This study employs Lacanian psychoanalytic technics to tackle Gan Yang’s thesis, treating the latter not just an object for textual analysis, but more deeply (and fruitfully), that for psychoanalysis. The findings of the study reveal the presence of a fantasmatic structure framing and guaranteeing Gan’s (sharply inconsistent) vision of China’s civilizational subjectivity. Such fantasmatic formation can be referred to as the “Great Dragon fantasy”—a fantasy about China’s civilizational unity and glory.     

Towards a “Sophisticated” Model of Belief Dynamics. Part I: The General Framework

It is well-known that classical models of belief are not realistic representations of human doxastic capacity; equally, models of actions involving beliefs, such as decisions based on beliefs, or changes of beliefs, suffer from a similar inaccuracies. In this paper, a general framework is presented which permits a more realistic modelling both of instantaneous states of belief, and of the operations involving them. This framework is motivated by some of the inadequacies of existing models, which it overcomes, whilst retaining technical rigour in so far as it relies on known, natural logical and mathematical notions. The companion paper (Towards a “sophisticated” model of belief dynamics. Part II) contains an application of this framework to the particular case of belief revision. Presented by Hannes Leitgeb     

Ontological Proofs of Existence and Non-Existence

Caramuels’ proof of non-existence of God is compared with Gödel’s proof of existence.     

Elimination problems in logic: a brief history

A common aim of elimination problems for languages of logic is to express the entire content of a set of formulas of the language, or a certain part of it, in a way that is more elementary or more informative. We want to bring out that as the languages for logic grew in expressive power and, at the same time, our knowledge of their expressive limitations also grew, elimination problems in logic underwent some change. For languages other than that for monadic second-order logic, there remain important open problems.     

Was ist seit BGHSt 45, 164 geschehen? Ein Überblick über die neuere Rechtsprechung des Bundesgerichtshofs zur Beurteilung der Glaubhaftigkeit von Zeugenaussagen

Zusammenfassung  Der 1. Strafsenat des Bundesgerichtshofs hat in seinem Urteil vom 30. Juli 1999 (BGHSt 45, 164) die wissenschaftlichen Anforderungen beschrieben, die an eine aussagepsychologische Begutachtung (Glaubhaftigkeitsgutachten) zu stellen sind, und die Richter verpflichtet, zukünftig darauf zu achten, dass diese Mindeststandards bei der Erstattung von Gutachten eingehalten werden. Ausgehend von dieser Entscheidung stellt der Beitrag die seitherige Entwicklung der Rechtsprechung zur Glaubhaftigkeitsbeurteilung von Zeugenaussagen dar. Er geht dabei über die an das Gutachten zu stellenden Anforderungen hinaus und befasst sich auch damit, wann ein solches Gutachten erforderlich, von wem es zu erstatten und in welcher Weise es vom Richter in den Entscheidungsgründen darzustellen ist. Zudem schildert er, welchen Einfluss die Anerkennung der hypothesengeleiteten, kriterienorientierten Aussageanalyse auf die Beweiswürdigung durch den Tatrichter und deren überprüfung durch das Revisionsgericht hat.

On Similarity Coefficients for 2×2 Tables and Correction for Chance

This paper studies correction for chance in coefficients that are linear functions of the observed proportion of agreement. The paper unifies and extends various results on correction for chance in the literature. A specific class of coefficients is used to illustrate the results derived in this paper. Coefficients in this class, e.g. the simple matching coefficient and the Dice/Sørenson coefficient, become equivalent after correction for chance, irrespective of what expectation is used. The coefficients become either Cohen’s kappa, Scott’s pi, Mak’s rho, Goodman and Kruskal’s lambda, or Hamann’s eta, depending on what expectation is considered appropriate. Both a multicategorical generalization and a multivariate generalization are discussed.