Neighborhoods for Entailment

This paper presents a neighborhood semantics for logics of entailment. It begins with a minimal system Min that expresses the most fundamental assumptions about the entailment relation, and continues by examining various extensions that reflect further assumptions that might be made about entailment. This leads first to the logic B that is the basic relevant logic, and then to more powerful systems. All of these logics are proved to be sound and strongly complete. With B the neighborhood semantics meets the Routley–Meyer relational semantics for relevant logic; these connections are examined. The minimal and basic entailment logics are shown to have the finite model property, and hence to be decidable.     

科学心理学的观念与人文科学的逻辑奠基

科学心理学观念的普遍兴起,是19世纪中叶错综复杂的思想史背景的产物。只有在人类思想及其历史作为整体的关系背景中,才能澄清这个观念的内在本性。也只有在系统地接受这个背景的制约关系中,这个观念才能获得其真理的实现。能否在人类思想作为整体中胜任并执行其理论职能,成为我们检验一种心理学体系之真理性的途径之一:科学心理学观念只有实现为现象学心理学,才能执行其为人文科学奠基的逻辑职能; 反之亦然。这个关系还从否定方面暗示着,一切以异化的形式实现的心理学,都不可能真正承担起为人文科学奠基的逻辑职能,并因而违背了我们的常识。     

A low power fuzzy logic based variable resolution ADC for wireless ECG monitoring systems

Portable low power and high quality monitoring devices play an important role for improving the performance of wireless body sensor networks. Mixed signal processor is required in ECG monitoring unit that comprises of analog front end, analog to digital converter (ADC) and digital signal processor. ADC is a core element in mixed signal processing unit and the proper design of ADC is crucial for data acquisition without losing heart related information and originality. The adaptive sampling has been used in the existing ADCs for choosing the sampling clock adaptively. Adaptive sampling rate ADC performs compression and reduces power consumption to some extent, however low powers ADCs are essential in wireless healthcare monitoring systems. In this paper, fuzzy logic based variable resolution controller is proposed to design the ADC efficiently in terms of circuit complexity and power. To further reduce the power consumption, power gating technique is adopted for static power reduction. Under 90 nm CMOS technology, gate count, core area utilization and power consumption have been determined for existing adaptive sampling ADC and fuzzy logic based adaptive sampling ADC. Cadence design tools have been used for the measurement of power in the designed circuit. The performance has been found to be better in terms of area and power that are very much essential for wireless ECG monitoring systems.     

Embodied Critical Realism

Christian Smith's What Is a Person? provides an account of the person from the perceptive of critical realism. As a fellow critical realist, I support that philosophical position and in this response I seek to support it by connecting it to the embodied realism developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In order to bring the two forms of realism together, I critique both the relativism of embodied realism and the idea, found in Smith, that the person's awareness of the world is mediated by her experience. The goal of this paper, then, is an embodied critical realism, a more coherent realist position that combines the best parts of each.     

Philosophical foundations of partial belief models

This paper is an attempt to put forward a new kind of partial model for representing belief states. I first introduce some philosophical motivations for working with partial models. Then, I present the standard (total) model proposed by Hintikka, and the partial models studied by Humberstone and Holliday. I then show how to reduce Hintikka’s semantics in order to obtain a partial model which, however, differs from Humberstone’s and Holliday’s. The nature of such differences is assessed, and I provide motivations for using the newly proposed semantics rather than the existing ones. Finally, I review some promising philosophical applications of the ideas developed throughout the discussion.     

A multiple-valued logic approach to the design and verification of hardware circuits

We present a novel approach, which is based on multiple-valued logic (MVL), to the verification and analysis of digital hardware designs, which extends the common ternary or quaternary approaches for simulations. The simulations which are performed in the more informative MVL setting reveal details which are either invisible or harder to detect through binary or ternary simulations. In equivalence verification, detecting different behavior under MVL simulations may lead to the discovery of a genuine binary non-equivalence or to a qualitative gap between two designs. The value of a variable in a simulation may hold information about its degree of truth and its “place of birth” and “date of birth”. Applications include equivalence verification, initialization, assertions generation and verification, partial control on the flow of data by prioritizing and block-oriented simulations. Much of the paper is devoted to theoretical aspects behind the MVL approach, including the reason for choosing a specific algebra for computations and the introduction of the notions of De Morgan Canonical Form and of verification complexity of Boolean expressions. Two basic simulation-based algorithms are presented, one for satisfying and verifying combinational designs and the other for equivalence verification of sequential designs.     

Bunched sequential information

It is known that the logic BI of bunched implications is a logic of resources. Many studies have reported on the applications of BI to computer science. In this paper, an extension BIS of BI by adding a sequence modal operator is introduced and studied in order to formalize more fine-grained resource-sensitive reasoning. By the sequence modal operator of BIS, we can appropriately express “sequential information” in resource-sensitive reasoning. A Gentzen-type sequent calculus SBIS for BIS is introduced, and the cut-elimination and decidability theorems for SBIS are proved. An extension of the Grothendieck topological semantics for BI is introduced for BIS, and the completeness theorem with respect to this semantics is proved. The cut-elimination, decidability and completeness theorems for SBIS and BIS are proved using some theorems for embedding BIS into BI.     

Can Hardcore Actualism Validate S5?

Hardcore actualism (HA) grounds all modal truths in the concrete constituents of the actual world (see, e.g., Borghini and Williams (2008), Jacobs (2010), Vetter (2015)). I bolster HA, and elucidate the very nature of possibility (and necessity) according to HA, by considering if it can validate S5 modal logic. Interestingly, different considerations pull in different directions on this issue. To resolve the tension, we are forced to think hard about the nature of the hardcore actualist’s modal reality and how radically this departs from possible worlds orthodoxy. Once we achieve this departure, the prospects of a hardcore actualist validation of S5 look considerably brighter. This paper thus strengthens hardcore actualism by arguing that it can indeed validate S5–arguably the most popular logic of metaphysical modality–and, in the process, it elucidates the very nature of modality according to this revisionary, but very attractive, modal metaphysics.