We describe the foundations and the systematization of natural logic-like monotonic inference using unscoped episodic logical forms (ULFs) that as reported by Kim et al. (Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA), Groningen, 2021a, b) introduced and first evaluated. In addition to providing a more detailed explanation of the theory and system, we present results from extending the inference manager to address a few of the limitations that as reported by Kim et al. (...) (Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA), Groningen, 2021b) naive system has. Namely, we add mechanisms to incorporate lexical information from the hypothesis (or goal) sentence, enable the inference manager to consider multiple possible scopings for a single sentence, and match against the goal using English rather than the ULF. (shrink)

We introduce a new class of real-valued monotones in preordered spaces, injective monotones. We show that the class of preorders for which they exist lies in between the class of preorders with strict monotones and preorders with countable multi-utilities, improving upon the known classification of preordered spaces through real-valued monotones. We extend several well-known results for strict monotones (Richter–Peleg functions) to injective monotones, we provide a construction of injective monotones from countable multi-utilities, and relate injective monotones to classic results concerning (...) Debreu denseness and order separability. Along the way, we connect our results to Shannon entropy and the uncertainty preorder, obtaining new insights into how they are related. In particular, we show how injective monotones can be used to generalize some appealing properties of Jaynes’ maximum entropy principle, which is considered a basis for statistical inference and serves as a justification for many regularization techniques that appear throughout machine learning and decision theory. (shrink)

Rule-based ethical theories like Kant's appear to be promising for machine ethics because of the computational structure of their judgments. On one formalist interpretation of Kant's categorical imperative, for instance, a machine could place prospective actions into the traditional deontic categories (forbidden, permissible, obligatory) by a simple consistency test on the maxim of action. We might enhance this test by adding a declarative set of subsidiary maxims and other "buttressing" rules. The ethical judgment is then an outcome of the consistency (...) test. While this kind of test can generate results, it may be vacuous in the sense that it would do no more than forbid obviously contradictory maxims of action. It is also possible that the kind of inference in such a rule-based system may be non-monotonic. I discuss these challenges to a rule-based machine ethics, starting from the framework of Kantian ethics. (shrink)

Since its inception, situation theory has been concerned with the situated nature of meaning and cognition, a theme which has also recently gained some prominence in Artificial Intelligence. Channel theory is a recently developed framework which builds on concepts introduced in situation theory, in an attempt to provide a general theory of information flow. In particular, the channel theoretic framework offers an account of fallible regularities, regularities which provide enough structure to an agent's environment to support efficient cognitive processing but (...) which are limited in their reliability to specific circumstances. This paper describes how this framework can lead to a different perspective on defeasible reasoning: rather than being seen as reasoning with incomplete information, an agent makes use of a situated regularity, choosing to use the regularity that seems best suited (trading off reliability and simplicity) to the circumstances it happens to find itself in. We present a formal model for this task, based on the channel theoretic framework, and sketch how the model may be used as the basis for a methodology of defeasible situated reasoning, whereby agents reason with simple monotonic regularities but may revise their choice of regularity on learning more about their circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out some basic elements of a deontic logic with an implementation appropriate for handling conflicting legal obligations for purposes of programming autonomous machine agents. Kantian justice demands that the prescriptive system of enforceable public laws be consistent, yet statutes or case holdings may often describe legal obligations that contradict; moreover, even fundamental constitutional rights may come into conflict. I argue that a deontic logic of the law should not try to work around such conflicts but, (...) instead, identify and expose them so that the rights and duties that generate inconsistencies in public law can be explicitly qualified and the conflicts resolved. I then argue that a credulous, non-monotonic deontic logic can describe inconsistent legal obligations while meeting Kant’s demand for consistency in the prescriptive system of public law. Finally, I propose an implementation of this logic via a modified form of “answer set programming,” which I demonstrate with some simple examples. (shrink)

This paper provides a series of reflections on making the case to senior leaders for the introduction of clinical ethics support services within a UK hospital Trust at a time when clinical ethics committees are dwindling in the UK. The paper provides key considerations for those building a case for clinical ethics support within hospitals by drawing upon published academic literature, and key reports from governmental and professional bodies. We also include extracts from documents relating to, and annual reports of, (...) existing clinical ethics support within UK hospitals, as well as extracts from our own proposal submitted to the Trust Board. We aim for this paper to support other ethicists and/or health care staff contemplating introducing clinical ethics support into hospitals, to facilitate the process of making the case for clinical ethics support, and to contribute to the key debates in the literature around clinical ethics support. We conclude that there is a real need for investment in clinical ethics in the UK in order to build the evidence base required to support the wider introduction of clinical ethics support into UK hospitals. Furthermore, our perceptions of the purpose of, and perceived needs met through, clinical ethics support needs to shift to one of hospitals investing in their staff. Finally, we raise concerns over the optional nature of clinical ethics support available to practitioners within UK hospitals. (shrink)

The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that (...) make them super-rich, i.e., pay a 100 % tax on their wealth above a certain level, or, (ii) they must forfeit some of their political rights. These rights include entitlements to fund political parties; to stand for office; and to work or volunteer for political parties. The right to vote, though, is not limited. I defend my proposal against non-consequentialist and consequentialist objections. I also argue that it avoids two problems that many attempts to reduce political inequality face; these are the political egalitarian’s dilemma and the problem of political equality’s relative moral importance. (shrink)

This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually and inter-personally, the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for (...) a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes. (shrink)

In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian (...) Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire full European Union membership. (shrink)

Democracy can be a means to independently valuable ends and/or it can be intrinsically (or non-instrumentally) valuable. One powerful non-instrumental defence of democracy is based on the idea that only it can publicly justify political authority. I contend that this is an argument about the reasonable acceptability of political authority and about the requirements of publicity and that satisfying these requirements has nothing to do with whether a society is democratic or not. Democracy, then, plays no role in publicly justifying (...) political authority. I also show that any non-instrumental defence of democracy must make claims about what justice requires and make several further claims that require substantial justification. (shrink)

There has been criticism of how Fair-Trade products represent workers in remote parts of the world where packaging offers an encounter with distant others which romanticizes and homogenizes them as a pre-modern form of ethnicity. Such workers are shown as always engaged in authentic, simple, honest decontextualized manual labor. And they are depicted as highly appreciative of, and empowered by, the act of ethical shopping. This paper shows that a close social semiotic analysis of Fair-Trade packaging reveals a different set (...) of meanings which sit alongside the decontextualized ones. Designs integrate these workers into more contemporary kinds of modernist, rational, design chic, which communicates its own kind of honesty and authenticity. We consider how this, too, shapes how such consumers encounter distant others and its consequence for the meaning of the act of ethical shopping, where consumers can buy into moral alignment offered by products. (shrink)

The diagnosis of a new geological epoch, The 'Anthropocene', has implications far beyond geological science. If human activity has disrupted the planet, then this diagnosis potentially disrupts socio-political conventions. This article assesses the implications the Anthropocene has for democratic politics, by delineating three challenges: challenges of knowledge, time and boundary. In contrast to the claim that democratic institutions are unable to adequately respond to these challenges, I suggest that they might be strengthened through an engagement with them. Following an 'agonistic' (...) understanding of politics, I argue that the contestation instigated by the challenges of the Anthropocene is key to democratic renewal. Just as democracy in the Anthropocene can be enhanced through an agonistic approach, agonistic theory can be enriched through an engagement with the Anthropocene. (shrink)

While there has been extensive work on the textual realizations of climate change in the media, there has been little on the way such discourses are realized and promoted visually. This article addresses this using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to examine a new collection of images from the globally operating Getty Images intended for use in promotions, advertisements and editorials. Getty is promoting this collection in terms of Green Issues being a `marketing opportunity'. In this article we consider the results (...) of these issues being recontextualized through this process, where they are shaped to fit the culture of branding. Analysis is of the images and the search terms where Getty lay out what can be said with the images. (shrink)

This article argues against the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, I propose a weaker set of conditions. First, I explain the case for the necessity of democracy. This is that only democracy can address the ‘egalitarian challenge’, i.e. ‘if we are all equal, why should only some of us wield political power?’. I show that if democracy really is a necessary condition of political legitimacy, then (what I label) the problems of domestic justice and (...) of international legitimacy become intractable. I then argue that the egalitarian challenge is addressed where the requirements of (1) horizontal equality, (2) acceptable vertical inequality, and (3) publicity, are met and where (4) citizens have some institutionalized opportunity for a voice in decisions. I show that these conditions can be realized in non-democratic form and conclude by explaining how the four conditions can be employed to make the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy more tractable. Overall, my ambitions are limited. I do not offer an all-things-considered case against democracy but I do show that (some) forms of non-democratic government are permissible. (shrink)

It has been recently demonstrated that yeast cells are able to partially regress chromosome segregation in telophase as a response to DNA double‐strand breaks (DSBs), likely to find a donor sequence for homology‐directed repair (HDR). This regression challenges the traditional concept that establishes anaphase events as irreversible, hence opening a new field of research in cell biology. Here, the nature of this new behavior in yeast is summarized and the underlying mechanisms are speculated about. It is also discussed whether it (...) can be reproduced in other eukaryotes. Overall, this work brings forwards the need of understanding how cells attempt to repair DSBs when transiting the latest stages of mitosis, i.e., anaphase and telophase. (shrink)

Clinical ethics can be viewed as a practical discipline that provides a structured approach to assist healthcare practitioners in identifying, analysing and resolving ethical issues that arise in practice. Clinical ethics can therefore promote ethically sound clinical and organisational practices and decision-making, thereby contributing to health organisation and system quality improvement. In order to develop students’ decision-making skills, as well as prepare them for practice, we decided to introduce a clinical ethics strand within an undergraduate medical curriculum. We designed a (...) programme of clinical ethics activities for teaching and assessment purposes that involved using ethical frameworks to analyse hypothetical and real-life cases in uni- and inter- professional groups. In this paper, we draw on medical student feedback collected over 6 years to illustrate the appeal to students of learning clinical ethics. We also outline the range of benefits for students, healthcare organisations, and the field of clinical ethics arising from tomorrow’s doctors experiencing clinical ethics early in their training. We conclude by briefly reflecting on how including clinical ethics within tomorrow’s doctors curricular can secure and continue future engagement in clinical ethics support services in the UK, alongside the dangers of preparing students for organisational cultures that might not exist. We anticipate the findings presented in the paper will contribute to wider debates examining the impact of ethics teaching, and its ability to inform future doctors’ practice. (shrink)

The United Nations ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ lays out 17 Sustainable Development Goals to address a range of global issues related to the future of the planet and human well-being. Critics, however, argue that the Agenda, a complex product of multi-stakeholder governance, in its drive to accommodate many competing voices, is overloaded with weakly defined, overlapping and contradictory issues, concepts and buzzwords. These serve to gloss over actual concrete global problems and forces, concealing an underlying (...) free-trade ideology. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw attention to the nature of the documents used to communicate the Agenda. These documents comprise an edifice of self-referential texts that rely heavily on infographics, bullet points, charts and tables. Such formats appear to helpfully simplify, distil information and break things down into workable components. But, we show, through the affordances of these formats, the the vagueness of buzzwords, contradictions and lack of clear causalities can be glossed over, presenting the Agenda as a highly technical, engaging, and above all moral process. These formats are important, therefore, for the legitimization and rhetorical power of the Agenda, necessary for its take-up by governments and organizations around the world. (shrink)

Researchers engaged in studies about ‘hidden social groups’ are likely to face several ethical challenges. Using a study with undocumented Chinese migrants in the UK, challenges involved in obtaining approval by a university research ethics committee are explored. General guidance about how to resolve potential research ethics issues, with particular reference to ‘hidden social groups’, prior to submission to a research ethics committee is presented.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 119-140.

It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we need (...) to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new. (shrink)

This book explores that question in unprecedented detail, drawing on empirical evidence from an impressive array of sources.

ABSTRACT In this paper we explore how a public national media outlet, the British BBC, represents an international legal case which has a highly political nature. The case is US versus Huawei/meng Wanzhou, which took place between 2018 and 2021. Accusations were that the Chinese technology company committed fraud, leading the global HSBC bank to breach US sanctions against Iran. The charges were made by the US using what is called an ‘extraterritorial law’, which, while rejected as law by governments (...) around the world, is policed by US economic powers and control over international finance. Using Critical Discourse Analysis we show that, while the BBC presents much detail of legal process, the actual nature of the law the US uses to bring criminal charges against international companies and banks, is neither considered nor questioned. Our interest is how such a law, which has a huge influence over global trade and politics, is presented to the public in this particular case. We contribute to the position that the nature of laws, how they are used and known, must always be understood within the prevailing discourses of the moment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. (Jacques Anatole François Thibault).

Among the categories of the telecom and internet frauds, the online romance scam is of particular concern for its sharp rise of victim numbers and the huge amount of cost. A social semiotic approach could be used to investigate the victim identity of the online romance scam from the aspects of the (re)construction and interpretation of discursive practices. The range of papers in this section shows that the study of text, context and the way that people use semiotic resources to (...) produce communication, to create and manage events and to interpret them. (shrink)

Researchers engaged in studies about ‘hidden social groups’ are likely to face several ethical challenges. Using a study with undocumented Chinese migrants in the UK, challenges involved in obtaining approval by a university research ethics committee are explored. General guidance about how to resolve potential research ethics issues, with particular reference to ‘hidden social groups’, prior to submission to a research ethics committee is presented.

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Critical Discourse Studies and in other linguistics oriented scholarly journals we now see more research which draws upon multimodality as part of carrying out analyses of how text...

In this paper we study the Kolmogorov complexity for non-effective computations, that is, either halting or non-halting computations on Turing machines. This complexity function is defined as the length of the shortest input that produce a desired output via a possibly non-halting computation. Clearly this function gives a lower bound of the classical Kolmogorov complexity. In particular, if the machine is allowed to overwrite its output, this complexity coincides with the classical Kolmogorov complexity for halting computations relative to the (...) first jump of the halting problem. However, on machines that cannot erase their output –called monotone machines–, we prove that our complexity for non effective computations and the classical Kolmogorov complexity separate as much as we want. We also consider the prefix-free complexity for possibly infinite computations. We study several properties of the graph of these complexity functions and specially their oscillations with respect to the complexities for effective computations. (shrink)

We are very grateful for the responses given to our article and for the editor of this journal for inviting us to have this kind of interaction. We simply need to have this kind of open discussion...

One of the more compelling features of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct is its theoretical parsimony. Utilizing what essentially amounts to one explanatory principle—that of Darwinian selection—Dutton advances a theory of aesthetics that is at once general enough to account for cross-cultural variations in artistic production and sufficiently nuanced to promote insights into individual artworks. In doing this, Dutton’s work could not offer a greater contrast to some of the more vocal trends in contemporary aesthetic theory, where ponderous theorizing and (...) rebarbative jargons have violently opposed the idea—otherwise so modest—that aesthetic activities might draw on the evolved capacities of the human imagination. On .. (shrink)

StyleLikeU is a hugely successful online social media platform that presents itself as a social justice movement related to body acceptance. Presenting moving personal stories, it offers a site for what it calls ‘diverse individuals’ to share their experiences as part of promoting individual self-acceptance in the face of a world that prioritizes one kind of body over another, which take the form of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sizeism and prejudice against disfigurement. Drawing out the discursive script carried (...) across the platform, we show how, beneath the rhetoric of progressiveness, social justice becomes a kind of personal therapy, related to empowerment and transformation, which erases actual differences in personal circumstances and the very forces of injustice. We place StyleLikeU into broader scholarly concerns about the neoliberal colonization of identity politics, diversity and intersectionality in institutions and in branding, drawing attention to how this can form one part of what are now presented as social justice movements. (shrink)

Clinical laboratories face ethical challenges on a daily basis. The ethics training provided for clinical laboratory staff is variable, with some receiving no training. We aimed to explore the perceived benefits of ethics education for laboratory professionals. Ethics training was provided to approximately 60 laboratory professionals in a UK not-for-profit blood cancer organisation, with group discussions incorporated into the session. The session covered dominant ethical theories and principles, the defining moments in medical research ethics and the ethical aspects of laboratory (...) practices. At the end of the session a short optional paper survey was distributed to the participants to obtain feedback on the training. The feedback was anonymous and thematically coded. Attendees reported to be more aware of the existence and importance of ‘everyday’ ethics in their workplace. Responses also showed that the training session had provided participants with an opportunity for ethical reflection in themselves and in discussion with their colleagues. Despite clinical laboratory professionals being faced with ethical challenges daily, there is comparatively little ethics education provided. Ethics training is believed to improve the ethical attitude of laboratory staff and help them when making decisions in their work. We have shown that ethics education is important for laboratory professionals to develop and retain ethical awareness, and ethical reflection. By gaining insight into the ethical aspects of their practices, laboratory professionals can apply this understanding when faced with making challenging decisions in their workplace, in order to act in the best interests of their patients. (shrink)

A growing body of literature critical of ethics review boards has drawn attention to the processes used to determine the ethical merit of research. Citing criticism on the bureaucratic nature of ethics review processes, this literature provides a useful provocation for (re)considering how the ethics review might be enacted. Much of this criticism focuses on how ethics review boards _deliberate,_ with particular attention given to the lack of transparency and opportunities for researcher recourse that characterise ethics review processes. Centered specifically (...) on the conduct of ethics review boards convened within university settings, this paper draws on these inherent criticisms to consider the ways that ethics review boards might enact more communicative and deliberative practices. Outlining a set of principles against which ethics review boards might establish strategies for engaging with researchers and research communities, this paper draws attention to how _Deliberative communication_, _Engagement with researchers_ and the _Distribution of responsibility_ for the ethics review might be enacted in the day-to-day practice of the university human ethics review board. This paper develops these themes via a conceptual lens derived from Habermas’ (The theory of communicative action. Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society, 1984 ) articulation of ‘communicative action’ and Fraser’s (Social Text, 25(26), 56–80, 1990 ) consideration of ‘strong publics’ to cast consideration of the role that human ethics review boards might play in supporting university research cultures. _Deliberative communication_, _Engagement with researchers_ and the _Distribution of responsibility_ provide useful conceptual prompts for considering how ethics review boards might undertake their work. (shrink)

Ethics review processes are frequently perceived as extending from codes and protocols rooted in biomedical disciplines. As a result, many researchers in the humanities and social sciences (HASS) find these processes to be misaligned, if not outrightly obstructive to their research. This leads some scholars to advocate against HASS participation in institutional review processes as they currently stand, or in their entirety. While ethics review processes can present a challenge to HASS researchers, these are not insurmountable and, in fact, present (...) opportunities for ethics review boards (ERBs) to mediate their practices to better attend to the concerns of the HASS disciplines. By highlighting the potential value of the ethics review process in recognising the nuances and specificity across different forms of research, this article explores the generative possibilities of greater collaboration between HASS researchers and ERBs. Remaining cognisant of the epistemic and methodological differences that mark different disciplinary formations in turn will benefit the ethical conduct of all researchers. (shrink)