Many historians reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies.This article argues that no sharp distinction between qualitative and quantitative concepts can be drawn, as almost any concept used to describe a past society is implicitly quantitative. Many recent advances in understanding have been achieved by deriving quantitative evidence from qualitative evidence...

In (1991), Meinwald initiated a major change of direction in the study of Plato’s Parmenides and the Third Man Argument. On her conception of the Parmenides , Plato’s language systematically distinguishes two types or kinds of predication, namely, predications of the kind ‘x is F pros ta alla’ and ‘x is F pros heauto’. Intuitively speaking, the former is the common, everyday variety of predicat...

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that when a belief was at issue, agreement from a dissimilar other would increase judgmental confidence more than agreement from a similar other; whereas when a value was at issue, agreement from a similar other would be more influential. The subjects judged either the relative academic success of two students (belief) or which of the two they ...

This chapter examines economists’ indefensible attachment to the positive-normative distinction, and suggests a behavioral economics explanation of their behavior on the subject. It reviews the origins of the distinction in Hume’s guillotine and logical positivism, and shows how they form the basis for Robbins’ understanding of value neutrality. It connects philosophers’ rejection of logical po...

Not acknowledging the history and metaphysics of the fact/value distinction has led to confusion about the difference between the normative and the cognitive, and disputes on whether there are ways to move from one side, facts, to the other, values. One solution is to recognize values as more "objective" than facts, and thus blur the common way of drawing this distinction. The origin of the dis...

In this contribution, we present a computational stylistic study of the French classic literature texts based on a data-driven approach where discovering interesting linguistic patterns is done without any prior knowledge. We propose an objective interestingness measure to extract meaningful stylistic syntactic patterns from a given author’s work. Our hypothesis is based on the fact that the mo...

This paper argues that the most famous objection to backward time travel can carry no weight. In its classic form, the objection is that backward time travel entails the occurrence of impossible things, such as auto-infanticide—and hence is itself impossible. David Lewis has rebutted the classic version of the objection: auto-infanticide is prevented by coincidences, such as time travellers sli...

In most real life situations we are not only confronted with one single source of risk or one single risk, but with several sources of risk or combinations of risks. An important question is whether individual risks influence each other or not. This may concern the time of their occurrence and/or their severity. In other words, we need to understand how to model and describe the dependence stru...

Rejecting the temptation to make up a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for diagrammatic and sentential systems, we present an important distinction which arises from sentential and diagrammatic features of systems. Importantly, the distinction we will explore in the paper lies at a meta-level. That is, we argue for a major difference in metatheory between diagrammatic and sentential ...