Exploring the Antecedents of #IFZ Online Support Community Adoption and Continued Use: a Conceptual Development

This conceptual paper presents the logic, theoretic foundations and rationale behind the development of the framework that will allow the authors to further develop the concept #IFZ online support community for tour-ism entrepreneurs. It can be seen as the conclusion of the conceptual phase of the broader action research that aims to develop, test and optimize the first online support community for tourism entrepreneurs in the country. Presented conceptual framework is ready to be further extended with qualitative research and then ready for the two-stage empirical testing that will be carried out during the first year of #IFZ existence.

Evidential Decision Theory

Evidential Decision Theory is a radical theory of rational decision-making. It recommends that instead of thinking about what your decisions *cause*, you should think about what they *reveal*. This Element explains in simple terms why thinking in this way makes a big difference, and argues that doing so makes for *better* decisions. An appendix gives an intuitive explanation of the measure-theoretic foundations of Evidential Decision Theory.

Naturalism in the Painting of the Leiden School and its Chief Representatives

The article is devoted to Dutch art — the Leiden School in Holland in the 17th century. The author analyzes the defi nition, particularities and the theoretic foundations of the characteristics and the artistic legacy of the painters — the representatives of the Leiden school and also demonstrates the close connection between naturalism and the particularities of the paintings of the school’s adherents and the uniqueness of the works by such masters as Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris the Elder.

Decision-theoretic foundations for statistical causality

We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic (DT) statistical causality, which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as “assisted decision-making” and aims to understand when, and how, I can make use of external data, typically observational, to help me solve a decision problem by taking advantage of assumed relationships between the data and my problem. The relationships embodied in any representation of a causal problem require deeper justification, which is necessarily context-dependent. Here we clarify the considerations needed to support applications of the DT methodology. Exchangeability considerations are used to structure the required relationships, and a distinction drawn between intention to treat and intervention to treat forms the basis for the enabling condition of “ignorability.” We also show how the DT perspective unifies and sheds light on other popular formalisations of statistical causality, including potential responses and directed acyclic graphs.

Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world politics: thinking with and beyond Giddens

Research on ontological security in world politics has mushroomed since the early 2000s but seems to have reached an impasse. Ontological security is a conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the management of anxiety in self-constitution. Building especially on Giddens, IR scholars have emphasized how this translates to a need for cognitive consistency and biographical continuity – a security of ‘being.’ A criticism has been its so-called ‘status quo bias,’ a perceived tilt toward theorizing investment in the existing social order. To some, an ontological security lens both offers social theoretic foundations for a realist worldview and lacks resources to conceptualize alternatives. We disagree. Through this symposium, we address that critique and suggest pathways forward by focusing on the thematic of anxiety. Distinguishing between anxiety and fear, we note that anxiety manifests in different emotions and leaves room for a range of political possibilities. Early ontological security scholarship relied heavily on readings of Giddens, which potentially accounts for its bias. This symposium re-opens the question of the relationship between anxiety and subjectivity from the perspective of ontological security, thinking with and beyond Giddens. Three contributions re-think anxiety in ontological security drawing on existentialist philosophy; two address limitations of Giddens' approach.

Spatial Types

While modalities relate directly to the philosophical concerns of metaphysicians, it has been recognized recently by mathematicians that operators behaving similarly can be deployed to capture spatial concepts synthetically. Drawing on the important ideas of Lawvere on cohesion, it can be shown that a collection of entities behaves as spaces merely by partaking in an interlocking series of maps to and from some base collection. In simplest terms, the points of a space are held together cohesively. Combining the spatial modalities with the refined notion of identity is just what is needed in current fields of mathematical geometry and topology. While standard set-theoretic foundations have brought with them a decline of philosophical interest in what constitutes the geometric, versions of geometry in mathematics have burgeoned. Now we can use cohesive HoTT to revive the philosophy of geometry and say what is distinctive about our conceptions of space.