A Talmudic norms approach to many-valued logic

In three-valued logic, the third truth-value is often interpreted as undefined. However, the value of a logical term may be well defined if its ‘history’ is taken into account. Following this approach, the analogy to the Sorites paradox meets the eye, which in turn has recently been addressed by means of a ‘Talmudic Norms’ approach. This paper thus lays bare a religious contribution to the field of many-valued logic and implements a simplified dynamic model for the theory of Talmudic mixtures—and, thus, for the outlined Sorites logic—using standard AI search and planning techniques.

Functional ASP with Intensional Sets: Application to Gelfond-Zhang Aggregates

In this paper, we propose a variant of Answer Set Programming (ASP) with evaluable functions that extends their application to sets of objects, something that allows a fully logical treatment of aggregates. Formally, we start from the syntax of First Order Logic with equality and the semantics of Quantified Equilibrium Logic with evaluable functions (${\rm QEL}^=_{\cal F}$). Then, we proceed to incorporate a new kind of logical term,intensional set(a construct commonly used to denote the set of objects characterised by a given formula), and to extend${\rm QEL}^=_{\cal F}$semantics for this new type of expression. In our extended approach, intensional sets can be arbitrarily used as predicate or function arguments or even nested inside other intensional sets, just as regular first-order logical terms. As a result, aggregates can be naturally formed by the application of some evaluable function (count,sum,maximum, etc) to a set of objects expressed as an intensional set. This approach has several advantages. First, while other semantics for aggregates depend on some syntactic transformation (either via a reduct or a formula translation), the${\rm QEL}^=_{\cal F}$interpretation treats them as regular evaluable functions, providing a compositional semantics and avoiding any kind of syntactic restriction. Second, aggregates can be explicitly defined now within the logical language by the simple addition of formulas that fix their meaning in terms of multiple applications of some (commutative and associative) binary operation. For instance, we can use recursive rules to definesumin terms of integer addition. Last, but not least, we prove that the semantics we obtain for aggregates coincides with the one defined by Gelfond and Zhang for the${\cal A}\mathit{log}$language, when we restrict to that syntactic fragment.

Ecoepidemiology

The origins, definitions, and usage of the term "ecoepidemiology" wind their way through the scientific literature of ecology and medicine. This study sought to determine if "ecoepidemiology" has been granted a common meaning in these disciplines or if the meanings have diverged or if new phrases have been proposed. "Ecoepidemiology" appears in the French literature of medicine — as the name for the geographic variable in epidemiologic studies — about ten years before it appears in English-language articles on ecology. In the English literature, a few scientists writing about ecological monitoring and assessment adopted the term because they needed a word or phrase to emphasize research methods common both to ecology and to epidemiology in human medicine. After the term "clinical ecology" was rejected in the medical literature, it was offered as an alternative to "ecoepidemiology". "Clinical ecology" can be defined as "the branch of ecology that studies the condition of ecosystems to document change in status and trends". A more logical term than "ecoepidemiology", "clinical ecology" keeps the literature about ecosystem health grouped by subject in libraries and bibliographic databases with ecology instead of improperly assigned to collections of information on human health and medicine. "Ecoepidemiology", however, seems to be more prevalent in the literature of the environmental and ecological sciences.

Literature as Discourse

I would say that syntax is a significant, if shifty, index of a writer's perspective on his subject-matter. In this light, please consider the syntax of my title. It is two nouns connected by a logical term, ‘as’. On one version of the programme for this lecture series, the word ‘as’ is misprinted as ‘and’; this makes a big difference. A simple conjunction of two nouns, ‘Literature and Discourse’, would suggest that I accept the meanings of the two words as stable, unanalysed. The connective ‘as’, however, is intended to announce that this juxtaposition of the two noun terms is an analysis of the two nouns, particularly the first – an examination of the nature of the first term in the light of the meaning of the second.