The scientific status of physical cosmology has been the subject of philosophical debate ever since detailed mathematical models of the Universe emerged from Einstein's general theory of relativity. Such debates have revolved around whether and to what extent cosmology meets established demarcation criteria for a discipline to be scientific, as well as determining how to best characterize cosmology as a science, given the unique challenges and limitations faced by a discipline which aims to study the origin, composition, and fate of the Universe itself. The present article revisits, in light of the dramatic progress in cosmology in recent decades, an earlier debate held in the 1950s between Herman Bondi and Gerald Whitrow regarding the scientific status of cosmology. We analyse cosmology's transition from an emerging science to a cornerstone of modern physics, highlighting its empirical successes in establishing the $Λ$-Cold Dark Matter ($Λ$CDM) model and in its delivery of various successful novel predictions. Despite this remarkable scientific success and progress, we argue that modern cosmology faces a further profound challenge: the permanent underdetermination of the microphysical nature of its exotic energy components: inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. Drawing historical parallels with the role of spectroscopy in revealing the microphysical nature of atomic physics, we argue that the epistemic barriers obstructing us from ascertaining the microphysical nature of these exotic energy components are significant, in turn casting doubt upon whether cosmology can ever transcend these particular epistemic challenges. We conclude by reflecting on the prospects for future breakthroughs and/or non-empirical arguments which could decide this issue conclusively.
We identify troubling cases of so-called `permanent underdetermination' in both dark energy and inflationary cosmology. We bring to bear (a) a taxonomy of possible responses to underdetermination, and (b) an understanding of both dark energy and inflationary cosmology from an effective field theory point of view. We argue that, under certain conditions, there are viable responses which can arguably alleviate at least some of the concerns about underdetermination in the dark energy and inflationary sectors. However, the epistemic threat of permanent underdetermination remains a significant challenge.
The GDPR contains an accuracy principle, as most data privacy laws in the world do. In principle, data controllers must ensure that personal data they use are accurate. Some have argued that the accuracy principle does not apply to personal data in the form of opinions about data subjects. We argue, however, from a positive law perspective, that the accuracy principle does apply to opinions. We further argue, from a normative perspective, that the accuracy principle should apply to opinions.
When selecting between applicants for a job, when and how should we take into account the reactions that they elicit from others? On one hand, applicants’ “reaction qualifications” often speak to their merit, in which case we seem required to consider them. On the other hand, others’ reactions are often rooted in prejudicial attitudes, in which case considering reaction qualifications can make the hiring process prejudicial. According to a popular view, we should refrain from considering reaction qualifications just in case there are weighty moral reasons against doing so. I argue that this morality-based approach fails. Instead, we should refrain from considering reaction qualifications just in case considering them would render a selection procedure non-transparent or discriminatory. If consideration of a reaction qualification would have either effect, the reaction qualification does not confer merit and so should not be considered by selectors.
El pronunciamiento de la Corte IDH en la sentencia titulada González y otras (“Campo Algodonero”) vs. México, se convirtió en un criterio jurisprudencial de gran relevancia por la inclusión de la perspectiva de género. La presente reseña expresa una valoración sobre la obra A diez años de la sentencia de “Campo Algodonero”: reflexiones sobre el desarrollo de la jurisprudencia interamericana en materia de violencia de género, a través de la cual se ofrece un panorama sobre la situación jurisprudencial de la Corte IDH del luego de cumplir diez años desde su primera sentencia sobre perspectiva de género, además de un análisis sobre diversos casos de violencia de género que han sido abordados por el tribunal interamericano. El texto permite concluir que el libro, a través de las valiosas aportaciones de sus autorías, es un apreciado objeto de estudio sobre las sentencias de la Corte IDH en casos de violencia contra las mujeres.
Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law, Comparative law. International uniform law
Jnaneshwar Baslingker, Riddhipratim Basu, Sudeshna Bhattacharjee
et al.
It is well-known that the largest eigenvalue of an $n\times n$ GUE matrix and the length of a longest increasing subsequence in a uniform random permutation of length $n$, both converge weakly to the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution as $n\to \infty$. We consider the sequences of the largest eigenvalues of the $n\times n$ principal minor of an infinite GUE matrix, and the the lengths of longest increasing subsequences of a growing sequence of random permutations (which, by the RSK bijection corresponds to the top row of the Young diagrams growing according to the Plancherel growth process), and establish laws of fractional logarithms for these. That is, we show that, under a further scaling of $(\log n)^{2/3}$ and $(\log n)^{1/3}$, the $\limsup$ and $\liminf$ respectively of these scaled quantities converge almost surely to explicit non-zero and finite constants. Our results provide complete solutions to two questions raised by Kalai in 2013. We affirm a conjecture of Paquette and Zeitouni (Ann. Probab., 2017), and give a new proof of $\limsup$, due to Paquette and Zeitouni (Ann. Probab., 2017), who provided a partial solution in the case of GUE minor process.
Previous work on black hole partition functions and entanglement entropy suggests the existence of "edge" degrees of freedom living on the (stretched) horizon. We identify a local and "shrinkable" boundary condition on the stretched horizon that gives rise to such degrees of freedom. They can be interpreted as the Goldstone bosons of gauge transformations supported on the boundary, with the electric field component normal to the boundary as their symplectic conjugate. Applying the covariant phase space formalism for manifolds with boundary, we show that both the symplectic form and Hamiltonian exhibit a bulk-edge split. We then show that the thermal edge partition function is that of a codimension-two ghost compact scalar living on the horizon. In the context of a de Sitter static patch, this agrees with the edge partition functions found by Anninos et al. in arbitrary dimensions. It also yields a 4D entanglement entropy consistent with the conformal anomaly. Generalizing to Proca theory, we find that the prescription of Donnelly and Wall reproduces existing results for its edge partition function, while its classical phase space does not exhibit a bulk-edge split.
Investigation findings and information obtained as a consequence of investigations cannot be treated as state secrets or utilized as evidence in court. This principle, which is followed by international aviation law, has generated controversy in Indonesian law enforcement practices, particularly when it comes to criminal and civil procedural laws, which acknowledge that the findings of investigations can serve as a foundation for further inquiries to identify suspects. The study’s findings revealed that, first, the ad hoc team’s philosophical investigation of space accidents within the framework of international law aims to determine the causes of spacecraft accidents to ensure that they don’t happen again in the future within the context of the main legal goal of benefit and justice for more people (the most people with the most happiness possible). While compensation claims are based on liability and without error (strict liability), police investigations as described in Articles 95 through 100 are intended to find criminal acts in space activities. There is no functional relationship between the two processes, so the findings of police or special team investigations cannot be used as the basis for carrying out legal actions. Given the obvious differences between the team’s investigation and the police’s investigation, there must be coordination between the technical team of the ministry and the police regarding the responsibilities and functions of these two institutions, each of which has a unique position and set of legal obligations. With this knowledge, it is believed that there won’t be any criminal prosecutions brought against the crews of spacecraft, similar to those brought against pilots in situations involving aviation accidents.
Islamic law, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
En este trabajo vamos a referirnos a tres posiciones que, desde nuestra perspectiva, representan concepciones crítico-alternativas de los derechos humanos. Concretamente en la teoría crítica, el decolonialismo y el pluralismo jurídico, encontraremos puntos en común para pensar en su afinidad para plantear espacios de visión más ligados con la lucha, la construcción de alternativas posibles y por lo tanto, consolidación de horizontes utópicos. La experiencia sociopolítica latinoamericana es fundamental para esta concepción que nos permitimos reseñar.
El concepto de «injusticia epistémica» fue formalizado y teorizado por Miranda Fricker en 2007. No obstante, no fue la primera vez que se denunciaron y estudiaron fenómenos similares a los que aborda la autora. Problemáticas cercanas a la de la injusticia epistémica ya habían sido tratadas bajo denominaciones tales como «violencia epistémica» o «colonialismo intelectual». Una de ellas es el concepto de «epistemicidio», elaborado por Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Este trabajo trata de relacionar las teorías de la injusticia epistémica y del epistemicidio, intentando encontrar similitudes y diferencias relevantes, así como establecer posibles conexiones entre ellas.
We present preliminary results about Legistix, a tool we are developing to automatically consolidate the French and European law. Legistix is based both on regular expressions used in several compound grammars, similar to the successive passes of a compiler, and on a new specialized language of functional type, allowing to describe the changes applied to the texts. Instead of creating manually a full consolidated version of a text at each modification date, Legistix generates automatically programs from legal documents written in natural language to automatically create the consolidated versions.
The paper attempts an analysis of the notion of “human nature” from a socio-historic perspective. Based on this analysis it shows how flawed is the concept of “reasonable man” that’s been upheld by the legal systems all over the world. In this effort, it points out how obsolete this conception is, and how unfair has this been to the existential reality of embodied human agency. After this, it ventures on to bringing to light a different scheme of such agency available in the existential phenomenological tradition that is capable of revolutionizing the notion of “reasonable man” and thereby enlightening criminal jurisprudence. And in view of such a re-orientation of the notion of human agency, the question that is addressed lastly in the paper is, what cause should the normative serve ultimately – retribution or reformation?
In recent years, violence against women has continued. Culture, beliefs, and the role of community and religious leaders are the reasons for the practice of female circumcision in East Java Province. To the perpetrators, this activity is reasonable. This article is a policy study with a gender perspective approach and uses qualitative methods and quantitative data. The results of this study reveal the insights of circumcision practitioners in women who are less aware of the effects of female circumcision, low education levels, and trust and pressure from the family (internal) and the environment (external). Moreover, the main rules are legalised as the 1945 Constitution explicitly outlines government interference in community control, including social and cultural. The gender mainstreaming strategy (PUG) has been implemented to eliminate activities that violate women's rights to health and other constitutional rights.
Private international law. Conflict of laws, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
We investigate the second law of black hole mechanics in gravitational theories with higher derivative terms in the action. Wall has described a method for defining an entropy that satisfies the second law to linear order in perturbations around a stationary black hole. We show that this can be extended to define an entropy that satisfies the second law to quadratic order in perturbations, provided that one treats the higher derivative terms in the sense of effective field theory. We also address some outstanding issues with Wall's method, in particular, its gauge invariance and its relation to the Iyer-Wald entropy.
To what extent does the black hole information paradox lead to violations of quantum mechanics? I explain how black hole complementarity provides a framework to articulate how quantum characterizations of black holes can remain consistent despite the information paradox. I point out that there are two ways to cash out the notion of consistency in play here: an operational notion and a descriptive notion. These two ways of thinking about consistency lead to (at least) two principles of black hole complementarity: an operational principle and a descriptive principle. Our background philosophy of science regarding realism/instrumentalism might initially lead us to prefer one principle over the other. However, the recent physics literature, which applies tools from quantum information theory and quantum computational complexity theory to various thought experiments involving quantum systems in or around black holes, implies that the operational principle is successful where the descriptive principle is not. This then lets us see that for operationalists the black hole information paradox might no longer be pressing.
Abstract
This article discusses the enforceability of Article 9 of Law No. 42 of 1999 on Fiduciary Guarantee that allows the use of receivables as debt collateral in business practices in Indonesia. Receivables bound by fiduciary collateral is deemed as a special collateral— in the context of civil law, a special collateral will be prioritized in case the debtor does not voluntarily make when due. In business practices, long-term receivables will be established following an agreement between a debtor and a third party, and the receivables that the debtor is entitled to receive from the third party will be provided as collateral to secure the debtor’s obligations under his loan agreement with the creditor. The issue discussed in this paper is the fact that although theoretically special collateral in the form of receivables should be able to increase the creditor’s assurance of getting repaid, in practice long-term receivables put higher risk on the creditor instead. As comparison, this paper uses the accounts receivables fiduciary in the United Kingdom. The Writing Method used in this paper is the normative juridical approach with a focus on conducting juridical studies regarding the creditors' risk in the use of receivables, specifically long-term debt collateral. This paper shows that receivables that are used as collateral in fiduciary agreements actually put the greatest risk on the creditor; especially if the agreement between the debtor and the third party stipulates that in case the debtor fails to fulfil his obligations, all receivables that he is supposed to receive from the third party will be aborted and become non-existent.
Private international law. Conflict of laws, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task.
This paper aims to set the scene for an emerging conversation on the Rights of Nature as articulated by a philosophy of law called Earth Jurisprudence, which privileges the whole Earth community over the profit-driven structures of the existing legal and economic systems.,The study used a wide range of thought from literature relating to philosophy, humanities, environmental economics, sustainable development, indigenous rights and legal theory to show how Earth Jurisprudence resonates with two recent treaties of Waitangi settlements in Aotearoa New Zealand that recognise the Rights of Nature.,Indigenous philosophies have become highly relevant to sustainable and equitable development. They have provided an increasingly prominent approach in advancing social, economic, environmental and cultural development around the world. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Maori philosophies ground the naming of the Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui River as legal entities with rights.,Recognition of the Rights of Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand necessitates a radical re-thinking by accounting researchers, practitioners and educators towards a more ecocentric view of the environment, given the transformation of environmental law and our responsibilities towards sustainable development.,This relates to the application of Earth Jurisprudence legal theory as an alternative approach towards thinking about integrated reporting and sustainable development.