Carissa Véliz (2021) soutient que pour être un agent moral, une entité (comme un système algorithmique) doit nécessairement être sentiente. En prenant l’exemple d’une forme d’agentivité sans conscience phénoménale et donc sans sentience, je conteste cette thèse. En effet, certains groupes humains peuvent être considérés comme des agents intentionnels non réductibles aux individus particuliers qui les composent. En m’appuyant sur l’interprétativisme proposé par Uriah Kriegel (2011) et John Haugeland (1990), ainsi que sur la posture intentionnelle (intentional stance) de Daniel Dennett (1987), je montre que l’intentionnalité est une condition suffisante pour parler d’agentivité morale et que, contrairement à ce qu’affirme Véliz, il peut donc y avoir des agents moraux qui ne sont pas sentients.

Given a presilting object in a triangulated category, we find necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a complement. This is done both for classic (pre)silting objects and for large (pre)silting objects. The key technique is the study of associated co-t-structures. As a consequence of our techniques we recover some known cases of the existence of complements, including for derived categories of some hereditary abelian categories and for silting-discrete algebras. Moreover, we also show that a finite-dimensional algebra is silting discrete if and only if every bounded large silting complex is equivalent to a compact one.

This article considers a general class of varying coefficient models defined by a set of moment equalities and/or inequalities, where unknown functional parameters are not necessarily point-identified. We propose an inferential procedure for a subvector of the varying parameters and establish the asymptotic validity of the resulting confidence sets uniformly over a broad family of data-generating processes. We also propose a practical specification test for a set of necessary conditions of our model. Monte Carlo studies show that the proposed methods have good finite sample properties. We apply our method to estimate the return to education in China using its 1%-population census data from 2005.

The Bray–Liebhafsky reaction is one of many intricate chemical systems that is known to exhibit periodic behaviour. Although the underlying chemistry is somewhat complicated and involves at least ten chemical species, in a recent work we suggested a reduced two-component model of the reaction involving the concentrations of iodine and iodous acid. Although it is drastically simplified, this reduced system retains enough structure so as to exhibit many of the oscillatory characteristics seen in experimental analyses. Here, we consider the possibility of spatial patterning in a nonuniformly mixed solution. Since many practical demonstrations of chemical oscillations are undertaken using circular containers such as beakers or Petri dishes, we develop both linearized and nonlinear pattern solutions in terms of cylindrical coordinates. These results are complemented by an analysis of the patterning that might be possible within a rectangular domain. The simulations give compelling evidence that spatial patterning may well be feasible in the Bray–Liebhafsky process.

We introduce the mean topological dimension of random bundle transformations associated with an infinite countable discrete amenable group action and show that continuous bundle random dynamical systems for amenable groups with finite fibre topological entropy have zero mean topological dimensions.

World heritage has become UNESCO’s flagship programme, and it is a site of active state engagement. At the crux of that engagement is the prestigious World Heritage List. This engagement is regularly analysed as pursuits of national prestige. In this article, I advance a Bourdieusian analysis of world heritage as a field that generates international cultural prestige. I identify humanity as the field’s doxa that allows for a vertical separation and the generation of more-than-national cultural value. I show how states’ desire for this prestige jeopardised the field’s autonomy at a critical juncture in 2010 and analyse the field’s aftermath as involving fraught attempts by states to discursively reconstruct the field’s vertical and functional separations in the quest for international cultural prestige. This reconstruction involves nothing less than reinterpreting humanity as the community-of-states, pointing at once to humanity’s indispensability for more-than-national value and undermining its ability to generate that value.

We report on an experience with impostor research participants, people who misrepresent themselves, and identify characteristics that can be used by investigators to screen out such participants. We compare the responses of impostor and valid participants, showing that impostors meaningfully change qualitative study findings with implications for policy interventions or follow-on research informed by the study. It is important for investigators to be alert to the potential for impostor participants and plan their research accordingly.

The resonance constraint holds that something can benefit someone only if it bears a connection to her favoring attitudes. It is widely taken as a decisive reason to reject objective views of well-being since they do not guarantee such a connection. I aim to show that this is a mistake and that felt-quality hedonism about well-being can in fact meet the constraint. First, I argue that the typical way of putting the constraint is misguided in its demandingness. I then introduce alternatives and argue that the most plausible among them are compatible with felt-quality hedonism. I proceed to show that the same considerations which animate traditional resonance concerns motivate another kind of resonance which the hedonist is well-positioned to accommodate. One upshot is that the constraint does not provide us with a reason to favor subjective views of well-being, as they are traditionally formulated, over objective ones.

La critique de John L. Austin contre le représentationnalisme en philosophie de la perception l’a mené à soutenir que les sens sont « muets », c’est-à-dire qu’ils ne nous fournissent aucun contenu conceptuel. Cette thèse a été reprise par Charles Travis et Jocelyn Benoist, qui y voient tous les deux une raison d’abandonner toute conception normative de la perception. Si la thèse du mutisme des sens prescrit en effet un rejet du caractère conceptuel de la perception, le présent article s’efforce toutefois de montrer que la tendance à en déduire que la perception exclut toute norme relève en fait d’une radicalisation de la thèse originale d’Austin.

We investigate semigroups S which have the property that every subsemigroup of $S\times S$ which contains the diagonal $\{ (s,s)\colon s\in S\}$ is necessarily a congruence on S. We call such an S a DSC semigroup. It is well known that all finite groups are DSC, and easy to see that every DSC semigroup must be simple. Building on this, we show that for broad classes of semigroups, including periodic, stable, inverse and several well-known types of simple semigroups, the only DSC members are groups. However, it turns out that there exist nongroup DSC semigroups, which we obtain by utilising a construction introduced by Byleen for the purpose of constructing interesting congruence-free semigroups. Such examples can additionally be regular or bisimple.

There has been substantial research undertaken on the role of a health-promoting diet in depression. Yet, the evidence of the relationship between the Nordic diet and the risk of depression is scarce. This cross-sectional study aimed to assess whether a healthy Nordic diet is associated with depressive symptoms. In total, 2603 men aged 42-60 years from the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study were included. Diet quality was evaluated with a healthy Nordic diet score derived from the 4-day food diaries and depressive symptoms with the self-reported Human Population Laboratory (HPL) depression scale. Quade ANCOVA was used to examine the mean values of HPL scores in quartiles of a healthy Nordic diet score. Participants’ mean age was 53 years and BMI 26.8kg/m2; 31.7% were current smokers, and 86.9% were married or living as a couple. The mean healthy Nordic diet score was 12.8 (SD 4.0, range 2-25), and the mean HPL depression score was 1.9 (SD 2.1, range 0-13). The findings suggested that lower adherence to a healthy Nordic diet was associated with higher HPL depression scores after adjusting for age, examination year, daily energy intake, leisure time physical activity, adulthood socioeconomic status, smoking, and marital status (extreme quartile difference: 0.33 points, 95% CI 0.10–0.56, p for trend across the quartiles=0.003). The results support the hypothesis that a lower-quality diet increases the odds of having depressive symptoms. However, prospective studies are needed to confirm the association.

Previous research has established various debt thresholds beyond which economic performance deteriorates, but few studies examine these thresholds in the context of ongoing fiscal consolidation efforts. This study investigates the interplay between government debt and fiscal consolidation in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 2000 to 2022. The findings reveal that fiscal consolidation, encompassing reductions in government expenditure and tax increases, results in a notable reduction of 1.366% in the primary fiscal balance and a minor 0.024% decrease in GDP per capita. This study significantly contributes to the literature by clarifying the impact of fiscal consolidation relative to specific debt thresholds and its implications for economic performance. A critical government debt threshold of 31.4% of GDP is identified, beyond which debt negatively affects GDP per capita in the presence of fiscal consolidation. Similarly, a debt threshold of 86.7% is found to have a detrimental effect on the primary fiscal balance in the presence of fiscal consolidation. The study shows for disaggregating government expenditure and taxation, that military spending reduces GDP per capita, while investments in health and education have positive effects. Notably, government consumption expenditure harms GDP per capita. On the fiscal balance side, military and education spending improve fiscal health, whereas government consumption and indirect taxes contribute negatively. The findings underline the importance of targeted fiscal policies, suggesting that prudent government spending, especially in health as well as education, and careful management of debt levels are crucial for maintaining economic stability during fiscal consolidation.

Semantic transparency is usually defined as the extent to which the lexical meaning of a morphologically complex word can be inferred from its structure and constituents. Recent studies have emphasized the need to distinguish two aspects of transparency: relatedness (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of lexical constituents is retained in that of a complex word) and compositionality (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of a complex word is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the way they are combined). In this paper, we investigate the influence of a variety of linguistic factors on both relatedness and compositionality. Our objective is twofold, as we seek to (i) determine more precisely the impact of lexical and morphological properties on transparency and (ii) better understand the distinction between relatedness and compositionality based on their respective determinants. The study focuses on deverbal nouns in French and estimates relatedness and compositionality based on human judgments and computational methods. The results indicate that the frequency and ambiguity of bases and derivatives, as well as the productivity and polyfunctionality of nominalizing suffixes, have different effects on relatedness and compositionality. They confirm the relevance of the distinction between the two aspects of transparency.

This paper presents the design of a phase gradient metasurface lens (MSL) that enables the orbital angular momentum (OAM) beam convergence alleviating the limitations of the OAM beams in far-field wireless communication. An MSL of a specific constitutive electromagnetic parameter, i.e., relative refractive index, in front of a traditional Uniform Circular Array is designed at 10 GHz. In the presence of the lens, the beam converges from 58∘ to 24∘ for +1 and –1 OAM modes. The proposed MSL can also be used for second-order (±2) OAM modes. The experimental verification performed on the laboratory prototype agrees well with the simulated results. The purity analysis also confirms that the OAM beams passing through the lens maintain high mode purity, thereby not disturbing the phase distribution in the corresponding OAM modes. The designed lens can be used in point-to-point and defense communications.