Two main questions are addressed in this dissertation, namely: 1. What is the correct higher-order modal theory; 2. What does it take for theories to be equivalent. The whole dissertation consists of an extended argument in defence of the joint truth of two higher-order modal theories, namely, Plantingan Moderate Contingentism, a higher-order necessitist theory advocated by Plantinga (1974) and committed to the contingent being of some individuals, and Williamsonian Thorough Necessitism, a higher-order necessitist theory advocated by Williamson (2013) and committed to the necessary being of every possible individual. The case for the truth of these two theories relies on defences of the following metaphysical theses: i) Thorough Serious Actualism, according to which no things could have been related and yet be nothing, ii) Higher-Order Necessitism, according to which necessarily, every higher-order entity is necessarily something. It is shown that Thorough Serious Actualism and Higher-Order Necessitism are both implicit commitments of very weak logical theories. Prima facie, Plantingan Moderate Contingentism and Williamsonian Thorough Necessitism are jointly inconsistent. The argument for their joint truth thus relies also on showing i) their equivalence, and ii) that the dispute between Plantingans and Williamsonians is merely verbal. The case for i) and ii) relies on the Synonymy Account, an account of theory equivalence developed and defended in the dissertation. According to the account, theories are equivalent just in case they have the same structure of entailments and commitments, and the occupiers of the places in that structure are the same propositions. An immediate consequence of the Synonymy Account is that proponents of synonymous theories are engaged in merely verbal disputes. The Synonymy Account is also applied to the debate between noneists and Quineans, revealing that what is in question in that debate is what are the expressive resources available to describe the world.

In the last 30 years there has been growing interest in and a greater appreciation of the unique contributions that medieval authors have made to the history of logic. In this thesis, we compare and contrast the modal logics of Robert Kilwardby and John Buridan and explore how their two conceptions of modality relate to and differ from modern notions of modal logic. We develop formal reconstructions of both authors' logics, making use of a number of different formal techniques. In the case of Robert Kilwardby we show that using his distinction between per se and per accidens modalities, he is able to provide a consistent interpretation of the apodictic fragment of Aristotle's modal syllogism and that, by generalising this distinction to hypothetical construction, he can develop an account of connexive logic. In the case of John Buridan we show that his modal logic is a natural extension of the usual Kripke-style possible worlds semantics, and that this modal logic can be shown to be sound and complete relative to a proof-theoretic formalisation of Buridan's treatment of the expository syllogism.

One aspect of critical reasoning is the analysis and appraisal of claims and arguments. A typical problem, when analysing and appraising arguments, is inconsistent statements. Although several inconsistencies may have deleterious effects on rationality and action, not all of them do. As educators, we also have an obligation to teach this evaluation in a way that does justice to our normal reasoning practices and judgements of inconsistency. Thus, there is a need to determine the acceptable inconsistencies from those that are not, and to impart that information to students. We might ask: What is the best concept of inconsistency for critical reasoning and pedagogy? While the answer might appear obvious to some, the history of philosophy shows that there are many concepts of “inconsistency”, the most common of which comes from classical logic and its reliance on opposing truth-values. The current exemplar of this is the standard truth functional account from propositional logic. Initially, this conception is shown to be problematic, practically, conceptually and pedagogically speaking. Especially challenging from the classical perspective are the concepts of ex contradictione quodlibet and ex falso quodlibet. The concepts may poison the well against any notion of inconsistency, which is not something that should be done unreflectively. Ultimately, the classical account of inconsistency is rejected. In its place, a semantic conception of inconsistency is argued for and demonstrated to handle natural reasoning cases effectively. This novel conception utilises the conceptual antonym theory to explain semantic contrast and gradation, even in the absence of non-canonical antonym pairs. The semantic conception of inconsistency also fits with an interrogative argument model that exploits inconsistency to display semantic contrast in reasons and conclusions. A method for determining substantive inconsistencies follows from this argument model in a 4 straightforward manner. The conceptual fit is then incorporated into the pedagogy of critical reasoning, resulting in a natural approach to reasoning which students can apply to practical matters of everyday life, which include inconsistency. Thus, the best conception of inconsistency for critical reasoning and its pedagogy is the semantic, not the classical. / Philosophy Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Phil

This diploma thesis deal with the description of electrical energy quality in low voltage. A test data model is created in the thesis which can automatically evaluate the state of the quality of electric energy in terms of higher harmonic voltages in the MATLAB programming environment. To verify the correct design of the model, two possible views of simulated data are created in the form of tables and graphical dependencies. An user interface is created for more complex control of each model states of the data being considered.

In der ersten Abhandlung untersuche ich die Auswirkungen von Informationsfriktionen und Aufwandskosten auf die Effektivität von Steuervergünstigungen bei der Förderung von Spenden für wohltätige Zwecke. Mittels eines groß angelegten Umfrageexperiments und einem Feldexperiment prüfe ich empirisch, ob die Verringerung von Informationsfriktionen durch Hervorhebung von Steuervergünstigungen und Bereitstellung von Informationen über die Höhe von Steuervergünstigungen Spendenentscheidungen verändert. Meine Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Spenden steigen, wenn Steuervergünstigungen hervorgehoben und Informationen bereitgestellt werden. Ich lege dar, dass der Hauptverhaltensmechanismus, der Informationsfriktionen zugrunde liegt, Unaufmerksamkeit ist. Die zweite Abhandlung ist eine gemeinsame Arbeit mit Steffen Altmann, Armin Falk, Paul Heidhues und Rajshri Jayaraman. In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir die Auswirkungen von voreingestellten Beträgen auf Spenden für wohltätige Zwecke in einem groß angelegten Feldversuch auf einer Online-Spendenplattform. Wir beobachten eine starke Auswirkung von voreingestellten Beträgen auf das individuelle Verhalten, stellen jedoch fest, dass die Gesamtspende nicht von voreingestellten Beträgen beeinflusst wird. Mit einem Strukturmodell wird untersucht ob die Personalisierung von voreingestellten Beträgen die Spendeneinnahmen erhöhen kann. In der dritten Abhandlung, die in Zusammenarbeit mit Rajshri Jayaraman und Michael Kaiser verfasst wurde, untersuchen wir gemeinnützige Spenden für Naturkatastrophen auf einer großen Online-Plattform. Wir beobachten, dass der Großteil der Spenden für wohltätige Zwecke an einen winzigen Teil der Naturkatastrophen geht, bei denen es sich in der Regel um besonders schwere Katastrophen handelt, über die in den Medien berichtet wird. Unter Verwendung eines Ereignisstudiendesigns finden wir Hinweise, die mit zwei Erscheinungsformen der Spenderermüdung übereinstimmen, jedoch nicht mit einer dritten. / In the first essay, I study the implications of information frictions and hassle costs for the effectiveness of tax incentives in encouraging charitable giving. Empirically, I test whether mitigating information frictions by making tax incentives more salient and by providing information on the magnitude of tax incentives alters donation decisions by conducting a large-scale survey experiment, representative of the German adult population and I complement this with a large-scale field experiment on an online donation platform. My findings indicate that when tax incentives are made salient, and when information is provided, donations increase. I find that the main behavioral mechanism underlying information frictions is inattention. Analyzing who responds more to salience and information provision shows that it is predominantly individuals that face lower hassle costs and have high incomes. The second essay is joint work with Steffen Altmann, Armin Falk, Paul Heidhues, and Rajshri Jayaraman. In this paper, we study the effects of defaults on charitable giving in a large-scale field experiment on an online fundraising platform. We document a strong effect of defaults on individual behavior but nevertheless find that aggregate donation levels are unaffected by defaults. In contrast, co-donations increase in the default amount. We complement our experimental results with a structural model that investigates whether personalizing defaults based on individuals’ donation histories can increase donation revenues. In the third essay, which is joint work with Rajshri Jayaraman and Michael Kaiser, we investigate charitable donations to natural disasters on a large online platform. We document that the bulk of charitable donations go to a tiny fraction of natural disasters, which tend to be severe disasters that receive media coverage. Using an event study design, we find evidence consistent with temporal fatigue and donor fatigue, but not with crowding out.

The original and still a major purpose of ontologies in computer and information sciences is to serve for the semantic integration of represented content, facilitating information system interoperability. Content can be data, information, and knowledge, and it can be distributed within or across these categories. A myriad of languages is available for representation. Ontologies themselves are artifacts which are expressed in various languages. Different such languages are utilized today, including, as well-known representatives, predicate logic, subsuming first-order (predicate) logic (FOL), in particular, and higher-order (predicate) logic (HOL); the Web Ontology Language (OWL) on the basis of description logics (DL); and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We focus primarily on languages with formally defined syntax and semantics. This overall picture immediately suggests questions of the following kinds: What is the relationship between an ontology and the language in which it is formalized? Especially, what is the impact of the formal semantics of the language on the formalized ontology? How well understood is the role of ontologies in semantic integration? Can the same ontology be represented in multiple languages and/or in distinct ways within one language? Is there an adequate understanding of whether two expressions are intensionally/conceptually equivalent and whether two ontologies furnish the same ontological commitments? One may assume that these questions are resolved. Indeed, the development and adoption of ontologies is widespread today. Ontologies are authored in a broad range of different languages, including offering equally named ontologies in distinct languages. Much research is devoted to techniques and technologies that orbit ontologies, for example, ontology matching, modularization, learning, and evolution, to name a few. Ontologies have found numerous beneficial applications, and hundreds of ontologies have been created, considering solely the context of biomedical research. For us, these observations increase the relevance of the stated questions and close relatives thereof, and raise the desire for solid theoretical underpinnings. In the literature of computer and information sciences, we have found only few approaches that tackle the foundations of ontologies and their representation to allow for answering such questions or that actually answer them. We elaborate an analysis of the subject as the first item of central contributions within this thesis. It mainly results in the identification of a vicious circularity in (i) the intended use of ontologies to mediate between formal representations and (ii) solely exploiting formal semantic notions in representing ontologies and defining ontology-based equivalence as a form of intensional/conceptual equivalence. On this basis and in order to overcome its identified limitations, we contribute a general model-theoretic semantic account, named \\\"ontological semantics\\\". This kind of semantics takes the approach of assigning arbitrary entities as referents of atomic symbols and to link syntactic constructions with corresponding ontological claims and commitments. In particular, ontological semantics targets the avoidance of encoding effects in its definition. Therefore we argue that this semantic account is well suited for interpreting formalized ontologies and for defining languages for the representation of ontologies. It is further proposed as a fundament for envisioned novel definitions of the intensional equivalence of expressions, in potential deviation from only being formally equivalent under set-theoretic semantics. The thesis is defended that a particular usage of a formalism and its respective vocabulary should be accompanied by establishing an ontological semantics that is tailored to that use of the formalism, in parallel to the formal semantics of the language, in order to capture the ontological content of the formal representation for adequate reuse in other formalisms. Accordingly, we advocate ontological semantics as a useful framework for justifying translations on an intensional basis. Despite all deviations of ontological semantics from its set-theoretic blueprint, close relationships between the two can be shown, which allow for using established FOL and DL reasoners while assuming ontological semantics.:* Preface ** Abstract ** Contents ** Acknowledgments ** Foreword 1 Introduction 1.1 Background 1.2 Motivations 1.3 Theses, Objectives and Scope 1.4 Outline and Contributions 1.5 Formal Preliminaries 2 Foundations on Languages, Semantics, and Ontology 2.1 Formal Syntax and Formal Semantics 2.2 The Role of Ontologies in Semantic Integration 2.3 Ontological Analysis and Meta-Ontological Architecture 2.4 Conceptualization of Categories and Relations - CR 2.5 Summary of the Analysis and Next Steps 3 Views on Set-Theoretic Semantics of Classical Predicate Logics 3.1 Tarskian Model Theory and Set-Theoretic Superstructure 3.2 Formal Semantics and Choices for Entity Postulation 3.3 Theory View of Semantics 3.4 Aims for an Ontologically Neutral Semantic Account 4 Ontological Semantics 4.1 Definition of Ontological Structures by Analogy to the Set-Theoretic Approach 4.2 Properties and Further Background for Ontological Structures in General 4.3 Ontological Models & Signature Aspects 4.4 Semantics of Predication 4.5 Semantics of Connectives and Quantifiers & Semantic Notions 4.6 Relations between Ontological and Set-Theoretic Semantics 4.7 Ontological Neutrality 5 Ontological Engineering and Applications 5.1 Formalization Method for Ontology Representation in FOL 5.2 Ontological Usage Schemes 5.3 Glimpse on Characterizing Modular Representation 5.4 Applications in the Biomedical Domain 6 Contributions to Ontologies 6.1 Formalizations of Categories and Relations - CR 6.2 Remarks on Further Contributions 6.3 Ontologies of Time 7 Conclusion and Continuation 7.1 Resume 7.2 Related Work 7.3 Conclusions 7.4 Beginnings of Future Work Appendix A Additional Preliminaries A.1 Logical Notions A.2 Axiomatic Systems of Set and Number Theory B Axioms of the CR Taxonomy in OWL B.1 Asserted OWL Class Axioms B.2 Asserted OWL Object Property Axioms C Lists of Figures and Tables C.1 List of Figures C.2 List of Tables D Abbreviations, Acronyms and Names D.1 Abbreviations D.2 Acronyms and Names E References E.1 Literature References E.2 Web References/List of URLs F Work and Author Information ** Selbständigkeitserklärung (Declaration of Authorship) ** Bibliographic Data ** Scientific Record

Durant ces dernières décennies, la communauté informatique a montré un intérêt grandissant pour les modèles de calcul non-standard, inspirés par des phénomènes physiques, biologiques ou chimiques. Les propriétés exactes de ces modèles ont parfois été l'objet de controverses: que calculent-ils? Et à quelle vitesse? Les enjeux de ces questions sont renforcés par la possibilité que certains de ces modèles pourraient transgresser les limites acceptées du calcul, en violant soit la thèse de Church-Turing soit la thèse de Church-Turing étendue. La possibilité de réaliser physiquement ces modèles a notamment été au coeur des débats. Ainsi, des considérations empiriques semblent introduites dans les fondements même de la calculabilité et de la complexité computationnelle, deux théories qui auraient été précédemment considérées comme des parties purement a priori de la logique et de l'informatique. Par conséquent, ce travail est consacré à la question suivante : les limites du calcul reposent-elles sur des fondements empiriques? Et si oui, quels sont-ils? Pour ce faire, nous examinons tout d'abord la signification précise des limites du calcul, et articulons une conception épistémique du calcul, permettant la comparaison des modèles les plus variés. Nous répondrons à la première question par l'affirmative, grâce à un examen détaillé des débats entourant la faisabilité des modèles non-standard. Enfin, nous montrerons les incertitudes entourant la deuxième question dans l'état actuel de la recherche, en montrant les difficultés de la traduction des concepts computationnels en limites physiques. / Recent years have seen a surge in the interest for non-standard computational models, inspired by physical, biological or chemical phenomena. The exact properties of some of these models have been a topic of somewhat heated discussion: what do they compute? And how fast do they compute? The stakes of these questions were heightened by the claim that these models would violate the accepted limits of computation, by violating the Church-Turing Thesis or the Extended Church-Turing Thesis. To answer these questions, the physical realizability of some of those models - or lack thereof - has often been put at the center of the argument. It thus seems that empirical considerations have been introduced into the very foundations of computability and computational complexity theory, both subjects that would have been previously considered purely a priori parts of logic and computer science. Consequently, this dissertation is dedicated to the following question: do computability and computational complexity theory rest on empirical foundations? If yes, what are these foundations? We will first examine the precise meaning of those limits of computation, and articulate a philosophical conception of computation able to make sense of this variety of models. We then answer the first question by the affirmative, through a careful examination of current debates around non-standard models. We show the various difficulties surrounding the second question, and study how they stem from the complex translation of computational concepts into physical limitations.

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The thesis deals with both scheme and its implementation of water-level metering apparatus. This data are send wireless into 500 m distant station. Potential ways of solution are gradually studied and final design suggested. Detailed implementation methods are described in the following section. Ultrasonic sensors are employed for level measurement and controlling element is processor ATmega162, data are transmitted by transceiver RC1280HP. Apparatus is suggested with a view to the lowest power consumption considering it will be supplied only with a accumulator. Solving of accepting station is not a part of the thesis. Functional tested sample is understated in the execution section.

Creatine is nitrogen-containing organic acid which naturally occurs in the human body. The aim of this work was to determine the optimal dose of creatine in combination with vitamin C and magnesium for male respondents aged 18-26 years. They were divided into two groups differing in the creatine dosage. Group 1 took smaller dose of creatine (3 g per day) and group 2 higher dose of creatine (10 g per day). Both groups took both magnesium and vitamin C at constant doses throughout the study. The effects of significantly different dose of creatine in the individual groups were compared with each other in terms of the performance of individuals in the powerlifting, the anthropological changes and the overal metabolism of the intakes. In all disciplines of powerlifting, group 1 recorded higher average weight gains, which were not found to be statistically significant at a significance level of alpha 0,05. Anthropological changes were measured using the InBody 160 and a diagnostic measuring tape. In both cases, group 1 recorded better results than group 2, but these results were not statistically significant at a significance level of alpha 0,05. The total metabolism of the accepted dietary supplements was investigated through analytical methods. The urine of each respondent was regularly collected and subsequently analyzed during the research. Determination of creatinine, a creatine waste product, was performed by UV-VIS spectrophotometry using the Jaffe reaction. Vitamin C was analyzed by RP-HPLC. Magnesium was determined by the ICP-OES method. After creatine suplemantion of 3 per day, group 1 showed a slight increase in creatinine in the urine, but still in the physiological range. At the significance level alpha 0,05 there was no statistically significant difference. Group 2 showed an increase above the physiological limit which was already a statistically significant difference. Overall, creatine supplementation of 3 g per day has been found as a sufficient intake of creatine needed to build up muscle mass, increase energy metabolism and overall physical performance. The metabolization itself works very well and within the physiological values.