Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Religion, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tennessee, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-233).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-207)

This work is an investigation into the notion of truth. More specifically, this thesis deals with how to account for the main features of truth, with the interaction between truth and fundamental linguistic elements such as connectives and quantifiers, and with the analysis and the solution of truth-theoretic paradoxes. In the introductory Chapter 1, I describe and justify the approach to truth I adopt here, giving some general coordinates to contextualize my work. In Part I, I examine some theories of truth that fall under the chosen approach. In Chapter 2, I discuss a famous theory of truth developed by Saul Kripke. Some difficulties of Kripke's theory led several authors, notably Hartry Field, to emphasize the importance of a well-behaved conditional connective in conjunction with a Kripkean treatment of truth. I articulate this idea in a research agenda, which I call Field's program, giving some conditions for its realizability. In Chapter 3, I analyze the main theory of truth proposed by Field to equip Kripke's theory with a well-behaved conditional, and I give a novel analysis of its shortcomings. Field's theory is remarkably successful but is technically and intuitively very complex, and it is unclear whether Field's conditional is a plausible candidate for a philosophically useful conditional. Moreover, Field's treatment of "determinate truth" and his handling of many kinds of paradoxes is not fully satisfactory. In Part II, I develop some new theories that capture the main aspects of the notion of truth and, at the same time, give a philosophically interesting meaning to connectives and quantifiers - in particular, they yield a strong and conceptually significant conditional. The theory proposed in Chapter 4 extends the inductive methods employed in Kripke's theory, showing how to adapt them to non-monotonic connectives as well. There, I also develop and defend a new, theoretically fruitful notion of gappiness. The theory proposed in Chapter 5 (and discussed further in Chapter 6), instead, employs some graph-theoretic intuitions and tools to provide a new model-theoretic construction. The resulting theory, I argue, provides a nice framework to account for the interaction between truth, connectives, and quantifiers, and it is flexible enough to be applicable to several interpretations of the logical vocabulary. Some new technical results are established with this theory as well, concerning the interplay between every Lukasiewicz semantics and some interpretations of the truth predicate, and concerning the handling of determinate truth. Finally, the theory developed in Chapter 5 provides articulate and telling solutions to truth-theoretical paradoxes.

Managers are frequently offered conflicting advice to increase the organisation‟s ability to meet its goals; grant employees autonomy, which may lead to self-management and empowerment or alternatively, exercise control which may enable managers to retain a firm and organised workforce. Management are constantly challenged with this complex dilemma. This research will focus on the key factors that influence the various combinations of autonomy and control and their respective outcomes. To this end, qualitative research with an exploratory design was conducted, as this approach has the potential to delve deep into this quandary. Consequently, in-depth interviews with 16 leading management and HR experts were held to uncover their unique insights regarding this dilemma. The rich data that was unearthed was analysed using content and frequency analysis. The empirical findings of this research found that combinations of autonomy and control can certainly co-exist in an ever-changing fashion. Management are able to create environments with high levels of autonomy whilst simultaneously retaining high levels of monitoring and oversight when the management control is subtle and indirect. This approach will solve the dilemma under review by neutralising employee‟s negative resistance commonly associated with direct control. A total of seventeen factors were identified that could influence the different levels of autonomy and control in organisations. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Orientador: Luise Weiss / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T13:13:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Castro_Dayande_M.pdf: 254244803 bytes, checksum: 290efbe27bd577bebcb934caa43871e2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: O presente volume é um indagar descritivo de imagens em processo. Expõe um amalgama de referências teórico-práticas que influenciaram o caminho na produção das imagens. Estão aqui as partes fundamentais dessa busca, inquietações que relacionam-se com o contemporâneo, a fotografia e o retrato. Fundamentalmente um caminho, um paradoxo / Abstract: The purpose of this volume is a descriptive inquiring of images in progress. It exposes an amalgam of theoretical and practical issues that influenced the way the images were developed. The key parts of this quest are here along with concerns that relate to the contemporary, photography and portrait. Fundamentally a path, a paradox / Mestrado

Building an asymmetric differentiated goods quantity competition model, the present paper explores how substitutability of products, one of the factors affecting the unilateral effect, determines horizontal mergers and acquisitions equilibrium and strategies. It seems intuitively obvious that the merger between firms with goods that are sufficiently close substitutes can be more profitable. However, this thesis's counter-intuitive results show that, for some parameter values, a merger is more profitable for the merging firm when the target firm produces a distant substitutes (i.e., when it is not the closest competitor to the acquiring firm in the market).The theoretical analysis shows that to merge with firm with low substitute parameter is more profitable provided that target firms are close enough and the both of them are distant enough from merging firms. The results in Cournot model and Bertrand have some similarities, for example, they both harm to consumer surplus and the optimal strategy harms most. For the difference, for example, in Coumot model, whenever it is profitable to merge with a distant competitor, it is the optimal strategy, while in Bertrand model, it depends. The paper also extends the classical "horizontal merger paradox" to a setting of asymmetric differentiated oligopoly.

The main motivation for this work was to show that economy cannot be explained just by economy. Many other sciences are essential for understanding economic processes and models of behavior. This paper presents the proven relations between the philosophy, economics and psychology. The study of different economic concepts requires development of an extensive network of connections between humans on the one side, and their social needs and behavior on the other side. The starting point is the return in the time of Ancient Greeks, with whose theoretical approaches can be explained the majority of person's actions. This paper uses theoretical analyses to assess the impact of the "passions and interests", hedonic happiness and stoic self-interest on the economic policy and individuals. Through the gently presented forms of hedonism, this work deals with different theories such as theory of modern consumerism, marginal utilitarianism, preference theory, theory of rational allocation. The data gathered in the form of publication analysis, little psychological experiments and real life examples serve to test the hypothesis of the direct relationship between hedonistic impacts on economic theory. The two research questions are dealing with mastery of passions and interest in the economic behavior as well as with the...

Many attempts at solving the liar paradox involve either rejecting some principles in classical logic so as to block the argument that leads to the contradiction or modifying the notion of truth so that the liar sentence can be classified as true in one aspect while false in another. However, the prominent approaches based the above strategies may suffer from the revenge problem. That is, while they solve the pristine liar paradox, the introduction of the solution triggers another one with the same structure. In this dissertation, three prominent approaches to the liar paradox are first introduced and examined. In particular, they are, first, the Tarskian hierarchical approach, whose main idea can be roughly characterized as that a natural language is a hierarchy of a series of languages and the liar sentence is true at one level of the hierarchy and is false at another; second, Saul Kripke's paracomplete approach, whose main idea can be roughly characterized as that the liar sentence is ungrounded and has no classical truth value at all; finally, Gupta and Belnep's revision theory of truth, the main idea of which is that truth is a circular concept and that the truth predicate is circularly defined. With a new semantics and logic for circular concept and definition, one can classify the liar sentence as not categorical. Based on two general patterns that give rise to the revenge paradox by Graham Priest, it is shown that none of the above approaches can escape the revenge paradox, at least, not satisfactorily. After the examination of three prominent approaches, I provide an initial characterization of a kind of approach which I call the silence approach. The main idea of the silence approach is that, perhaps what the liar paradox teaches us is that the semantic status of the liar sentence is eventually not classifiable, in the sense that the accepted or correct semantic theory for natural language simply does not apply to the liar sentence. There are two theoretical possibilities that can evoke the failure of classification. Either there is just no semantic category that fits the liar sentence or the necessary principles for the classification do not apply to the sentence. In either case, the silence approach suggests that although the liar sentence could have a semantic status according to the accepted or correct semantic theory, but given that we cannot classify it, we cannot know it. In this dissertation, I do not provide a detailed and well-developed theory of the silence approach. Instead, after the initial characterization of this approach, I go on to introduce and examine two current theories on the liar paradox which I think satisfy at least part of my characterization of the silence approach. The first theory is the semantic epistemicism by Paul Horwich. The second one is what I call exceptional theory, which is given by Thomas Hofweber. The result of the examination is that, both theories can indeed be interpreted as a silence approach. However, although they can block both the pristine liar paradox and the revenge paradox, they suffer severely from the problem of being ad hoc. The current conclusion of this dissertation about the silence approach thus is that, it is possible to construct a silence approach which can block the pristine liar paradox and the revenge, but it is hard to find a rationale for the solution. That is, it is hard to answer the question as to why the liar sentence is not classifiable. Finally, as an overlook to the future development of the silence approach, I suggest that even if we can solve the problem of ad hocness, there remains a question as to whether the incompleteness of classification is a symptom revealing that the accepted semantic theory is defective, or it is a symptom showing that there is just no possible semantic theory that can eventually do the job. Without answering this question, the silence approach still lacks a plausible theoretical ground

Individuals that perceive stigma surrounding their identity and fear rejection of support requests may experience a paradox whereby they seek support indirectly from support networks (friends and family) to avoid rejection and are met with unsupportive responses. This study extended this paradox to sexual minorities using survey data from a sample of 133 individuals self-identified as gay and lesbian. Results of structural equation modeling showed self-stigma and fear of support rejection linked to increased indirect support seeking, which in turn explained unsupportive network responses, providing support for a paradox among gays and lesbians. Findings may have implications for interventions to improve support exchanges in the lives of sexual minorities.