The study of serial killing has been dominated by an individualized focus on the aetiology and biography of particular offenders. As such, it has tended to downplay the broader social, historical and cultural context of such acts. This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that serial killers are distinctively modern. It highlights six modern phenomena related to serial killing: (a) the mass...

rationality of religious belief is one of the most important issues in the philosophy of religion and includes five epistemological approaches. up till recent times, evidentialism was the approach prevalent in the field of rationality of religious beliefs. and it was considered as a symbol of maximal rationalism. reformed epistemology, however, is a newly-emerged school which opposes evidential...

Abstract According to Husserl, the mathematization of lifeworld involves reducing it, as object knowledge, what is measurable, well excluding other forms knowledge it. This has important implications in relation modern conception rationality, and, significantly, practical rationality. More precisely, it issues an impoverishment notion reason. article examines idea that process commodification a...

ALX3 is a multi-agent version of ALX with a rst-order description language. ALX, a modal action logic, combines ideas from H.A. Simon's bounded rationality, S. Kripke's possible world semantics, G. H. von Wright's preference logic, Pratt's dynamic logic, and Stalnaker's conditional logic. ALX avoids important drawbacks of other action logics, especially the counterintuitive necessi-tation rule ...

The curative effects of Chinese herbal compounds result from the coordination of numerous natural compounds. We aimed to review the mechanism of action of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) compounds (TCMC), explore the rationality of formulation theory and synergistic effects in TCM compounds, and analyze the effectiveness of drug compatibility of TCMC in molecular biology. This literature rev...

When artificial intelligence seeks to make reasoning “mechanical,” it means reasoning carried out by a machine or definite procedure rather than a form of behavior satisfying the laws of mechanics. This paper describes work on the mechanization of reasoning in the latter sense, aiming to formalize reasoning systems using the science of mechanics. The paper describes how the formal concepts of m...

Academic and corporate research departments alike face a crucial dilemma: to exploit known frameworks or to explore new ones; to specialize or to innovate? Here I show that these two conflicting epistemic desiderata are sufficient to explain pluralistic ignorance and its boom-and-bust-like dynamics, exemplified in the collapse of the efficient markets hypothesis as a modern risk management para...

This article examines prospects for theories and methods of preferences, both in the specific sense of the preferences of the ideal rational agents considered in economics and decision theory and in the broader interplay between reasoning and rationality considered in philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Modern applications seek to employ preferences as means for specifying, des...

Approaches to decision making that are based on individual rationality, whether relying upon classical game-theoretic notions or upon modern distributed artificial intelligence based concepts, are limited in their ability to characterize cooperative social behavior. Altruism, in particular, is a difficult concept to characterize with these approaches. In this paper we contrast categorical altru...

The debate on the existence of laws in individual and social behaviour dates back to the very beginnings of economics as a modern science. In adopting the concept of natural laws from classical mechanics, economics originally evolved as ‘social physics.’ But is it really appropriate to transfer the idea of precise and accurate laws to social life and social science? We attempt to answer this qu...