VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Entailment : the formalisation of inference

Entailment is the relation which holds between the premisses and conclusion of a. valid argument. Various standards of argument validity are prominent in the current literature: the classical, the relevant, and the intuitionistic. Correspondingly there exist various entailment relations. Classical entailment is studied in Chapters II-V, and relevant entailment in Chapters VI - IX.
Entailment is treated syntactically as a sentence-predicate, and sentences asserting entailment are axiomatised hierarchically, one axiom system for each level of language. The axiomatisations used are based on Genzen's sequent calculus. o and 9 are defined in terms of entailment, and thus are treated also as sentence-predicates. Accordingly the hierarchy of entailment systems constitutes modal logic at what Quine has termed the first grade of modal involvement. It is proved that the hierarchy of systems is of SS strength. Thereby the influential conjectures of Montague (1963) are rebutted.
The semantics of entailment is studied. In particular semantics giving a substitutional interpretation to the quantifiers are investigated. Such semantics answer Quine's charge that quantification into first grade modal contexts is incoherent. The problem of finding a substitutional semantics which invalidates the Barcan Formula is tackled. Finally, with a view to avoiding the standard objections to substitutional quantification whilst retaining the facility of quantifying into metalinguistic contexts, semantics which mix the substitutional and objectual interpretations are introduced.
Reasons given in the literature for rejecting classical entailment theory in favour of relevance logic are surveyed and dismissed. However, the question of the relevance of premisses to conclusion is obviously a bona fide part of the whole business of appraising the worth of an argument. It behooves us as formal logicians to attempt to formalise the relevance appraisal. Given a formal theory of premiss-conclusion relevance one may, if one wishes, include the relevance appraisal alongside the truth-preservation appraisal in the assessment of formal validity. This procedure generates a relevant entailment relation. Anderson and Belnap's system E of entailment is investigated and dismissed as being merely ad hoc, answering to no account of premiss-conclusion relevance. A formal semantical analysis of premiss-conclusion relevance is given. This analysis is used in the construction of a semantical characterisation of a system of relevant entailment. A Genzen-style axiomatisation of the system is then given.

Keywords: Entailment
Logic
The cultural life of Bristol, 1640-1775

Historians have become increasingly concerned with changes in urban provincial culture between the Civil War and the late eighteenth century, particularly as it has become clear that urban industrialization in the provinces depended heavily on a preceding period in which both the mentality and the trading infrastructure of ‘consumer society' were created. Renewed interest in extra-Parliamentary politics has also focused attention on the urban electorate and public opinion. Most of the research in these fields has, however, been carried out on a national scale, examining particular features of urban cultural life. The aim of this thesis is to test the assumptions and conclusions of recent historical work through a detailed analysis of one major city, emphasizing the inter-connections between cultural changes and their local significance.
The approach adopted is essentially that of social rather than intellectual history, concentrating on the social circumstances which affected involvement in, and attitudes towards, cultural activity, rather than analysis of the changing styles and content of particular cultural practices. The first half of the thesis is concerned with the background to artistic and scientific activity, namely educational provision, the place of the printed word, and the nature of leisure and sociability, while the final chapter looks at the values associated with urban life, and their impact on political and religious behaviour. Therefore, although it concentrates on the 'culture' of literature, painting, music, drama, and intellectual research, the thesis attempts to ask broad questions in the social scientific tradition about their context and meaning.
In doing so, this study is intended to redress the imbalance in current historiography. Recent work has mostly looked at urban life from outside, evaluating the economic or political ‘impact of towns! on national affairs. To the general dangers of 'Whiggishness' have been added specific assumptions which have encouraged the tendency to ignore the nature and impact of cultural change within the town. It has been assumed that a growing divergence of elite and popular culture, and the spread of metropolitan cultural practices and standards left the respectable inhabitants of provincial towns with little option but to follow the cultural changes pioneered by the landed and professional classes. Often the towns benefited economically by acting as regional entrepots for leisure and cultural activity by the gentry and pseudo-gentry, but they were subordinate both to their London suppliers and their genteel customers. The gradual re-establishment of political stability is thought to have followed the same pattern. Only with the establishment of an independent industrial base did a distinct urban provincial consciousness emerge, complete with new middle-class political aims and practices.
Continued in thesis ...

Keywords: cultural life
18th century
seventeenth century
Bristol
customs
Social life
17th century
Civilization
eighteeth century
Seeing like a humanitarian: legibility in Lebanon's emergency response

This thesis examines how international humanitarian organisations in Lebanon see and respond to the populations they aim to support. It focuses on four different organisational practices used by humanitarian actors in programme implementation in Lebanon: classification, assessment, targeting, and empowerment. While these processes are couched in the language of impartiality, objectivity and neutrality, I argue that from design to deployment, they are profoundly social, politically embedded processes, which carry tremendous material force. By ignoring or obscuring the political, social and unintended material consequences of their work, humanitarian organisations are in danger of sustaining and reproducing the inequalities they aim to alleviate.
Drawing on 12 months’ ethnographic research with international humanitarian organisations in Lebanon, I make three interrelated arguments. Firstly, I argue that legibility is established via socio-material networks of people, technologies, policies, and objects. Power relations are formed through these networks, which rely on ‘invisible’ work on the part of displacement-affected communities and front-line staff. Secondly, I argue that humanitarian legibility is established along gendered lines. Women are engaged with as vulnerable by humanitarian practitioners, while risks faced by adult men are rendered invisible. Thirdly, I argue that humanitarian organisations establish legibility in ways that are deeply embedded in the socio-political context of Lebanon: local and national dynamics have a profound impact on the ways that humanitarians see, and humanitarian actors actively shape the political and social environment around them.
While solidarity remains at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise, humanitarian schemes of legibility, even when shaped profoundly by the context, rarely afford the flexibility for staff members to put the humanity, dignity and experiences of displacement-affected people at their centre. Throughout this thesis, I argue that the networks that have evolved around schemes of legibility have standardised the ways that humanitarians see and consequently, the power they exert is formidable.

Keywords: Lebanon
humanitarianism
development
technology
gender
Advisor: Scott-Smith, T
Cole, G
Toward Islamo-Christian business ethics? A case study on the prohibitions of riba and usury and the morality of interest

Islamic banking has attracted attention as a possible source of inspiration for ethical renewal in the finance industry. A frequently cited attribute of Islamic banking is the prohibition of riba, often identified with interest. This identification elicits comparisons with Christianity’s usury ban and raises hopes of a shared Islamo-Christian contribution to secular business ethics through a reassessment of the morality of interest.
With hopes for wider appeal, this thesis focuses on Sunni and Roman Catholic sources of authority regarding the respective prohibitions. The religious texts underlying this study are from the Qur’an and Bible, the Hadith and the Fathers of the Church, Sunni jurisprudence and the Catholic magisterium.
Given the view that the audience of business ethicists comprises other philosophers and the general public, it is argued that the suitable approach for the field is based on secular reasoning. While recognizing the importance of secular argumentation in the business ethics, this thesis proposes and employs a framework that invites religions to lend greater acceptability to secular argumentation and to provide inspiration for secular discourse.
Part I of this thesis compares the significations of “interest” (Chapter 1), “riba” (Chapter 2), and “usury” (Chapter 3) as well as Islam’s prohibition of riba (Chapter 4) and Christianity’s prohibition of usury (Chapter 5). Since there is sufficient (though imperfect) overlap between these significations and prohibitions, Part II derives from rationales for the prohibitions of riba and usury lines of secular reasoning for analyzing the morality of interest. This analysis considers whether interest-based lending is immoral, presents moral risks, or its avoidance is supererogatory. This analysis takes into consideration the effects of interest-based lending (Chapter 6), considerations of virtue (Chapter 7), and the demands of justice (Chapter 8).
Beyond its own subject matter, this case study exemplifies possibilities and challenges of attempting Islamo-Christian contributions to secular business ethics more widely.

Keywords: usury
Christian ethics
interfaith finance
Islamic finance
financial ethics
Islamic banking
Advisor: Sapir Abulafia, A
Investigating the function and regulation of cohesin ATPase

Cohesin is essential for the spatial organization of the genome through its ability to extrude loops on the DNA. Structural information indicates that the cohesin’s Smcs fold at the elbow, bringing the hinge domain close to the ATPase heads and also can dissociate from each other to adopt an unzipped coils conformation. In all proposed loop extrusion models, cohesin needs to undergo changes to its conformational state, with unzipping or unfolding of the complex being necessary for its ATP hydrolysis driven loop extrusion. In this work, I investigate the role of cohesin’s conformation in relation to its ATPase activity. Specifically I am looking at its the folding and the zipping up of the coiled coils. I examine the changes that occur in those conformational states during cohesin’s ATP hydrolysis cycle while also considering their regulatory role. My research shows that both unzipping and unfolding occur during the hydrolysis cycle, while only unzipping is necessary for ATP hydrolysis. I find that the zipped-up coils inhibition is lost in cohesin trimers with mutations at the hinge that do not fold. The unfolded cohesin trimers hydrolyse ATP more readily than WT, indicating that the folded state is required for the stability of the zipping up of the coils. My results lead me to the conclusion that cohesin’s rigid APO state inhibits ATP hydrolysis due to the zipped up coils that are stabilized by the folding at the elbow. ATP hydrolysis therefore, requires Scc2 and DNA to ensure the unzipping of the coils in the clamped state.

Keywords: SMC
Loop extrusion
hydrolysis
elbow
ATPase
cohesin
Advisor: Nasmyth, K
Srinivasan, M
Learning deep neural networks: necessity and scope of prior knowledge, raw data, and labels

The recent rise in machine learning has been largely made possible by novel algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks and large-scale labelled datasets. Yet obtaining labelled datasets is expensive, does not scale well, and should not be necessary for learning general representations of data such as images or videos. Thus, by shifting the training of neural networks to not require labelled data, it is possible to obtain more robust, diverse and generelizeable neural networks that can scale to the vast quantities of readily available unlabelled data. Learning transferable representations from raw data can thus drastically reduce the cost of solving new tasks and improve performance in many settings where supervisory signals are scarce. The field of self-supervised learning has therefore become an increasingly popular framework for learning without labels and in this thesis I provide several works that shed light on the workings of self-supervised learning, and that contributed to, and shaped the state of the art in this field. This thesis covers works that: i) analyze the role of image transformations; ii) develop methods for self-supervised clustering in the image and video domain; iii) develop novel representation learning methods for video-audio and video-text data and; iv) propose a new dataset better suited to self-supervised pretraining than the current standard. Put together, these works investigate and further the state of self-supervised learning from multiple dimensions and its insights continue to shape the future of deep learning without labels.

Keywords: computer vision
self-supervised learning
multi-modal learning
representation learning
Advisor: Vedaldi, A
Reading the book of nature: natural theology in early modern Spain, 1436-1825

This dissertation is an analysis of the development of natural theology in early modern Spain. It examines the definitions and uses of natural theology that occurred within Spanish Catholicism, 1436-1825. This dissertation makes three main arguments: firstly, that the modern parameters of natural theology are ahistorical and insufficient to understanding the term’s history; secondly, that the development of natural theology in early modern Spain was contextually determined and distinct from other forms; and thirdly, that understanding these historical contexts and the formation of natural theology reveals new ways of understanding the relationship between theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences.
The parameters of natural theology in early modern Spain were constantly redefined, influenced by ideas about human nature, the intelligibility of the natural world, the noetic effects of sin and the capabilities of human reason, the credibility of experimentalism and observation in the natural sciences, and the authority granted to the Church and to Scripture. As these notions were reshaped in Spain, new and alternative ideas about the scope and legitimacy of natural theology arose. As a result, natural theologies varied in purpose; for example, natural theology was used alternatively throughout the period for evangelization, apologetics, catechesis, and devotion or worship.
This dissertation explores the historical causes for these variations. It challenges scholars of historical theology to recognize a wider definition and use of natural theology. It reconceptualizes the historiography of early modern intellectual history by showing how natural theology was directly related to philosophical and scientific endeavors in the Spanish mentality. Finally, it suggests new ways of developing the “new natural theology” in contemporary discussions. The dissertation incorporates original and archival research of dozens of works from the early modern Iberian world, and consists of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion.

Keywords: historical theology
natural theology
early modern Spain
science and religion
Advisor: McGrath, A
The social world of the poligrafi and the cultural politics of sixteenth-century Italy

This thesis is about the poligrafi, an amorphous group of writers, editors, and translators active in sixteenth-century Italy, and their impact on cultural politics – debates about the nature, purpose and audience for education, art, and literature. Drawing on archival sources and the poligrafi’s manuscript and print publications across four generations, it contributes to historiographical debates about the impact of the printing press and humanist culture on patronage networks and writers in sixteenth-century Italy. At the same time, it shows how the poligrafi’s attempts to improve their social standing prompted their provocative criticisms of humanist court culture, the nature of language, and the use of obscenity, as well as their shift towards propagandistic work for the Venetian republic in the second half of the sixteenth century.
The first part of this thesis is about the social world of the poligrafi, concentrating first on their social world outside Venice (chapter 1) followed by their social world in Venice (chapter 2). The second part, on cultural politics, is split into three chapters. These deal respectively with the role of poligrafi in the circulation of libel in manuscript and print outside of Venice (chapter 3), their reinvention in Venice, following the Sack of Rome of 1527, as truth-tellers opposed to courtiers and humanist culture (chapter 4), and the shift of those poligrafi who remained in Venice towards propagandistic treatises on art, guidebooks, and popular histories from the mid-1540s onwards (chapter 5). Finally, the conclusion discusses the wider significance of this inquiry in three main areas: first, for our understanding of early modern patronage systems in ecclesiastical and princely courts and republics; second, with respect to the nature and impact of technological innovation – specifically, of the printing press; and third, with respect to humanist debates about language, style, and form in sixteenth-century Italy.

Keywords: cultural history
history of the book
early modern italy
social history
Advisor: Parrott, D
Pattenden, M
Regulation of molecular subtypes of pancreatic cancer by TET2 and 5'hmC

Genomic studies using mRNA datasets have uncovered two molecular subtypes within pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) tumours with distinct gene programmes and clinical characteristics, raising the possibility of subtype specific therapeutic options. In each of these studies a similar aggressive subtype was identified that was characterized by a loss of endodermal differentiation markers such as GATA6 and PDX1, as well as poorer patient survival, referred to collectively as squamous. Despite the inherent heterogeneity in the molecular basis of PDAC, there is little genetic heterogeneity between different PDAC tumours, even when comparing metastasis to primary tumours. Conversely, there is widespread epigenetic reprogramming association with progression to more aggressive phenotypes, suggesting that aggressive molecular subtypes are likely to be epigenetically driven.
TET-mediated DNA Hydroxymethylation (5’hmC) is dynamically regulated during pancreatic differentiation, but it remains unknown what role 5’hmC during PDAC initiation and progression. In this work the role of 5’hmC during PDAC progression is explored. Loss of 5’hmC correlates with squamous subtypes and decreased expression of GATA6 while re-expression of TET2 increases GATA6 expression. Critically, TET2 can be effectively targeted using Metformin and Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid). When used in combination, metformin and ascorbic acid can increase TET2 and GATA6 levels in vitro and in vivo. This suppresses Wnt pathway signalling and causes cells to become less squamous in identity. Thus, the findings presented here suggest that aggressive molecular subtypes can be targeted therapeutically be restoring TET2 activity.

Keywords: 5'hmC
Epigenetics
PDAC
TET2
Molecular Subtypes
Hydroxymethylation
Pancreatic Cancer
Oncology
Advisor: O’Neill, E
Selective pecking in the domestic chick

When a chick pecks at one of a number of alternative stimuli, two questions about mechanisms of decision-making arise. One of these concerns the timing of the peck - this will be discussed later - and the other is about its orientation. In an attempt to answer the second of these questions, a model is proposed, called the Threshold Model. This model then is a possible analogue of the mechanism in a chick which determines at which of the available stimuli each individual peck is directed.
The Threshold Model embodies the following assumptions. There is a fluctuating variable of unknown nature called Variable X, which interacts with thresholds corresponding to the external stimuli. A stimulus cannot be pecked unless Variable X exceeds its threshold. Some stimuli have lower thresholds than others and are therefore more likely to be pecked - they are "preferred". If the thresholds of more than one available stimulus are exceeded at any one time, they are equally likely to be pecked.
From these assumptions it is possible to deduce a prediction about the precise relationship between the three percentage preferences obtained when any three stimuli are presented to animals in all possible pair combinations.
This prediction, called Prediction 1, was tested on domestic chicks, by counting the numbers of pecks given to small hemispherical spots presented in pairs, and differing in colour or some other quality. In general it was well confirmed. The model need not be confined to the pecking response, nor indeed to the domestic chick. Prediction 1 also gave a good fit to the findings in experiments again on domestic chicks involving learned preferences in approach situations. Also, M. Impekoven, J. Kear, W. Muntz, and C. Rees allowed me to test and fairly well confirm Prediction 1 using their data from choice experiments on a number of different species.
Continued in thesis ...

Keywords: domestic
chick
animals
behaviour
selective
decision
making
pecking