0000000000046089
AUTHOR
Marcello D'agostino
La logica e il mito del linguaggio perfetto
L'articolo sostiene che il sogno di una "linguaggio perfett", inteso come un mezzo di espressione universale e semanticamente trasparente sia strettamente connesso al mito della razionalità istantanea. Il linguaggio logicamente perfetto sarebbe infatti un linguaggio nel quale tutte le relazioni logiche divengono immediatamente visibili, e la questa linguaggio, possa pensare per noi (frege, 1884). nella prima parte dell'articolo si ricostruisce la storia di questo tipo di linguaggio perfetto da Leibniz e Wittgenstein. nella seconda parte si mostra come tale linguaggio non possa esistere sulla base di recenti risultati in logica e computer science. We argue that the dream of a ‘perfect langua…
How to standardize (if you must)
In many situations we are interested in appraising the value of a certain characteristic for a given individual relative to the context in which this value is observed. In recent years this problem has become prominent in the evaluation of scientific productivity and impact. A popular approach to such relative valuations consists in using percentile ranks. This is a purely ordinal method that may sometimes lead to counterintuitive appraisals, in that it discards all information about the distance between the raw values within a given context. By contrast, this information is partly preserved by using standardization, i.e., by transforming the absolute values in such a way that, within the s…
The measurement of rank mobility
Abstract In this paper we investigate the problem of measuring social mobility when the social status of individuals is given by their rank. In order to sensibly represent the rank mobility of subgroups within a given society, we address the problem in terms of partial permutation matrices which include standard (“global”) matrices as a special case. We first provide a characterization of a partial ordering on partial matrices which, in the standard case of global matrices, coincides with the well-known “concordance” ordering. We then provide a characterization of an index of rank mobility based on partial matrices and show that, in the standard case of comparing global matrices, it is equi…