Sharif Digital Repository

Hartry Field argues that meaning-besed approaches to explaining the apriority of certain propositions fail to succeed in their endeavour. He suggests that adoting what one cals a non-factualist view of justification itself removes the mystery of the apriority of such propositions, and sketches what such a view of justification involves. A priori justification is often thought mysterious or out of keeping with a naturalistic view of the world; strong forms of priori justification that involve empirical indefeasibility are often thought especially mysterious. While this is no doubt correct for excessive claims of a priority – for instance, claims to prori acces to features of the physical... 

As Davidson says, "Rorty sees the history of Western philosophy as a confused and victorless battle between unintelligible skepticism and lame attempts to answer it." Therefore we can say that the core issue of Epistemology, in various ages of history of philosophy, is the problem of skepticism. Semantic externalism according to some contemporary philosophers, like Hilary Putnam, Anthony Brueckner and Donald Davidson, gives various answers to skeptical arguments. On the other hand, skepticism also can be a challenge for semantic externalism. In this thesis, I have attempted to draw a scheme to clarify the status of these issues with regard to each other  

My dissertation includes four chapters; three introductory chapters and a final conclusion. The first chpter is a comprehensive introduction to the problem of consciousness. The next chapter is allocated to representationalism, especially Michael Tye's PANIC theory, as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness and related phenomena. The third chapter is a brife look at causal theories of mental content. And the last chapter contains my arguments agaisnt Tye's theory. Apparently, mental states are of two categories; some mental states have representational content and some other have phenomenal aspect; there is something it is like to undergo latter states. Representationalism holds... 

Dynamic hand gesture is an efficient approach used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The goal is to recognize and analyze the different hand gestures in a recorded video. There are some associated challenges such as video noises, illumination changes, rotation variance, hand occlusion which make the process more complicated.To do the research we used five different gestures out of the Sheffield hand gesture dataset which is collected from six persons under three different backgrounds and two illumination conditions. This procedure needs image processing in order to detect and segment the important parts involved in images such as hands and analyzing the changes and motions of them. We... 

Most existing face recognition methods require several gallery (training) images per person for optimally training the system. On the other hand, in many real applications of face recognition such as law enforcement, driver’s license and identification by passport, generally only one image per person is available. However, “the variations between face images with different illumination and gestures are almost always larger than image variations due to change in face identity”, Therefore, in this thesis we have considered face recognition with changes in ambient lighting conditions and viewing angles where only one training image per person is availabe. A method have been proposed in which we... 

Polyethylene (PE) is used as an insulation material for wires and cables because of its excellent electrical properties. For such application, it can be exposed to the high energy irradiation such as gamma ray and electron beam (EB), making possible crosslinking of the PE. Most of the properties of PE are improved greatly after irradiation, but it was harden and split easily. Due to the flexibility of EVA, depending on the vinyl acetate content, it can improve the toughness of the LDPE significantly upon addition to this polymer. As a result, radiation induced LDPE/EVA blend has been a good candidate for the wire and cable insulation. Also, upon addition of a few amount of OC, different... 

In this dissertation, the thesis of Duhem-Quine holism will be intoduced and its similarity and dissimilarity in epistemolical webs of Duhem and Quine will be enumerated and criticisms that is taken to this thesis will be examined. In chapter 1 and 2, the fundamental characteristics of Duhem and Quine viewpoints will be introduced in sequence. This chapter is introduction to more accurate understanding of holism each of them and better Comparison together. In chapter 3, we will introduce their holism and we’ll see what the results of their holism in falsification and confirmation of different Hypotheses are. In chapter 4, we will discuss about discrepancy between their viewpoints and we...