Logical Positivism and Carnap's Confirmability on the Meaningfulness of Religious Language

Due to their acceptance of the verifiability principle, the only way left for logical positivists to argue for the meaningfulness of religious language was to accept some sort of emotivistic conception of it or to reduce it to the description of religious attitude. The verifiability principle, however, suffers from some severe limitations that make it inadequate as a criterion for cognitive meaning. To resolve these problems, logical positivists gave up the requirement of conclusive verifiability and defended a sort of ‘liberalization’ of the verifiability principle. Carnap’s confirmability criterion for cognitive meaning, which is a liberalized form of the verifiability principle, is compatible with an orthodox conception of religious language since, from a theistic perspective, the existence of God can be confirmed through our observational statements

W. K. Clifford and William James on Doxastic Norms

The main aim of this paper is to explain and analyze the debate between W. K. Clifford ("The Ethics of Belief", 1877) and William James ("The Will to Believe", 1896). Given that the main assumption shared by Clifford and James in this debate is doxastic voluntarism –i.e., the claim that we can, at least in some occasions, willingly decide what to believe–, I will explain the arguments offered by Bernard Williams in his “Deciding to Believe” (1973) against doxastic voluntarism. Finally, I will explain what happens with the debate between Clifford and James once we accept Bernard Williams’s arguments and refuse to accept doxastic voluntarism

Unamuno and James on Religious Faith

The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist defense of religious faith without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation

A distributed scheme to detect wormhole attacks in mobile wireless sensor networks

Due to mostly being unattended, sensor nodes become open to physical attacks such as wormhole attack, which is our focus in this paper. Various solutions are proposed for wormhole attacks in sensor networks, but only a few of them take mobility of sensor nodes into account. We propose a distributed wormhole detection scheme for mobile wireless sensor networks in which mobility of sensor nodes is utilized to estimate two network features (i.e. network node density, standard deviation in network node density) through using neighboring information in a local manner. Wormhole attack is detected via observing anomalies in the neighbor nodes’ behaviors based on the estimated network features and the neighboring information. We analyze the performance of proposed scheme via simulations. The results show that our scheme achieves a detection rate up to 100% with very small false positive rate (at most 1.5%) if the system parameters are chosen accordingly. Moreover, our solution requires neither additional hardware nor tight clock synchronization which are both costly for sensor networks