Related papers: Marxism, Logic and the Rate of Profit

Can cost-reducing technical change lead to a fall in the long run rate of profit if class struggle manages to keep the rate of exploitation constant? In a general circulating capital model, we derive sufficient conditions for cost-reducing…

It is argued that arguments for strict prohibition of interests must be based on the use of arguments from authority. This is carried out by first making a survey of so-called dialectical roots for interest prohibition and then…

The long term estimation of the Marxist average rate of profit does not adhere to a theoretically grounded standard regarding which economic activities should or should not be included for such purposes, which is relevant because…

Neoclassical economics has two theories of competition between profit-maximizing firms (Marshallian and Cournot-Nash) that start from different premises about the degree of strategic interaction between firms, yet reach the same result,…

Interest prohibition theory concerns theoretical aspects of interest prohibition. We attempt to lay down some aspects of interest prohibition theory wrapped in a larger framework of informal logic. The reason for this is that interest…

Defeasible logic is a rule-based nonmonotonic logic, with both strict and defeasible rules, and a priority relation on rules. We show that inference in the propositional form of the logic can be performed in linear time. This contrasts…

A common assumption of political economy is that profit rates across firms or sectors tend to uniformity, and often models are formulated in which this tendency is assumed to have been realised. But in reality this tendency is never…

Ultrafinitism postulates that we can only compute on relatively short objects, and numbers beyond certain value are not available. This approach would also forbid many forms of infinitary reasoning and allow to remove certain paradoxes…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) attempts to infer human rewards or preferences from observed behavior. Since human planning systematically deviates from rationality, several approaches have been tried to account for specific human…

It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…

The question of "Justice" still divides social research and moral philosophy. Several Theories of Justice and conceptual approaches compete here, and distributive justice remains a major societal controversy. From an evolutionary point of…

This paper argues that, insofar as we doubt the bivalence of the Continuum Hypothesis or the truth of the Axiom of Choice, we should also doubt the consistency of third-order arithmetic, both the classical and intuitionistic versions.…

Nonmonotonic reasoning is a pattern of reasoning that allows an agent to make and retract (tentative) conclusions from inconclusive evidence. This paper gives a possible-worlds interpretation of the nonmonotonic reasoning problem based on…

Debates about juridical proof are often framed as a conflict between probabilistic approaches and relative plausibility theory (RPT). This paper argues that this opposition rests on a level-of-analysis error. Drawing on Marr's distinction…

We present Russell's antinomy using three distinct deductive systems, which are then compared to deepen the logical deductions that lead to the contradiction. Some inferential paths are then presented, alternative to the commonly accepted…

In many situations humans have to reason with inconsistent knowledge. These inconsistencies may occur due to not fully reliable sources of information. In order to reason with inconsistent knowledge, it is not possible to view a set of…

Although conventional logical systems based on logical calculi have been successfully used in mathematics and beyond, they have definite limitations that restrict their application in many cases. For instance, the principal condition for…

Many people feel compelled to interpret, describe, and respond to Large Language Models (LLMs) as if they possess inner mental lives similar to our own. Responses to this phenomenon have varied. Inflationists hold that at least some folk…

It has been assumed that arbitrage profits are not possible in efficient markets, because future prices are not predictable. Here we show that predictability alone is not a sufficient measure of market efficiency. We instead propose to…

There are two main opposing schools of statistical reasoning, Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Until recent days, the frequentist or classical approach has dominated the scientific research, but Bayesianism has reappeared with a strong…