Sharif Digital Repository

Hubert Dreyfus other than being a prominent philosopher is amongst early critics of classical artificial intelligence project which was initialized during 1955-1960. Challenging the rationalist presuppositions of this paradigm, he foresaw various situations where mechanical artificial intelligence based upon modeling the world through symbolic representation and mimicking reason by formalized rules would fail to deliver even remotely similar outputs in digital computers as in human though process and problem solving ability.Twenty years later it became obvious for AI researchers that obstacles like frame problem or lack of common sense would follow their projects no matter what computing... 

In this research, first of all, the main question of Heidegger and his epoch is investigated. If we read Heidegger along the tradition of German philosophy, then it is perceived that the problem of science is the most central subject matter standing against Heidegger. My question is this: how Heidegger reaches to this existential phenomenological view about science. Regarding that, by giving a coherent narration about a crucial problem called 'the crisis of science', in the first chapter I gave a short view to philosophies preceding Heidegger, some important of which is Dilthey's philosophy of life, phenomenology of Husserl, and south-west school of neo-Kantianism. The second chapter... 

This thesis is going to investigate the ontological foundation of Science and Tool. To this aim, it refers to Heidegger’s works especially the Being and time. Heidegger gets involve in analyzing Science in the Being and Time. He emphasizes on importance of establishment of a fundamental knowledge which should ontologically recognize basic concepts and methods of Sciences, to cause a real progress in sciences. Heidegger also asserts that the Mathematical interpretation of the world is not a fundamental, and it must be replaced with phenomenological interpretation, which clarifies the ontological foundation of the theoretical view, and regards to all aspects of world’s existence. In this... 

In this thesis we review different approaches to the theory of value laden technology and realize that there are at least two major ideas about this. Some philosophers believe that technology is not a mere instrument and has a value laden nature. In contrast some others count technology as something neutral which contains no social or moral value. After explaining this ideas, in the second chapter we examine different models which explain the relation between technology and moral and social values and show how this values can contribute in design and use of technologies. In chapter three we talk about different methods used to steer technology in a desirable way which is in accordance with... 

Let Σ be a connected orientable surface of finite type. Due to Nielsen and Thurston’s classification, it is known that any element of the mapping class group of Σ is periodic, reducible, or (exclusively) pseudo-Anosov. Thus it is natural to form a random walk on the mapping class group with a step distribution and ask about the asymptotic distribution of the location of the random walk on each of the mentioned classes. Joseph Maher has proved that if the group generated by the support of is a non-elementary subgroup of the mapping class group, then the random walk will encounter a pseudo-Anosov element with asymptotic probability one. Indeed, this result not only concerns random walks on...