• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
• /
• no.125
• /
• pp.63-89
• /
• 2019

The aim of this paper is to examine the so-called theory of automatic action attributed to Plotinus, according to which the sage can act automatically without deliberation or reasoning. Concerns were raised that such a theory runs the risk of turning the agent into an automaton by reducing action to mechanical reflexes to external stimuli. I attempt to show that Plotinus does not hold a theory of automatic action by arguing that the Plotinian sage's non-deliberative action is not automatic at all. For this purpose, I first draw attention to the non-deliberative action of the World-Reason (i.e. the reason of the World-Soul), which is supposed to present an ideal model of action. Indeed, Plotinus mentions that the World-Reason rules the world "as if automatically". This is, however, meant to indicate the spontaneous and natural manner in which the World-Reason rules. In this respect, the way the World-Reason works is compared to the way nature (i.e. the productive power of the World-Soul) works. But Plotinus points out that the World-Reason knows what to do, whereas nature works without knowing. In this connection, Plotinus makes it clear that the World-Reason does not calculate or deliberate about what to do because it already knows it. To clarify this point, I turn to Plotinus' analogy of practical wisdom (phronêsis) and skill, according to which the World-Reason is compared to an accomplished craftsman or artist, who confidently works without any doubt, hesitation or difficulty, thereby expressing her intelligence, unmediated by deliberation. From this perspective, non-deliberative action according to practical wisdom turns out to be superior to deliberative action. Plotinus admits that there are difficult circumstances in which even the skilled craftsman, unlike the World-Reason who always controls the whole situation, needs to deliberate or calculate, but he is nevertheless confident that the craftsman easily finds the solution. This suggests that the sage, who possesses practical wisdom, can act normally like a great master or virtuoso without deliberation, but in an emergency situation he also employs deliberation, but resourcefully and creatively responds to challenge. The attempt is made to elucidate the Plotinian model of sage's action with the help of Csikzentmihalyi's concept of 'flow' and Annas' application of it to the analogy of virtue and skill. Finally, it is shown that the sage's virtuous action, in spite of being a habituated action, is not a passive, routinized, automatic action, but an active, flexible, intelligent action.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.23 no.3
• /
• pp.1-27
• /
• 2017

It is known that the economic sentiment index and macroeconomic indicators are closely related because economic agent's judgment and forecast of the business conditions affect economic fluctuations. For this reason, consumer sentiment or confidence provides steady fodder for business and is treated as an important piece of economic information. In Korea, private consumption accounts and consumer sentiment index highly relevant for both, which is a very important economic indicator for evaluating and forecasting the domestic economic situation. However, despite offering relevant insights into private consumption and GDP, the traditional approach to measuring the consumer confidence based on the survey has several limits. One possible weakness is that it takes considerable time to research, collect, and aggregate the data. If certain urgent issues arise, timely information will not be announced until the end of each month. In addition, the survey only contains information derived from questionnaire items, which means it can be difficult to catch up to the direct effects of newly arising issues. The survey also faces potential declines in response rates and erroneous responses. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to complement it. For this purpose, we construct and assess an index designed to measure consumer economic sentiment index using sentiment analysis. Unlike the survey-based measures, our index relies on textual analysis to extract sentiment from economic and financial news articles. In particular, text data such as news articles and SNS are timely and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. There exist two main approaches to the automatic extraction of sentiment from a text, we apply the lexicon-based approach, using sentiment lexicon dictionaries of words annotated with the semantic orientations. In creating the sentiment lexicon dictionaries, we enter the semantic orientation of individual words manually, though we do not attempt a full linguistic analysis (one that involves analysis of word senses or argument structure); this is the limitation of our research and further work in that direction remains possible. In this study, we generate a time series index of economic sentiment in the news. The construction of the index consists of three broad steps: (1) Collecting a large corpus of economic news articles on the web, (2) Applying lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis of each article to score the article in terms of sentiment orientation (positive, negative and neutral), and (3) Constructing an economic sentiment index of consumers by aggregating monthly time series for each sentiment word. In line with existing scholarly assessments of the relationship between the consumer confidence index and macroeconomic indicators, any new index should be assessed for its usefulness. We examine the new index's usefulness by comparing other economic indicators to the CSI. To check the usefulness of the newly index based on sentiment analysis, trend and cross - correlation analysis are carried out to analyze the relations and lagged structure. Finally, we analyze the forecasting power using the one step ahead of out of sample prediction. As a result, the news sentiment index correlates strongly with related contemporaneous key indicators in almost all experiments. We also find that news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity in most cases. In almost all experiments, the news sentiment index strongly correlates with related contemporaneous key indicators. Furthermore, in most cases, news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity; in head-to-head comparisons, the news sentiment measures outperform survey-based sentiment index as CSI. Policy makers want to understand consumer or public opinions about existing or proposed policies. Such opinions enable relevant government decision-makers to respond quickly to monitor various web media, SNS, or news articles. Textual data, such as news articles and social networks (Twitter, Facebook and blogs) are generated at high-speeds and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. Although research using unstructured data in economic analysis is in its early stages, but the utilization of data is expected to greatly increase once its usefulness is confirmed.