Papers by Oseni Taiwo Afisi
Al-Hikmat: A Journal of Philosophy, 2023
To evaluate Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner's edited volume, Karl Popper: After the Open ... more To evaluate Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner's edited volume, Karl Popper: After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings (2008), I seek to examine what Katrina Forrester saw as Popper's "later" views, and how this would deflect the central idea of liberalism expressed by Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism. Forrester's assertion suggests that the views expressed by Popper in After the Open Society appear more towards neoliberalism, and that Popper's membership of the Mont Pélerin Society alongside Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in promoting free market, openness, and individual freedom, set him comfortably within the framework of classical liberalism and market fundamentalism. To appreciate Popper's liberal political philosophy, one only needs to come to a high level of understanding and a good appreciation of the values inherent in The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism by evaluating his liberal worldview in the context of Popper's critical rationalism. The primary goal of this essay is to show that Forrester' scategorization of the 'later' Popper as a neoliberal is incorrect. Popper's ideas were strictly liberal, but they impacted the development of neoliberal ideas. In placing Popper properly within the realm of liberals, what is required is to understand that Popper's liberal concepts as articulated in all five versions of The Open Society and its Enemies, and the two editions of The Poverty of Historicism serve quite well his liberal outlooks.
Social Science Research Network, 2023
Heliyon
Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others have been used as tools ... more Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others have been used as tools for staging protests, opinion polls, campaign strategy, medium of agitation and a place of interest expression especially during elections. Aim: In this work, a Natural Language Processing framework is designed to understand Nigeria 2023 presidential election based on public opinion using Twitter dataset. Methods: Two million tweets with 18 features were collected from Twitter containing public and personal tweets of the three top contestants-Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Bola Tinubuin the forthcoming 2023 Presidential election. Sentiment analysis was performed on the preprocessed dataset using three machine learning models namely: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Linear Support Vector Classifier (LSVC) models. This study spanned ten weeks starting from the candidates' declaration of intent to run for Presidency. Results: The sentiment models gave an accuracy, precision, recall, AUC and f-measure of 88%, 82.7%, 87.2%, 87.6% and 82.9% respectively for LSTM; 94%, 88.5%, 92.5%, 94.7% and 91.7% respectively for BERT and 73%, 81.4%, 76.4%, 81.2% and 79.2% respectively for LSVC. Result also showed that Peter Obi has the highest total impressions the highest positive sentiments, Tinubu has the highest network of active friends while Atiku has the highest number of followers. Conclusion: Sentiment analysis and other Natural Language Understanding tasks can aid in the understanding of the social media space in terms of public opinion mining. We conclude that opinion mining from Twitter can form a general basis for generating insights for election as well as modeling election outcomes.
Analytics, 2023
Introduction: Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the deadliest and most common causes of malignancy ... more Introduction: Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the deadliest and most common causes of malignancy and death in men worldwide, with a higher prevalence and mortality in developing countries specifically. Factors such as age, family history, race and certain genetic mutations are some of the factors contributing to the occurrence of PCa in men. Recent advances in technology and algorithms gave rise to the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of PCa. With the availability of medical image datasets and emerging trends in state-of-the-art machine and deep learning techniques, there has been a growth in recent related publications. Materials and Methods: In this study, we present a systematic review of PCa diagnosis with medical images using machine learning and deep learning
techniques. We conducted a thorough review of the relevant studies indexed in four databases (IEEE, PubMed, Springer and ScienceDirect) using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. With well-defined search terms, a total of 608 articles were identified, and 77 met the final inclusion criteria. The key elements in the included papers are presented and conclusions are drawn from them. Results: The findings show that the United States has the most research in PCa diagnosis with machine learning, Magnetic Resonance Images are the most used datasets and transfer learning is the most used method of diagnosing PCa in recent times. In addition, some available PCa datasets and some key considerations for the choice of loss function in the deep learning models are presented. The limitations and lessons learnt are discussed, and some key recommendations are made. Conclusion: The discoveries and the conclusions of this work are organized so as to enable researchers in the same domain to use this work and make crucial
implementation decisions.
Journal of Philosophical Investigations, 2023
This paper examines the liberal society that Popper lauds, that aims to be truly open, and discus... more This paper examines the liberal society that Popper lauds, that aims to be truly open, and discusses why another, more communitarian kind of society, particularly societies in Africa, may also reflect the quest for intellectual openness that is Popper's ideal. Moreover, this paper avers reasons why Popper should be comfortable with such a liberal-communitarian mix. The inter-subjectivity in his critical rationalism is a balance of an explicit individualism, and an implicit social element (Afisi, 2016a). Popper is indeed an author of such a balance. For a society to be truly open requires the careful recognition and protection of individual freedom. However, the extent to which individuals are free to perform actions that they desire without external constraints, and the level of their individuality in relation to others when performing such actions, remain a contentious issue between liberals and more communitarian thinkers. Popper's critical rationalism provides the necessary impetus to this contention through his view of freedom that I contend can best be viewed as carefully balanced, a view which combines individuality with a social element that upholds community values necessary for openness of society. With this combination, Popper's politics of liberalism provides an effective model of how a truly open society can be achieved. The values inherent to Popper's liberalism including those concerning intellectual openness, individual freedom, mutual respect, measured selfrespect, welfarism, humanitarianism, accountability, critical debates and feedback from the citizens, together concern the conditions for a society to be truly open. There are many competing thoughts as to what openness might be in Popper's philosophy. The present study of Popper does not presume to address them all. The focus here is specifically on using Popper's idea of critical rationalism to balance relations between liberal politics of individual rights and freedom, and communitarian politics of the common good, as it relates to situations about how socioeconomic and political conditions in Africa societies should be structured. While I contend that Popper's works in political philosophy focused centrally on Western political tradition, and not about Africa in its strict sense, significant lessons can be distilled from Popper that can offer suggestions on social reforms in Africa. This paper explores Popper's project of the open society across the plurality and differences of societies, so that his liberal ideas of individual freedom are not undermined, and the progress of the communitarian idea of the common good, that Africa societies are built upon, is also well enhanced. Liberal individualism and community values inherent to communitarianism are both well accommodated within Popper's critical rationalism.
Election outcomes have been predicted in the past with the help of various state-of-the-art langu... more Election outcomes have been predicted in the past with the help of various state-of-the-art language models. Sentiment analysis helps in establishing the opinions of the public about a particular subject, a popular experiment known as opinion mining. Twitter has grown in popularity and proven to be a key tool in mining people’s sentiments concerning election and other trending subjects of interest. The outcome of the just concluded Presidential election in Nigeria shifts the focus on Lagos State governorship election. In this study, we propose a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model for the sentiment analysis of governorship election in Lagos State Nigeria using Twitter data. A total of 800,000 personal and public tweets were scraped from twitter concerning the three prominent contesting candidates using carefully selected search queries. The tweets were preprocessed to avoid noise and inconsistencies. The preprocessed tweets were passed into the pretr...
Introduction: Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others have been ... more Introduction: Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others have been used as a tool for staging protests, opinion polls, campaign strategy, medium of agitation and a place of interest expression especially during elections. Past studies have established people’s opinion elections using social media posts. The advent of state-of-the-art algorithms for unstructured text processing implies tremendous progress in natural language processing and understanding. Aim: In this work, a Natural Language framework is designed to understand Nigeria 2023 presidential election based on public opinion using Twitter dataset. Methods: Raw datasets concerning discourse around Nigeria 2023 elections from Twitter of 2,059,113 18 dimensions were collected. Sentiment analysis was performed on the preprocessed dataset using three different machine learning models namely: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transforme...
Journal of Advanced Research in Social Sciences, 2023
Many cutting-edge language models have been used in the past to forecast election results. Sentim... more Many cutting-edge language models have been used in the past to forecast election results. Sentiment analysis aids in opinion mining – a common experiment used to detect public opinions – on a given topic. Twitter has gained popularity and established itself as a crucial instrument for analyzing public opinion on elections and other trending issues. The unexpected but interesting results of recently held Nigeria's presidential election shifted attention to the upcoming governorship race in Lagos State. In this work, we propose a Google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model for the sentiment analysis of governorship election in Lagos State, Nigeria, using Twitter data. A total of 800,000 personal and public tweets were scraped from twitter concerning the three prominent contesting Lagos State Gubernatorial candidates using carefully selected search queries. The tweets were preprocessed to avoid noise and inconsistencies and the preprocessed tweets were parsed into the pre-trained and finetuned BERT model. The result was analyzed to establish the sentiments of the public about the candidates. The social networks of the candidates were also presented and the effect of parameter using different learning rates (LR) was also considered. The BERT model achieved the maximum performance under varied learning rate and epoch sizes of 88% precision, 92% recall and 91% F1-Measure. Results also showed that the learning rate at 1e-7 gave the best performance. Also, the smaller the learning rate, the higher the accuracy but the larger the epoch size, the higher the accuracy. Applying the developed BERT model to the public’s tweet showed that the election will be a two-party race between the Labour Party and All Progressives Congress party, thereby challenging the status quo. The results of the experiment demonstrated that sentiment analysis and other Natural Language Processing activities can help with comprehension of the social media environment. Results also showed how much influence each candidate has over the outcome of the election. We come to the conclusion that estimating election results and providing insights for electoral parties can benefit from sentiment analysis and other language models.
Heliyon, 2023
Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others have been used as tools ... more Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others have been used as tools for staging protests, opinion polls, campaign strategy, medium of agitation and a place of interest expression especially during elections. Aim: In this work, a Natural Language Processing framework is designed to understand Nigeria 2023 presidential election based on public opinion using Twitter dataset. Methods: Two million tweets with 18 features were collected from Twitter containing public and personal tweets of the three top contestants-Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Bola Tinubuin the forthcoming 2023 Presidential election. Sentiment analysis was performed on the preprocessed dataset using three machine learning models namely: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Linear Support Vector Classifier (LSVC) models. This study spanned ten weeks starting from the candidates' declaration of intent to run for Presidency. Results: The sentiment models gave an accuracy, precision, recall, AUC and f-measure of 88%, 82.7%, 87.2%, 87.6% and 82.9% respectively for LSTM; 94%, 88.5%, 92.5%, 94.7% and 91.7% respectively for BERT and 73%, 81.4%, 76.4%, 81.2% and 79.2% respectively for LSVC. Result also showed that Peter Obi has the highest total impressions the highest positive sentiments, Tinubu has the highest network of active friends while Atiku has the highest number of followers. Conclusion: Sentiment analysis and other Natural Language Understanding tasks can aid in the understanding of the social media space in terms of public opinion mining. We conclude that opinion mining from Twitter can form a general basis for generating insights for election as well as modeling election outcomes.
Looking beyond the received view of Popper's form of liberalism, according to which Popper... more Looking beyond the received view of Popper's form of liberalism, according to which Popper's liberalism is informed by altogether individualistic principles, and studying instead or in addition a dimension of Popper's liberalism which is social in nature, I argue that Popper achieves a balanced understanding both of the nature of freedom and what is involved in order to protect freedom. I extend this discussion, in order to consider the theoretical basis upon which societies that are non-liberal in nature can learn important lessons from Popper given the balance in his position on liberal thought. Such non-liberal societies are in their communitarian orientation not on that account untouched by Popper's insights. On the contrary, in arguing that Popper's own philosophy was trending towards a liberal-communitarian one, by emphasising the social dimension of liberalism, and by justifying my arguments with theories of the social character of the self and the social ...
Karl Popper and Africa: Knowledge, Politics and Development, 2021
This book was inadvertently published with the funder acknowledgment excluded in chapters 4 and 1... more This book was inadvertently published with the funder acknowledgment excluded in chapters 4 and 15. The correction has now been incorporated by including the "Acknowledgments" in both the chapters.
Philosophy study, 2013
This paper reviews and adds to previous arguments for the thesis that Karl Popper was mistaken t... more This paper reviews and adds to previous arguments for the thesis that Karl Popper was mistaken to have rejected hypothetico-deductive confirmation. By turning from the positive idea of verification to the negative idea of criticism, Popper believed that he had turned his back on induction. He believed he had “solved” the “problem of induction” by providing a non-inductive account of corroboration. Popper used the term “corroboration” rather than confirmation which he believed was too closely allied to the notion of the inductive or probabilistic support that a theory can receive from evidence. Wesley Salmon’s (1967) “concept of confirming evidence” and Clark Glymour’s (1980) “bootstrap conception of evidence for theory” both defended respectively the thesis that passed tests can be confirmed by evidence or warranted by the degree of probability. Using a sequence of symbols in logical form or analysis, I shall further defend the concept to hypothetico-deductive confirmation in order...
European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 2012
This paper adds to much existing knowledge of reasons to be pluralist about science and its metho... more This paper adds to much existing knowledge of reasons to be pluralist about science and its methods. The pluralism that I defend rebuts Karl Popper and some other philosophers, such as the early logical positivists, who contend (actually, often simply assume) that there are universal procedures, laws or methods that are defining of science, and so are applicable to all fields of scientific enquiry. Philosophers like Stephen Kellert and Helen Longino have defended respectively the thesis of pluralism about occidental science and the related thesis that its epistemologies (in the plural) are “local” not only within cognitive geography at a time but also historically. Building on this, I move further in this paper to defend a cross-cultural epistemic pluralism, broadening the idea of local epistemologies so that it concerns as well inquiry concerning the world in systematic indigenous societies.
This paper adds to much existing knowledge of reasons to be pluralist about science and its metho... more This paper adds to much existing knowledge of reasons to be pluralist about science and its methods. The pluralism that I defend rebuts Karl Popper and some other philosophers, such as the early logical positivists, who contend (actually, often simply assume) that there are universal procedures, laws or methods that are defining of science, and so are applicable to all fields of scientific enquiry. Philosophers like Stephen Kellert and Helen Longino have defended respectively the thesis of pluralism about occidental science and the related thesis that its epistemologies (in the plural) are "local" not only within cognitive geography at a time but also historically. Building on this, I move further in this paper to defend a crosscultural epistemic pluralism, broadening the idea of local epistemologies so that it concerns as well inquiry concerning the world in systematic indigenous societies.
Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy, 2018
Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia, 2020
While Karl Popper highly valued the ability to invent a bold new form of theoretical thought, he ... more While Karl Popper highly valued the ability to invent a bold new form of theoretical thought, he warned us at the same time of the need to be cautious in action. Ambitions that are utopian or revolutionary seemed to Popper always unacceptable. We must always be open to reforming our practices, but we must attempt this slowly and piecemeal. Every change that we make we must hold open to criticism. However, change must be conservative and anti-revolutionary. This is the demand that while any one element of current culture may be criticised and rejected, it is important to do this work piecemeal and carefully. Only then does the audacity or boldness of rejecting a seemingly settled view amount to courage: for it reflects also significant conservation of values. Popper regarded no social change or scientific breakthrough as revolutionary. Even the process of conjecture and refutation, of trial and error, is a piecemeal method. Popper’s piecemeal method depicts Otto Neurath’s metaphor of...
Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions, 2016
The general character of science and the methodology it employs are in specific terms referred to... more The general character of science and the methodology it employs are in specific terms referred to as observation and experimentation. These two methodologies reflect how science differs from other systematic modes of inquiries. This description characterises, strictly, 'Western science' and it is contrasted with the indigenous mode of enquiry that has come under the name, 'African science'. In contemporary scholarship, 'African science' is being condemned to the level of the mysticoreligious or supernaturalist worldview. 'African science' is said to be purely esoteric, personal, and devoid of elements of objectivity and rigorous theorization. In this paper, I reexamine this recondite issue by further reflecting and strengthening some of the ideas put forward by some African scholars to affirm that there is a distinct method of 'African science' that can be termed scientific. In defending a pluralist thesis toward knowledge, scientific inclusive, this paper posits that there exist varieties of inquiry beyond what has been developed in the 'West' which can still be justifiably termed scientific. In addition to pluralism, it argues further that the social character of science, which makes it a part of social and cultural traditions, qualifiedly justifies 'African science' as a true science. I will employ the newly formulated conversational method endorsed by the Conversational School of Philosophy (CSP) in this inquiry.
Understanding the true nature of the human being is no doubt a sine qua non for developing an ide... more Understanding the true nature of the human being is no doubt a sine qua non for developing an ideology for a desirable praxis. This paper examines the pitfalls of Marxist-Leninist scientific socialism and African socialism. It argues that a critical analysis of both ideologies reveals a lack of clear understanding of the nature of man by their proponents. An exhaustive account of the nature of man must explain self-consciousness, the urge to avoid pain, the desire for a purposeful life and for freedom from external interference, the passion for distinction, and, most importantly, the desire to acquire personal property. The paper further contends that socialism (whether scientific or African), does not allow room for the pursuit of personal ambition. This accounts for the failure in the implementation of both Marxist-Leninist socialism and African socialism. The paper avers that there is need to understand that the human being cannot simply be seen as a socio-economic or historical ...
The focus of this paper is to examine the problem of induction as a methodology for science. It a... more The focus of this paper is to examine the problem of induction as a methodology for science. It also evaluates Karl Popper’s deductive approach as the suitable methodology for scientific research. Popper calls his theory ‘hypothetico-deductive methodology’. However, this paper argues the thesis that Popper’s theory of hypothetico-deductive methodology, which he claims is the only appropriate methodology of science is fraught with some theoretical difficulties, which makes it unacceptable. Popper’s logical asymmetry between verification and falsification, we argue, is philosophically untenable. We argue the thesis for the complementarity of both inductive and deductive methodology in scientific investigation. This study seeks to establish the resonance of accepting both deductive and inductive reasoning as the basic methodologies upon which scientific research and discoveries proceed.
The reality of globalization in the world today, and the apparent benefits it has recorded in the... more The reality of globalization in the world today, and the apparent benefits it has recorded in the sphere of international economics, politics, social, educational liberalization and principally, science and technology are without doubt, overwhelming. But globalization is by no means a full proof error free ideology. Its negative impacts on the economic, political, educational and national cultures and values of most developing nations, particular Africa are of immense proportion. The concern of this paper is to philosophically examine the impact of globalization on African value system. The paper argues that globalization is not a problem but a challenge to Africa. African countries need not cry foul over globalization but need to stand up to the challenges it poses. The paper contends that African countries need to develop policies that are rooted in their cultural heritages, which can also be adopted by other cultures and societies of the world in order to have an encompassing as ...
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Papers by Oseni Taiwo Afisi
techniques. We conducted a thorough review of the relevant studies indexed in four databases (IEEE, PubMed, Springer and ScienceDirect) using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. With well-defined search terms, a total of 608 articles were identified, and 77 met the final inclusion criteria. The key elements in the included papers are presented and conclusions are drawn from them. Results: The findings show that the United States has the most research in PCa diagnosis with machine learning, Magnetic Resonance Images are the most used datasets and transfer learning is the most used method of diagnosing PCa in recent times. In addition, some available PCa datasets and some key considerations for the choice of loss function in the deep learning models are presented. The limitations and lessons learnt are discussed, and some key recommendations are made. Conclusion: The discoveries and the conclusions of this work are organized so as to enable researchers in the same domain to use this work and make crucial
implementation decisions.
techniques. We conducted a thorough review of the relevant studies indexed in four databases (IEEE, PubMed, Springer and ScienceDirect) using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. With well-defined search terms, a total of 608 articles were identified, and 77 met the final inclusion criteria. The key elements in the included papers are presented and conclusions are drawn from them. Results: The findings show that the United States has the most research in PCa diagnosis with machine learning, Magnetic Resonance Images are the most used datasets and transfer learning is the most used method of diagnosing PCa in recent times. In addition, some available PCa datasets and some key considerations for the choice of loss function in the deep learning models are presented. The limitations and lessons learnt are discussed, and some key recommendations are made. Conclusion: The discoveries and the conclusions of this work are organized so as to enable researchers in the same domain to use this work and make crucial
implementation decisions.