A comparison of the effects of vicariously instigated classical conditioning and direct classical conditioning procedures

Two groups of Ss received either two or 16 paired classical conditioning trials beyond the peak CR. A third group received the same stimuli as in the 16 postpeak condition but in an unpaired and random order. The stimuli in all three groups were delivered directly to S. Subsequently, all three groups, including a fourth which was not given any prior direct classical conditioning, were exposed to vicariously instigated classical conditioning. This consisted of havingS observe someone (model) employed byE who received the same CS as was delivered during direct conditioning. The CS was paired with the feigned arm movement of the model, simulating a reaction to shock. This vicarious classical conditioning procedure when compared to direct classical conditioning resulted in smaller GSR magnitudes for both the CRs and UCRs. Previous experience with direct classical conditioning seems to have had an attenuating effect on GSR magnitude during the vicarious situation. A postexperimental questionnaire tended to support the results, and the relationship between the present study and current classical conditioning theory is discussed.     

The allure of connectionism reexamined

There is currently a debate over whether cognitive architecture is classical or connectionist in nature. One finds the following three comparisons between classical architecture and connectionist architecture made in the pro-connectionist literature in this debate: (1) connectionist architecture is neurally plausible and classical architecture is not; (2) connectionist architecture is far better suited to model pattern recognition capacities than is classical architecture; and (3) connectionist architecture is far better suited to model the acquisition of pattern recognition capacities by learning than is classical architecture. If true, (1)–(3) would yield a compelling case against the view that cognitive architecture is classical, and would offer some reason to think that cognitive architecture may be connectionist. We first present the case for (1)–(3) in the very words of connectionist enthusiasts. We then argue that the currently available evidence fails to support any of (1)–(3).     

Vagueness-Adaptive Logic: A Pragmatical Approach to Sorites Paradoxes

Kripke-completeness of every classical modal logic with Sahlqvist formulas is one of the basic general results on completeness of classical modal logics. This paper shows a Sahlqvist theorem for modal logic over the relevant logic Bin terms of Routley-Meyer semantics. It is shown that usual Sahlqvist theorem for classical modal logics can be obtained as a special case of our theorem.     

Phenomenal conservatism, classical foundationalism, and internalist justification

In “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism” (2007), “Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist Intuition” (2006), and Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001), Michael Huemer endorses the principle of phenomenal conservatism, according to which appearances or seemings constitute a fundamental source of (defeasible) justification for belief. He claims that those who deny phenomenal conservatism, including classical foundationalists, are in a self-defeating position, for their views cannot be both true and justified; that classical foundationalists have difficulty accommodating false introspective beliefs; and that phenomenal conservatism is most faithful to the central internalist intuition. I argue that Huemer’s self-defeat argument fails, that classical foundationalism is able to accommodate fallible introspective beliefs, and that classical foundationalism has no difficulty accommodating a relatively clear internalist intuition. I also show that the motivation for phenomenal conservatism is less than clear.     

Against classical dialetheism

Dialetheism is the view that there are true contradictions. Classical dialetheism holds further the view that the law of excluded middle is indeed a logical law. Most famous dialetheists, such as G. Priest and J. Beall, are classical dialetheists; they take classical dialetheism to be the only plausible solution to the semantic paradoxes. The main contention of the paper is, however, that their views should be rejected. Based on inspecting Priest’s and Beall’s dialetheist theories from a special perspective, this paper contends that classical dialetheism has no natural and plausible way to assign truth values to various truth-ineliminable sentences, i.e., sentences whose truth-conditions essentially involve the property of being true. Several examples of such truth-ineliminable sentences are given in the paper, and two classical dialetheist strategies for assigning them truth values are inspected. This paper argues that none of these strategies is successful.     

Making space for India in post-apartheid South Africa: Narrating diasporic subjectivities through classical song and dance

Background/purposeDiasporic associations and hometown groups fuel transnational exchanges and circulations. Their role has mostly been understood in terms of broader calculative agendas related to ethnic and national cultural politics. In South Africa, classical Indian singers, dancers and instrumentalists are an important part of these transnational landscapes. This paper focuses on the individual actors giving shape to these flows, and explores how a range of subjectivities is entangled with the materialities and forces present in classical performance spaces.Methods and resultsDrawing on fieldwork in Durban, South Africa, it explores how, and why organising actors assemble the matter of classical performance spaces. The paper also explores interconnections to Bollywood as another emergent diasporic site both in tension and accord with classical Indian performances.ConclusionDrawing from a feminist social practice approach, this paper argues that diaspora associational life is assembled through agents negotiating different gaps and discrepancies arising from the material and affective inhabitation of diasporic worlds.     

Unified Interpretation of Quantum and Classical Logics

Quantum logic is only applicable to microscopic phenomena while classical logic is exclusively used for everyday reasoning, including mathematics. It is shown that both logics are unified in the framework of modal interpretation. This proposed method deals with classical propositions as latently modalized propositions in the sense that they exhibit manifest modalities to form quantum logic only when interacting with other classical subsystems.     

Semantics without Truth in Later Mohist Philosophy of Language

In this paper, I examine the concept of truth in classical Chinese philosophy, beginning with a critical examination of Chad Hansen’s claim that it has no such concept. By using certain passages that emphasize analogous concepts in the philosophy of language of the Later Mohist Canons, I argue that while there is no word in classical Chinese that functions as truth generally does in Western philosophy for grammatical reasons, the Later Mohists were certainly working with a notion of semantic adequacy in which a language-to-world relationship is made an object of investigation, challenging Hansen’s position that classical Chinese functions within a primarily pragmatic linguistic framework in which a language-to-user relationship determines the meaning of words.     

The Logics of Strict-Tolerant Logic

Adding a transparent truth predicate to a language completely governed by classical logic is not possible. The trouble, as is well-known, comes from paradoxes such as the Liar and Curry. Recently, Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij have put forward an approach based on a non-transitive notion of consequence which is suitable to deal with semantic paradoxes while having a transparent truth predicate together with classical logic. Nevertheless, there are some interesting issues concerning the set of metainferences validated by this logic. In this paper, we show that this logic, once it is adequately understood, is weaker than classical logic. Moreover, the logic is in a way similar to the paraconsistent logic LP.     

Experimental Proposal for Testing the Emergence of Environment Induced (EIN) Classical Selection Rules with Biological Systems

According to the so-called Quantum Darwinist approach, the emergence of “classical islands” from a quantum background is assumed to obey a (selection) principle of maximal information. We illustrate this idea by considering the coupling of two oscillators (modes). As our approach suggests that the classical limit could have emerged throughout a long and progressive Evolution mechanism, it is likely that primitive living organisms behave in a “more quantum”, “less classical” way than more evolved ones. This brings us to seriously consider the possibility to measure departures from classicality exhibited by biological systems. We describe an experimental proposal the aimed at revealing the presence of entanglement in the biophotonic radiation emitted by biological sources.     

A systematic analysis of distressing near-death experience accounts

ABSTRACT

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are usually associated with positive affect, however, a small proportion are considered distressing. We aimed to look into the proportion of distressing NDEs in a sample of NDE narratives, categorise distressing narratives according to Greyson and Bush’s classification (inverse, void or hellish), and compare distressing and “classical” NDEs. Participants wrote down their experience, completed the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (assessing the phenomenology of memories) and the Greyson scale (characterising content of NDEs). The proportion of suicidal attempts, content and intensity of distressing and classical NDEs were compared using frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Distressing NDEs represent 14% of our sample (n?=?123). We identified 8 inverse, 8 hellish and 1 void accounts. The proportion of suicide survivors is higher in distressing NDEs as compared to classical ones. Finally, memories of distressing NDEs appear as phenomenologically detailed as classical ones. Distressing NDEs deserve careful consideration to ensure their integration into experiencers’ identity.     

Dissuasion as a Rhetorical Technique of Creating a General Disposition to Inaction

In this paper, it is argued that the classical rhetorical framework undergoes a transformation because of an important change in Western thought. Following this hypothesis, I analyze a rhetorical notion of “dissuasion” as a rhetorical technique of creating a “general disposition to inaction” in addition to a classical rhetorical notion of “dissuasion” that aims at “refraining from an action”.     

The classical limit of quantum theory

Both physicists and philosophers claim that quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics as 0, that classical mechanics is a limiting case of quantum mechanics. If so, several formal and non-formal conditions must be satisfied. These conditions are satisfied in a reduction using the Wigner transformation to map quantum mechanics onto the classical phase plane. This reduction does not, however, assist in providing an adequate metaphysical interpretation of quantum theory.Earlier versions of this essay received helpful criticism from Bruce Knight, Clark Glymour, and Donald Martin.     

How I Become a Psychoanalyst

In this essay, I focus on how my personal history contributed to my choosing to become a psychoanalyst, what I then encountered and the choices I made professionally, and the issue of being “inside” versus “outside” the classical tradition. In this context, I describe some of the political conditions that prevented Ph.D.'s from being able to be trained as analysts within the classical tradition during those years. I also describe how the training I received outside the classical tradition actually was much broader than what would have been offered within it and how it allowed for a level of intellectual freedom and critical thinking about traditional ways of working that would not have been possible in the classical institutes. I also describe briefly how I began developing the concept of working at the “intimate edge” in the analytic relationship, which I first began writing about in 1974 and which is detailed most fully in my 1992 book, The Intimate Edge: Extending the Reach of Psychoanalytic Interaction, and in several subsequent publications (Ehrenberg, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2003).     

Is behaviorism false because there is no such thing as conditioning? Popper and skinner on learning

Sir Karl Popper has claimed that behaviorism is misguided because it holds that conditioning occurs through repetition. According to Popper, there is no such thing as learning through repetition. To the limited extent that philosophers of science have concerned themselves with behaviorism, this attack is one of the most direct and unique in that the battleground is not over the value of mentalism/cognitivism but a bold claim that conditioning—the heart and soul of behaviorism—is fictitious. This paper examines the soundness of Popper's argument against behaviorism by examining whether operant and classical conditioning rely on learning through repetition and suffer from other problems Popper attributes to the notion of conditioning. Although Popper correctly attributes certain properties to classical conditioning, he fails to undermine the empirical evidence that such conditioning occurs. Second, we claim that although B. F. Skinner is never entirely clear, operant conditioning does not rely on repetition nor does it suffer from the other problems Popper attributes to conditioning. Thus, Popper's argument also fails because of his assumption that all conditioning is classical conditioning and therefore his misattributing properties of classical conditioning to operant conditioning. We conjecture that the earlier polemics of John Watson and Watson's sole reliance on classical conditioning probably contributed to Popper's confusion on this point.     

What Assertion Doesn't Show

Abstract: Some recent arguments against the classical invariantist account of knowledge exploit the idea that there is a ‘knowledge norm’ for assertion. It is claimed that, given the existence of this norm, certain intuitions about assertability support contextualism, or contrastivism, over classical invariantism. In this paper I show that, even if we accept the existence of a knowledge norm, these assertability‐based arguments fail. The classical invariantist can accommodate and explain the relevant intuitions about assertability, in a way that retains the idea that knowledge is the epistemic norm for assertion. When we consider the role of assertion as a conversational act, it becomes plausible that a subject's epistemic warrant to assert can be defeated even though she has knowledge. This defeasibility thesis is what allows the classical invariantist to accommodate and explain the kinds of intuitions on which assertability‐based arguments depend.     

Can Planck's constant be measured with classical mechanics?

An interesting case of the complex interaction between theory and experiment can be found in many experiments in quantum physics employing classical reasoning. It is expected that this practice would lead to quantitative inaccuracy, unless the measurements’ results were averaged. Whether or not this inaccuracy is significant depends critically on the details of the particular experimental situation. The example of Millikan's photoelectric experiment, in which he obtained a precise value of Planck's constant, provides a good case for illustrating the process of estimating the inaccuracy resulting from the classical‐quantum discrepancy. In the case of Millikan's experiment, it seems that a significant inaccuracy was avoided because of fortunate coincidences. In general, in the absence of a careful analysis, it is impossible to say whether the use of classical reasoning interferes with the accuracy of a quantum‐physical experiment.     

Arnold W. Brunner and the new classical synagogue in America

Arnold W. Brunner (1857–1925), Albert Kahn (1869–1942), and other Jewish architects played an important role in reviving the classical style for American synagogue design at the turn of the twentieth century, putting their stamp on American Jewish identity and American architecture. The American-born Brunner was the preferred architect of New York’s Jewish establishment from the 1880s until his death. He adopted the classical style with his third New York synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel, dedicated in 1897, and then championed the style in his extensive public writing about synagogue design. The classical style was subsequently widely accepted nationally by Reform congregations, especially in the South and Midwest. Classicism was a mediating device, and served as a new emblem of religious and civic identity. Mixing a variety of architectural and cultural traditions, Jewish architects and their patrons created a bridge between Judaism—or Jewishness—and Americanism.