Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the Antigone Family Romance

This essay discusses the implications of Irigaray's readings of the Antigone in the construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray's eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, 1 emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of new models of intersubjectivity.     

Andromeda Freed From Her Chains

Minds for the Making: The Role of Science in American Education, 1750–1990, by Scott L. Montgomery, New York: The Guilford Press, 1994, pb, $18.95.     

Predicting garden path sentences

This work is an investigation into part of the human sentence parsing mechanism (HSPM). The major test of the psychological validity of any model of the HSPM is that it fail on precisely those sentences that humans find to be garden paths. It is hypothesized that the HSPM consists of at least two processes. We call the first process the syntactic processor, and the second will be known as the semantic processor. It is hypothesized that the syntactic processor is unconscious, deterministic and fast, but limited. While most ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information, when the syntactic processor can no longer guarantee a correct analysis, semantic information is used to help resolve the ambiguity. This model leads to a better prediction and explanation of which sentences will cause people to garden path.     

Syntactic structure and the garden path

The experiment investigated locally ambiguous English sentences containing “complement” verbs such as believe, which can be followed either by a direct object or by a complement clause. These two sentence types were compared with unambiguous sentences in which the complement clause was introduced by the word that. Subjects processed numerous examples of these sentences in a word-by-word self-paced reading task. At the disambiguation point after the ambiguous noun phrase, longer reading times were obtained for reduced complement constructions compared with direct object sentences. Such an effect has been attributed to the operation of the parsing principle Minimal Attachment (Frazier and Rayner, 1982). This principle predicts that subjects assume falsely that the noun phrase after the complement verb in the reduced complement constructions is the direct object, resulting in the need for subsequent structural reanalysis. However, longer times in the disambiguating zone were also found for the unambiguous that complements. Thus, the complexity difference seems not to represent “garden-pathing” as a result of the operation of Minimal Attachment, but may instead reflect the extra complexity caused by having to handle two sets of clausal relations instead of just one.     

A Woman'S Voice As Her Life Changes

Our innate capacity for voice is with us from the beginnings of life. The concept of voice is a complex issue rooted in the core of the self. Once we become aware of ourselves, we realize our capacity for self-expression. Self-expression is part of the cooperative network of communication between the self and others as we share emotions, thoughts, and ideas. Voice facilitates a connection between the world of one individual and the world of another. The purpose of this article was to explore and discover the processes, influences, attitudes and beliefs that affect a woman's ability to define her menopausal voice. A woman's voice expresses her knowledge, set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices in the form of language. Voice becomes a manifestation of the essence of self, and when listened to, breaks the silence of non-existence. A menopausal woman's voice is the voice that expresses the entirety of her existence at that particular stage in life. Post-menopausal women were asked to define their menopausal voices. They were interviewed in depth and their information was collected through semi-structured interviews. This approach used a qualitative methodology with a focus on meaning of their voices rather than measurement. The format was narrative research using life stories and thematic analysis. As a result, five themes: The Voice of Wisdom, The Voice of Aging, The Voice of relationship, The Voice of Spirit, and the Voice of Knowledge emerged after analyzing the women's stories. Each theme represents the complexities that influenced the participants’ competence to ascribe meaning to their voices. This article identifies the meanings that menopausal women associated with the concept of voice and how it changed during menopause.     

女儿给父亲交退党申请书

说服老母亲由佛教徒转为基督教的宝贝女儿(注),十多年过去了,如今已近老年,徐娘半老,丰韵犹存。她是一个坚定而虔诚的基督徒。她深信,祷告能治病,忏悔可免罪,即便有否定的例子也不动摇。由于虔诚的笃信,似乎她已从教徒升为神职人员。她不仅自己祷告,还经常给教徒宣讲。她讲的除了圣经有关段落外,还经常反复强调几点:1.世间万物都有一定的归属,而人的所有权属于上帝,人的最大价值是上帝的殿,让上帝居住,来荣耀上帝,也就是说,听上帝的话,供上帝使用。2.上帝就是耶稣,耶稣就是上帝,要感谢主,愿主耶稣与我们永远同在!3.我们中国,就是上帝所预备…     

Semantic re-interpretation and garden path recovery

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the syntactic reanalysis was largely localised to the disambiguating region, with difficulty due to semantic persistence occurring later. The results show that semantic persistence is not limited to extreme cases of parse failure, and can occur even when reanalysis is relatively straightforward.     

The Pregnant Client: Understanding and Counseling Her

To help the pregnant client manage her transition to motherhood, counselors need to understand and to build on the normal psychological changes of pregnancy.     

The Executive Manager and His or Her Organisation

Thoughts based on an inquiry and on experiences from my practice as a consultant, manager and company executive.     

Incompatibilism and the garden of forking paths

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the laws of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom.     

Karen Horney: A Bibliography of Her Writings

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

The diagnosis and cure of garden paths

We propose that, for the human parser, recovery from garden paths consists in repairing the structure built so far, rather than reparsing the input. The difficulty of a repair is attributable not to the cost of effecting the structural alterations but to the cost of deducing which alterations are needed. The parser must diagnose its error in order to correct it. The error is signaled by an input word that is incompatible with the current structure; this is the symptom from which the diagnosis must be made. If the error is transparently clear from the nature of the symptom, recovery is easy; but sometimes the necessary reasoning is obscure, and then the diagnosis is unsuccessful and the garden path persists. Unlike other repair models, the diagnosis model needs no special mechanism for revising garden path analyses. The garden path recovery device is the same machine as the first-pass parser, merely set into emergency mode. When faced with a breakdown the parser does not stop its normal activities and enter a new mode of reasoning to detect what went wrong. It simply continues to parse, attaching the problematic input item in the least ungrammatical way it can, despite the conflict with previously built structure. This conflict is productive; it provokes adjustments to the existing structure. In successful cases, one adjustment leads to another until a stable state is reached, at which point the original error will have been eliminated. Examples suggest that the parser gives more weight to syntatctic than to pragmatic acceptability; only a syntactic clash between the input and the existing structure sets the adjustment process in motion.