Some notes on the nature of methodological indeterminacy

This paper is an attempt to extend the meaning of the concept of indeterminacy for the human sciences. The authors do this by coining the term methodological indeterminacy and arguing that indeterminacy is better understood when linked to specific methodological techniques. Paradoxically, while specific research techniques demonstrate that the issue of indeterminacy is complex, yielding the possibility of types and degrees, it does not eliminate the problem of translation first raised by Quine. However, the authors go on to argue that, from a research perspective, indeterminacy can and must be approached in such a way that it is possible to reduce cases of it, even though never completely eliminating it in the human sciences.     

Kenneth Strike on Liberalism,Citizenship and the Private Interest in Schooling

After indicating a number of points of agreement with the argument 0eveloped by Kenneth Strike in his article Liberalism, Citizenship and the Private Interest in Schooling, this article identifies and explores a number of queries and criticisms which arise in relation to that argument. These queries and criticisms relate especially to the nature and extent of the expansiveness involved in Strike's conception of public or common educational influence, and to the implications and justification of the claim that private educational interests enjoy a greater salience and recognition on Strike's view of public or common educational influence than on some alternative views.     

Can Parts of Space Move? On Paragraph Six of Newton’s Scholium

Paragraph 6 of Newtons Scholium argues that the parts of space cannot move. A premise of the argument – that parts have individuality only through an order of position – has drawn distinguished modern support yet little agreement among interpretations of the paragraph. I argue that the paragraph offers an a priori, metaphysical argument for absolute motion, an argument which is invalid. That order of position is powerless to distinguish one part of Euclidean space from any other has gone virtually unremarked. It remains uncertain what the import of the paragraph is but it is not close to apparently similar arguments of Leibniz.     

Stuffed Cabbage in the Old New School Cafeteria

The purpose of this lecture is to celebrate the memory of Aron Gurwitsch by examining and enlarging the domain of phenomenological clarification of some elements of what Gurwitsch called the logic of reality. Chief among those elements are the nature of the taken-for-grantedness of our existential belief, the difference between presentive and non-presentive indices of reality and the ground for the self-illumination of the world of working.     

Metaphysics and the interpretation of persons: Davidson on thinking and Conceptual Schemes

Certain metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are shown to play a role in the defense of Davidson's claims that an empirically constructed theory of truth provides an adequate theory of meaning for any natural language. Dadivson puts forward demonstrative arguments in favor of these presuppositions in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Thought and Talk, and The Method of Truth in Metaphysics. These arguments are examined and found to include controversial and dubitable assumptions as premises. It is then suggested that both these controversial assumptions and Davidson's metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions can be partially defended, however, by dialectical, interpretive, and historical arguments that elucidate the nature of persons.     

Three views of demonstrative reference

Three views of demonstrative reference are examined: contextual, intentional, and quasi-intentional. According to the first, such reference is determined entirely by certain publicly accessible features of the context. According to the second, speaker intentions are criterial in demonstrative reference. And according to the third, both contextual features and intentions come into play in the determination of demonstrative reference. The first two views (both of which enjoy current popularity) are rejected as implausible; the third (originally proposed by Kaplan in Dthat) is argued to be highly plausible.     

The Weight of Context: Headscarves in Holland

This paper explores the potential of a contextual approach to multicultural conflict. It reconstructs two cases that were hotly debated in the Netherlands—Islamic headscarves for police officers and for court officers—and asks whether a contextual approach reaches compromises and thus promotes social stability more easily than a deductive approach. The argument is that a deductive approach accepts standing interpretations of normative principles, whereas a contextual approach reinterprets these principles in the light of the circumstances and that, whether or not it promotes social stability, a contextual approach makes us attend to otherwise neglected perspectives and thus yields greater normative insights.     

Listening to a different voice: A feminist critique of Gilligan

A critical examination of Carol Gilligan's study of psychological theory and women's development, this essay begins by exploring her concerns about malebiased developmental theorizing. I consider in detail Gilligan's criticisms of Sigmund Freud and her own empirical studies of moral development, as they relate to the work of L. Kohlberg. After defending Freud to some degree, I propose various (less theoretical but intuitively plausible) alternative interpretations of her data-interviews with males and females about hypothetical ethical dilemmas and with females about actual abortion decisions. I contend that Gilligan is too willing to concede the adequacy of Kohlberg's categories for fathoming the moral reasoning of males and that she may, in consequence, exaggerate differences between males and females. Noting the ironic similarities between Gilligan's claims and Schopenhauer's misogyny, I suggest that there may be something undesirably self-limiting about the different course of development she sketches. To move toward a morally preferable, feminism-compatible version of an ethic of care, I recommend that it be extended — by the imagination — beyond the here and now and that it not be restricted to existing webs of personal relationships.     

Socialism in One Country: A Reassessment

Until 1917 Lenin and Trotsky believed that an isolated revolutionary Russia would have no chance of survival. However, from 1917 to 1923 Lenin's standpoint on this matter underwent a complete reversal. First he came to the conclusion that socialism could be built in an isolated Russia, although it would remain incomplete in the absence of the world revolution. By 1923 he was abandoning that latter qualification too. The standpoint of Stalin and Bukharin in the debate on socialism in one country of 1925–26 was more orthodox-Leninist than the position taken by Trotsky, who had at first also embraced the notion of incomplete socialism, but subsequently returned to the old concept, abandoned by Lenin, that the restoration of capitalism was inevitable in the absence of the world revolution.     

Theor of free choice permission

I argue that the conjunctive distribution of permissibility over or, which is a puzzling feature of free-choice permission is just one instance of a more general class of conjunctive occurrences of the word, and that these conjunctive uses are more directly explicable by the consideration that or is a descendant of oper than by reference to the disjunctive occurrences which logicalist prejudices may tempt us to regard as semantically more fundamental. I offer an account of how the disjunctive uses of or may have come about through an intermediate discourse-adverbial use of or, drawing a parallel with but, which, etymologically, is disjunctive rather than conjunctive and whose conjunctive uses seem to represent just such a discourse-adverbial application.     

La Evolucion de la filosofia de Wittgenstein

Summary The author claims that there is a basic difference between theTractatus and thePhilosophical Investigations; despite Bernstein's and O'Brien's claims to the contrary, there are, indeed, two Wittgensteins. Yet, to ascertain the difference between both we must look at Wittgenstein's conceptions of philosophy rather than at his views on logic and language. Wittgenstein's different, and even divergent, views on logic and language are grounded on his two views on philosophy and not the other way around. At the same time, Wittgenstein's views on philosophy are caused by his ways of conceiving the scope of philosophical activity in regard to language. Both in theTractatus and in thePhilosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein points out what is important in language for philosophy, but in each case he reaches very different conclusions. Now, when all is said, there remains one unifying factor in all of Wittgenstein's investigations: it is the question of the logic of language, which shifts positions from theTractatus to theInvestigations, so that what was earlier a hidden structure becomes later the grammar of its indefinitely complexe uses.     

Branching space-time

Branching space-time is a simple blend of relativity and indeterminism. Postulates and definitions rigorously describe the causal order relation between possible point events. The key postulate is a version of everything has a causal origin; key defined terms include history and choice point. Some elementary but helpful facts are proved. Application is made to the status of causal contemporaries of indeterministic events, to how splitting of histories happens, to indeterminism without choice, and to Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen distant correlations.     

Early German approaches to experimental reading research: The contributions of Wilhelm Wundt and Ernst Meumann

Summary Wundt looked at the reading process from a predominantly theoretical perspective. He opposed the total shape theory formulated by Erdmann and Dodge and insisted on the occurrence of attention shifts during word recognition. As an alternative to the total shape theory, he formulated a two-stage theory of word recognition. An initial, apperceptive phase of reading is concerned with the active analysis of visually salient local details, and a second, assimilative phase fills in the unanalyzed parts of words on the basis of a passive evocation of earlier experiences with graphemic input. Meumann looked at the reading process from the point of view of an educational psychologist. His review of experimental reading research presents most of the basic issues which are still controversial today. In his recommendations for the teaching of reading, he emphasized the importance of analyzing words into their constituent sounds and of articulatory awareness as a precondition for the firm establishment of connections between graphemes and speech sounds. The review discusses some of the reasons why the experimentally based approach to the psychology of reading failed to evoke the interest of German educators after World War I.     

From negation to “notion”: Cognitive processes and argumentative strategies

Summary This article deals with the role of negation as a language and cognitive operation. Such a topic is treated here within the framework of the argumentative strategies which consist in making certain cognitive landmarks of the discourse flip over with the intent of imposing the necessity to choose between two types of notions, aiming at the transformation of this choice into an implication. The reference here to the Aristotelian logic of Prior Analytics appears to be more efficient than any other contemporary logic and the author intends to give account of the role of negation as contrary coming into play on an operational and cognitive basis in all the argumentative strategies which oscillate reciprocally from universal to particular.     

Becoming: A modest proposal

In this paper I attempt a new approach to an old technical term: becoming. I show how the theory that becoming is coming-to-be could be supported by a semantic derivation of the nominalization becoming from its verbal counterpart, by investigating the properties of the present progressive constructions in which becoming as a verbal appears. My theory denies that dates, or qualitative change, play an essential role in the analysis of becoming.     

The probabilistic import of illatives

It is not only overtly probabilistic illatives like makes it certain that but also apparently non-probabilistic ones like therefore that have probabilistic import. Illatives like therefore convey the meaning that the premise confers on the conclusion a probability not only greater than 0 but also greater than 1/2. But because they do not say whether that probability is equal to or less than 1, these illatives are appropriately called neutral.     

On the nature of meaning and its indeterminacy: Davidson''s view in perspective

In order to illustrate the nature of the indeterminacy of meaning, Donald Davidson sometimes compares it to the fact that we can measure length or temperature on different scales. In the following paper I try to explain first why we are supposed to expect such an analogy, given the semantics of the word meaning and of the word length or temperature. In the second part I examine how close the analogy is by distinguishing different forms of indeterminacy of meaning (viz., the indeterminacy of reference and the indeterminacy of truth) and ask whether both forms have an equivalent in a theory of measurement. I shall conclude that this is indeed the case.I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for his or her detailed comments on a first version of this paper, which helped me to clarify my views considerably.     

Theorem counting

Consider the set of tautologies of the classical propositional calculus containing no connective other than and, or, and not. Consider the subset of this set containing tautologies in exactlyn propositional variables. This paper provides a method for determining the number of equivalence classes of each such subset modulo equivalence in the infinite-valued Lukasiewicz propositional calculus.     

Hypnotic time distortion and free-recall learning — an attempted replication

Summary Krauss, Katzell and Krauss (1974) have presented evidence suggesting that hypnosis can be used to facilitate free-recall learning. Specifically, they report that hypnotised individuals, given special time-distortion instructions, can recall as much in three minutes as waking control subjects can in ten minutes. The present study was an attempt to replicate and extend this main finding of Krauss et al. The results of the present study failed to replicate Krauss et al.'s finding; in fact, the hypnotised subjects did rather worse than waking control groups; also no relationship was found between recall scores and depths of hypnosis. Marked discrepancies were noticed between the scores of the waking control groups used in the present study, and those used by Krauss et al. It was concluded that any facilitatory effect of hypnotic time distortion on free-recall learning still awaits a definitive demonstration.     

Increasing correct identifications by children

Four new lineup procedures were examined with the goal of increasingchildren's identification accuracy. Participants (329 children aged 10 and11 years, 426 children aged 12 to 14 years, and 265 adults) were presentedwith either a target-present or target-absent lineup. Proceduralmodifications included providing a salient "I don't know" response option,extending standard instructions, and modeling correct responses eitherusing an identification demonstration video or a handout. These conditionswere compared to a standard (control) lineup procedure. Extendingstandard instructions increased correct identifications by the youngerchildren. Presenting a salient "I don't know" response increased overallchoosing for both target-present and target-absent lineups. Experimentalprocedures did not influence correct rejection rates. These data demonstratea variety of techniques that may be useful for improving the identificationaccuracy of child witnesses. Future directions are discussed.