Against the Additive View of Imagination

According to the additive view of sensory imagination, mental imagery often involves two elements. There is an image-like element, which gives the experiences qualitative phenomenal character akin to that of perception. There is also a non-image element, consisting of something like suppositions about the image's object. This accounts for extra-sensory features of imagined objects and situations: for example, it determines whether an image of a grey horse is an image of Desert Orchid, or of some other grey horse. The view promises to give a simple and intuitive explanation of some puzzling features of imagination, and, further, to illuminate imagination's relation to modal knowledge. I contend that the additive view does not fulfil these two promises. The explanation of how images come to be determinate is redundant: the content constituting the indeterminate mental images on which the view relies is sufficient to deliver determinate images too, so the extra resources offered by the view are not required. When applied to modal epistemology, the view either delivers implausible results or offers no distinctive insight. Since the view is sold on its explanatory merits, and since these are dubious, the additive view should be rejected.     

Eternalist Theories of Persistence Through Time: Where the Differences Really Lie

The eternalist endurantist and perdurantist theories of persistence through time come in various versions, namely the two versions of perdurantism: the worm view and the stage view, and the two versions of endurantism: indexicalism and adverbialism. Using as a starting point the instructive case of what is depicted by photographs, I will examine these four views, and compare them, with some interesting results. Notably, we will see that two traditional enemies—the perdurantist worm view and the endurantist theories—are more like allies: they are much less different than what is usually thought, and some alleged points of central disagreement fall prey to closer scrutiny. The aim of this paper is to examine carefully all those points, and to call attention to the places where the real differences between these views lie. I will then turn to the perdurantist stage view, and claim that with respect to some central issues it is the view that is the most different from the other three, but that in some places the reason why it different is also the reason why it is less satisfactory.

Summation relations and portions of stuff

According to the prevalent ‘sum view’ of stuffs, each portion of stuff is a mereological sum of its subportions. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the sum view in the light of a modal temporal mereology which distinguishes between different varieties of summation relations. While admitting David Barnett’s recent counter-example to the sum view (Barnett, Philos Rev 113:89–100, 2004), we show that there is nonetheless an important sense in which all portions of stuff are sums of their subportions. We use our summation relations to develop, as an alternative to the sum view, an analysis of stuffs that distinguishes between the ways in which different sorts of stuffs are sums of their subportions.

On the Compositional Extension Problem

A semantics may be compositional and yet partial, in the sense that not all well-formed expressions are assigned meanings by it. Examples come from both natural and formal languages. When can such a semantics be extended to a total one, preserving compositionality? This sort of extension problem was formulated by Hodges, and solved there in a particular case, in which the total extension respects a precise version of the fregean dictum that the meaning of an expression is the contribution it makes to the meanings of complex phrases of which it is a part. Hodges' result presupposes the so-called Husserl property, which says roughly that synonymous expressions must have the same category. Here I solve a different version of the compositional extension problem, corresponding to another type of linguistic situation in which we only have a partial semantics, and without assuming the Husserl property. I also briefly compare Hodges' framework for grammars in terms of partial algebras with more familiar ones, going back to Montague, which use many-sorted algebras instead.

     

Forms of emergent interaction in General Process Theory

General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete, dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining, and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term.     

Mass Nouns in a Logic of Classes as Many

A semantic analysis of mass nouns is given in terms of a logic of classes as many. In previous work it was shown that plural reference and predication for count nouns can be interpreted within this logic of classes as many in terms of the subclasses of the classes that are the extensions of those count nouns. A brief review of that account of plurals is given here and it is then shown how the same kind of interpretation can also be given for mass nouns.     

Textbook Presentations of the Basic Addition Facts

Widely usedmathematics textbooks from kindergarten, first, second, and third grades were evaluated both for the frequency and the order of presentation of the basic 100 addition facts 0 + 0 through 9 + 9. A striking result was that the frequency of occurrence distributions for the basic facts were markedly skewed. There were many fewer presentations of large than small problems in the texts, and problems involving the addition of 0 were relatively infrequent at all grades; such was also the case in a similar study conducted in 1924. Correlations among the tabulated variables and a variety of published normative and performance measures are presented. We suggest several possible relationships between these results and the empirical literature on mental arithmetic performance. In particular, reaction time performance across the entire developmental span is closely related to both the frequency of presentation and the order of presentation of the basic facts in elementary texts. Furthermore, both the frequency and order of presentation variables have strong and possibly important relationships to adults' ratings of problem difficulty.     

Facts which Support the Concept of need or Drive

Research investigating the relationship between body-cathexis and self-esteem has frequently dealt with the problem of the use of body-cathexis scores weighted by the S's rating of the personal importance of body aspects. Since the original research in this area, two studies have presented contradictory data testing the hypothesis that the greater the importance of body aspects to the individual, the greater the correlation between self-esteem and body-cathexis. This hypothesis is tested here using several approaches to the question. These data clearly indicate that there is no relationship between Ss' subjectively stated importance of body aspects and statistical importance in the form of correlations between body-cathexis and self-esteem.     

Against the Vagueness Argument

In this paper I offer a counterexample to the so called vagueness argument against restricted composition. This will be done in the lines of a recent suggestion by Trenton Merricks, namely by challenging the claim that there cannot be a sharp cut-off point in a composition sequence. It will be suggested that causal powers which emerge when composition occurs can serve as an indicator of such sharp cut-off points. The main example will be the case of a heap. It seems that heaps might provide a very plausible counterexample to the vagueness argument if we accept the idea that four grains of sand is the least number required to compose a heap—the case has been supported by W. D. Hart. My purpose here is not to put forward a new theory of composition, I only wish to refute the vagueness argument and point out that we should be wary of arguments of its form.

佛教幸福感的心理学解读：基于中西比较的视角

幸福感是文化定位的,因此幸福感的研究必须本土化.佛教是影响中国人最重要的三种文化传统之一,正确理解佛教独特的对于幸福感的理解也能够进一步推动幸福感研究的本土化进程.笔者通过对佛教教义的梳理,重点阐述了佛教对幸福的认识是“苦乐圆融”.佛教“苦乐圆融观”主要从“苦受”和“乐受”两方面入手,其核心是“苦受”,关键在“圆融”.最后,通过与西方幸福感研究的比较,加深对佛教“苦乐圆融观”的理解.佛教幸福感的研究作为一个新思路,不但丰富了幸福感的研究,也为今后进一步的研究提供了一定的依据.     

哲学观与马克思哲学观

哲学是反思的学问,这种反思不仅指向哲学思考的对象内容,而且指向哲学思考本身.哲学观的反思对于哲学的内容变革和体系调整,具有重要的前提性意义.深刻理解马克思的哲学观,是我们重新理解马克思哲学的基础.     

Demonstration of the shape bias without label extension

Existing shape bias research has determined that children generally extend object labels to novel instances on the basis of shape, and this typically occurs by around age 2.5. This research was conducted to further examine the nature of this bias during the second year of life, and determined that by using a more sensitive measure (novelty preference looking time) an emerging shape bias can be found as early as 14 months of age. In addition, demonstration of the shape bias in the current experiment appears to be unrelated to the 50 count noun marker.