Parallel lines in life,divergent lines in science: Complexity encompasses different worlds

This paper has two major parts. The first recounts the beginning and growth of the friendship between Siegfried Streufert and Peter Suedfeld, who in the mid-1960s were graduate students in Harold M. Schroder's social psychology laboratory at Princeton University. Each continued to develop a different line of theory and research on cognitive aspects of personality and social psychology while maintaining their contacts and friendship. The second part describes the background, characteristics, and applications of the integrative complexity (IC) work of Peter Suedfeld and his collaborators and students.     

Constructing worlds

You and I can differ in what we say, or believe, even though the things we say, or believe, are logically equivalent. Discussing what is said, or believed, requires notions of content which are finer-grained than sets of (metaphysically or logically) possible worlds. In this paper, I develop the approach to fine-grained content in terms of a space of possible and impossible worlds. I give a method for constructing ersatz worlds based on a theory of substantial facts. I show how this theory overcomes an objection to actualist constructions of ersatz worlds and argue that it naturally gives rise to useful notions of fine-grained content.     

Pleonastic possible worlds

The role of possible worlds in philosophy is hard to overestimate. Nevertheless, their nature and existence is very controversial. This is particularly serious, since their standard applications depend on there being sufficiently many of them. The paper develops an account of possible worlds on which it is particularly easy to believe in their existence: an account of possible worlds as pleonastic entities. Pleonastic entities are entities whose existence can be validly inferred from statements that neither refer to nor quantify over them as a matter of conceptual necessity. Definitions are proposed that ensure that this is the case for possible worlds.     

Explaining old worlds

This Comment treats each of Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus's three subjects ‐entrepreneurship, democratic activity, and cultivation of solidarity ‐ in turn. Though marred by inattention to moral consequences and an accordingly unjustified meliorism, the authors’ insights reaffirm and strengthen a number of convictions obscured in current political‐theory debates. In particular, their account of the virtuous citizen, and of a variant of solidarity which grows out of such citizens’ activity, deserves recognition. The basic contention that humans are ‘at their best’ when self‐consciously engaged in transformative activities is accepted, with the essential caveat that such activity can only be sustained for relatively short periods of time by individuals and polities alike.     

Celtic ways between worlds

I am all for walking in two worlds at once since we are gifted with two legs. C. G. Jung Letters, Vol. 2, para. 459     

Functionalism about possible worlds

Various writers have proposed that the notion of a possible world is a functional concept, yet very little has been done to develop that proposal. This paper explores a particular functionalist account of possible worlds, according to which pluralities of possible worlds are the bases for structures which provide occupants for the roles which analyse our ordinary modal concepts. It argues that the resulting position meets some of the stringent constraints which philosophers have placed upon accounts of possible worlds, while also trivializing the question what possible worlds are. The paper then discusses a range of problems facing the functionalist position.     

Partial worlds and paradox

Since universal language systems are confronted with serious paradoxical consequences, a semantic approach is developed in whichpartial worlds form the ontological basis. This approach shares withsituation semantics the basic idea that statements always refer to certain partial worlds, and it agrees with the extensional and model-theoretic character ofpossible worlds semantics. Within the framework of the partial worlds conception a satisfactory solution to theLiar paradox can be formulated. In particular, one advantage of this approach over those theories that are based on the totality of possible worlds semantics can be found in the fact that the so-called Strengthened Liar problem is avoided.I would like to thank Dirk Koppelberg for helpful remarks on an earlier draft of this paper. Special thanks to an anonymous referee for detailed comments.     

Imaginary bodies and worlds

In this paper I distil a concept of the imaginary with which to make good the claim that our mode of embodied subjectivity is an imaginary embodiment in an imaginary world. The concept of the imaginary employed is not one in which imaginary worlds are contrasted with the real, but one in which imagination is a condition of there being a real for us. The images and forms in terms of which our imagined bodies and worlds are constituted carry, in an interdependent way, cognition and affects. Imagined configurations have a resilience which makes their displacement more than a matter of appealing to considerations of truth or falsity. It involves encounters with alternative imagined configurations which can be recognized as making both cognitive and affective sense.