Feature inference and the causal structure of categories

The purpose of this article was to establish how theoretical category knowledge-specifically, knowledge of the causal relations that link the features of categories-supports the ability to infer the presence of unobserved features. Our experiments were designed to test proposals that causal knowledge is represented psychologically as Bayesian networks. In five experiments we found that Bayes' nets generally predicted participants' feature inferences quite well. However, we also observed a pervasive violation of one of the defining principles of Bayes' nets-the causal Markov condition-because the presence of characteristic features invariably led participants to infer yet another characteristic feature. We argue that this effect arises from a domain-general bias to assume the presence of underlying mechanisms associated with the category. Specifically, people take an exemplar to be a "well functioning" category member when it has most or all of the category's characteristic features, and thus are likely to infer a characteristic value on an unobserved dimension.     

Fusions and Ordinary Physical Objects

In “Tropes and Ordinary Physical Objects”, Kris McDaniel argues that ordinary physical objects are fusions of monadic and polyadic tropes. McDaniel calls his view “TOPO”—for “Theory of Ordinary Physical Objects”. He argues that we should accept TOPO because of the philosophical work that it allows us to do. Among other things, TOPO is supposed to allow endurantists to reply to Mark Heller’s argument for perdurantism. But, we argue in this paper, TOPO does not help endurantists do that; indeed, we argue that anyone who accepts TOPO should reject endurantism.     

Two notions of compactness in Gödel logics

Compactness is an important property of classical propositional logic. It can be defined in two equivalent ways. The first one states that simultaneous satisfiability of an infinite set of formulae is equivalent to the satisfiability of all its finite subsets. The second one states that if a set of formulae entails a formula, then there is a finite subset entailing this formula as well.In propositional many-valued logic, we have different degrees of satisfiability and different possible definitions of entailment, hence the questions of compactness is more complex. In this paper we will deal with compactness of Gödel, Gödel_Δ, and Gödel_～ logics.There are several results (all for the countable set of propositional variables) concerning the compactness (based on satisfiability) of these logic by Cintula and Navara, and the question of compactness (based on entailment) for Gödel logic was fully answered by Baaz and Zach (see papers [3] and [2]).In this paper we give a nearly complete answer to the problem of compactness based on both concepts for all three logics and for an arbitrary cardinality of the set of propositional variables. Finally, we show a tight correspondence between these two concepts     

Thirty-something categorization results explained: selective attention, eyetracking, and models of category learning

An eyetracking study testing D. L. Medin and M. M. Schaffer's (1978) 5-4 category structure was conducted. Over 30 studies have shown that the exemplar-based generalized context model (GCM) usually provides a better quantitative account of 5-4 learning data as compared with the prototype model. However, J. D. Smith and J. P. Minda (2000) argued that the GCM is a psychologically implausible account of 5-4 learning because it implies suboptimal attention weights. To test this claim, the authors recorded undergraduates' eye movements while the students learned the 5-4 category structure. Eye fixations matched the attention weights estimated by the GCM but not those of the prototype model. This result confirms that the GCM is a realistic model of the processes involved in learning the 5-4 structure and that learners do not always optimize attention, as commonly supposed. The conditions under which learners are likely to optimize attention during category learning are discussed.     

Disjunctive Quantum Logic in Dynamic Perspective

In Coecke (2002) we proposed the intuitionistic or disjunctive representation of quantum logic, i.e., a representation of the property lattice of physical systems as a complete Heyting algebra of logical propositions on these properties, where this complete Heyting algebra goes equipped with an additional operation, the operational resolution, which identifies the properties within the logic of propositions. This representation has an important application towards dynamic quantum logic, namely in describing the temporal indeterministic propagation of actual properties of physical systems. This paper can as such by conceived as an addendum to Quantum Logic in Intuitionistic Perspective that discusses spin-off and thus provides an additional motivation. We derive a quantaloidal semantics for dynamic disjunctive quantum logic and illustrate it for the particular case of a perfect (quantum) measurement.     

On Łukasiewicz's Four-Valued Modal Logic

ukasiewicz's four-valued modal logic is surveyed and analyzed, together with ukasiewicz's motivations to develop it. A faithful interpretation of it in classical (non-modal) two-valued logic is presented, and some consequences are drawn concerning its classification and its algebraic behaviour. Some counter-intuitive aspects of this logic are discussed in the light of the presented results, ukasiewicz's own texts, and related literature.     

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors     

Life,Chaos, and Transdisciplinarity: A Personal Journey

This article uses an autobiography as an object of research, to both illustrate some principles of chaos theory in analytic practice, and give those ideas a personal and social context, thereby producing a unique but explanation-rich history of chaos theory and recent intellectual history of transdisciplinarity and social research in the West. The ideas from Chaos Theory it uses and illustrates include: three-body analysis (Poincaré); fractals (Mandelbrot); fuzzy logic (Zadeh); and the butterfly effect (Lorenz).     

A cognitive and an affective dimension of alexithymia in six languages and seven populations

The Dutch Bermond–Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ) is translated into various languages. The aim of this research was to establish the factor structure of subscales on seven cultural groups. The BVAQ consists of five subscales of eight items each: Emotionalising, Fantasising, Analysing, Identifying, and Verbalising emotions. The BVAQ was administered to a group of Dutch students (n=375), a group of English students (n=175), a group of Australian students, university employees and visitors (n=216), a group of French speaking Belgian students (n=175), a group of Italian people (n=791; a mix of various clinical groups), a group of Polish people (n=427; also a mix of various clinical groups) and a group of Russian people (n=141; general population). The hypothesised two-factor structure of an affective alexithymia dimension (Emotionalising, Fantasising) and a cognitive alexithymia dimension (Insight and Verbalising), with “Analysing emotions” loading on both factors, was clearly supported by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). Both orthogonal and oblique principal components analyses (PCA), without restriction concerning the number of factors, provided the same two-factor solution in all groups explaining between 55% and 64% of the variance. Oblique rotation further demonstrated that the correlations between these two factors were low in all populations. The combined CFA and PCA results, therefore, indicated that a model with two independent factors has to be preferred over the model assuming two correlated factors.     

Reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition

Models of spoken word recognition assume that words are represented as sequences of phonemes. We evaluated this assumption by examining phonemic anadromes, words that share the same phonemes but differ in their order (e.g., sub and bus). Using the visual-world paradigm, we found that listeners show more fixations to anadromes (e.g., sub when bus is the target) than to unrelated words (well) and to words that share the same vowel but not the same set of phonemes (sun). This contrasts with the predictions of existing models and suggests that words are not defined as strict sequences of phonemes.