Der Ideologiebegriff bei Marx und die heutige Kontroverse über Ideologie und Wissenschaft in den sozialistischen Ländern

Marx and Engels inherited and developed the 18th Century notion of ideology as distorted consciousness. Although they did not speak explicitly of a ‘proletarian ideology’, they did develop the elements which Lenin then elaborated. His failure to develop a theory of ideology has left this task to contemporary Marxists (e.g., Althusser) and Marxist-Leninists (e.g., Choruc), who often do this in the process of criticizing non-Marxist theories. A lively discussion took place in the 1960's in Poland (Schaff and Bauman) and in the Soviet Union (Jadov and Julina). One of the results has been to cast doubt on the systemic validity of the principle of party-mindedness (partijnost').     

The dynamics of belief: Contractions and revisions of probability functions

Conclusion Using probability functions defined over a simple language as models of states of belief, my goal in this article has been to analyse contractions and revisions of beliefs. My first strategy was to formulate postulates for these processes. Close parallels between the postulates for contractions and the postulates for revisions have been established - the results in Section 5 show that contractions and revisions are interchangeable.As a second strategy, some suggestions for more or less explicit constructive definitions of the revision process (and indirectly also of the contraction process) were then presented. However, the results in Section 6 are less conclusive than in the earlier ones. This problem area still awaits further development.     

Language and thought: Some remarks on Chomsky and Piaget

The author analyzes pertinent aspects of Piaget's and Chomsky's point of view on language and thought, indicating the similarities in their attempts to understand the underlying structures of both functions. The major difference between Chomsky and Piaget is that the latter considers all cognitive acquisitions, including language, to be the outcome of the gradual process of construction; whereas the former seems to be assuming as innate a general ability to synthesize the successive levels reached by an increasingly complex cognitive organization. Citing examples drawn from ongoing research in Geneva, the author also challenges Chomsky's assertion that there exist highly innate specific capacities which account for the principles underlying the development of scientific knowledge.Translated by Gilbert Voyat, Graduate Faculty, City College, and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in collaboration with Donald Nicholson-Smith.     

Memory for numbers in monolinguals and bilinguals

Forty-six subjects were assigned to two groups according to a reaction time technique: one monolingual group of 14 subjects with German as the dominant language and one group of 32 German-Swedish bilingual subjects balanced in skills. The subjects were given short-term memory tasks on numbers presented aurally and a visually presented prose text involving both short-term and long-term memory processes. The results provide evidence that two language systems actively used in daily communication affect both speed and memory span for digits: when compared with monolingual subjects, balanced bilinguals read more slowly and showed a higher error rate in the recall of two-digit numbers. The results support a hypothesis of interdependent bilingual storage.