赫拉克利特:流变、秩序与知识

赫拉克利特不仅仅思考宇宙论问题,也关注人类社会和知识问题。本文从文本分析入手,从古典语文学的角度考察了赫拉克利特残篇的语言风格,据此重构了赫拉克利特思想的主要方面。首先分析赫拉克利特论变化、秩序等宇宙论问题,强调他主张一切具体事物都是流变的,但是事物的变动、转化有其数量、比例和秩序,因此作为整体的世界是有秩序和统一的。其次探讨赫拉克利特如何以此为基础阐明了人类知识问题,他既强调知识的经验来源,又强调通过logos来直觉地、归纳地把握世界的总体性和普遍真实性。     

Disagreement

There has been a recent explosion of interest in the epistemology of disagreement. Much of the recent literature is concerned with a particular range of puzzle cases (discussed in the “Cases” section of my paper). Almost all of the papers that contribute to that recent literature make mention of questions about religious disagreement in ways that suggest that there are interesting connections between those puzzle cases and real life cases of religious disagreement. One important aim of my paper is to cast doubt on that suggestion. More generally, the aim of my paper is to give a reasonably full account of the recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement, and then to give a serious discussion of some of the epistemological issues that are raised by real world religious disagreements.     

The role of comparison in preschoolers’ novel object categorization

We examined the role of the comparison process and shared names on preschoolers’ categorization of novel objects. In our studies, 4-year-olds were presented with novel object sets consisting of either one or two standards and two test objects: a shape match and a texture match. When children were presented with one standard, they extended the category based on shape regardless of whether the objects were named. When children were presented with two standards that shared the same texture and the objects were named with the same noun, they extended the category based on texture. The opportunity to compare two standards, in the absence of shared names, led to an attenuation of the effect of shape. These findings demonstrate that comparison plays a critical role in the categorization of novel objects and that shared names enhance this process.