Henry M. Sheffer and Notational Relativity

Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a significant figure in nineteenth-century logic was firmly established when the philosopher and historian of philosophy William Warren Bartley, III published Dodgson's ‘lost’ book of logic, Part II of Symbolic Logic, in 1977. Bartley's commentary and annotations confirm that Dodgson was a superb technical innovator. In this paper, I closely examine Dodgson's methods and their evolution in the two parts of Symbolic Logic to clarify and justify Bartley's claims. Then, using more recent publications and unpublished letters, I argue that Dodgson approached the elimination problem in class logic differently than his contemporaries, and in doing so, anticipated several important concepts and techniques in automated deductive reasoning. These materials also provide additional insight into his reasons for writing this book.     

SPACE,TIME, AND CAUSALITY

The characters of space, time, and causality are issues that are constrained by physics but that require also acts of metaphysical decision. Relativity theory is consistent both with the idea of an a temporal block universe and with a temporal universe of true becoming. Science's account of causal properties is patchy and does not imply the closure of the universe to other forms of causal influence. Intrinsic unpredictabilities offer opportunities for metaphysical conjecture concerning the form that such additional causal principles might take. Different theological understandings of how God relates to time afford legitimate criteria for differing metaphysical decisions about the nature of temporality.     

Of substance: The nature of language effects on entity construal

Shown an entity (e.g., a plastic whisk) labeled by a novel noun in neutral syntax, speakers of Japanese, a classifier language, are more likely to assume the noun refers to the substance (plastic) than are speakers of English, a count/mass language, who are instead more likely to assume it refers to the object kind [whisk; Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169–200]. Five experiments replicated this language type effect on entity construal, extended it to quite different stimuli from those studied before, and extended it to a comparison between Mandarin speakers and English speakers. A sixth experiment, which did not involve interpreting the meaning of a noun or a pronoun that stands for a noun, failed to find any effect of language type on entity construal. Thus, the overall pattern of findings supports a non-Whorfian, language on language account, according to which sensitivity to lexical statistics in a count/mass language leads adults to assign a novel noun in neutral syntax the status of a count noun, influencing construal of ambiguous entities. The experiments also document and explore cross-linguistically universal factors that influence entity construal, and favor Prasada’s [Prasada, S. (1999). Names for things and stuff: An Aristotelian perspective. In R. Jackendoff, P. Bloom, & K. Wynn (Eds.), Language, logic, and concepts (pp. 119–146). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] hypothesis that features indicating non-accidentalness of an entity’s form lead participants to a construal of object kind rather than substance kind. Finally, the experiments document the age at which the language type effect emerges in lexical projection. The details of the developmental pattern are consistent with the lexical statistics hypothesis, along with a universal increase in sensitivity to material kind.     

THERE'S MORE TO TIME THAN TICKING AWAY

Time is an element that each of us experiences in the core of our being. Yet it also is one of the great mysteries in our conceptual grasp of reality. The notion of time has therefore been reflected upon and explored by thinkers and scientists since ancient times. In this essay I relate the multiple ways in which Antje's Jackelén's scholarly and stimulating work Time and Eternity analyzes the historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives on the notion of time lived and its relation to the conceptual endless time that we call eternity, and offer some of my own contextual reflections on the topic.     

论道德相对性及其道德实践意义——兼析道德相对主义

道德相对性表现为道德准则规范具有具体性、差异性和不确定性.道德相对性中渗透了道德绝对性即存在普遍的、共同的、不变的道德价值.道德相对主义的错误在于夸大相对性而否定了绝对性.但道德相对主义基于道德相对性的某些主张有一定的合理性.正确理解道德相对性在道德实践中有重要意义.个体道德自主性的提高,既要把握绝对的道德价值观念,同时需要把握道德的相对性以提高具体情境中道德判断和选择能力.     

Color categories: evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment. Recent research (Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; Roberson et al., in press) found substantial evidence of cognitive color differences between different language communities, but concerns remained as to how representative might be a tiny, extremely remote community. The present study replicates and extends previous findings using additional paradigms among a larger community in a different visual environment. Adult semi-nomadic tribesmen in Southern Africa carried out similarity judgments, short-term memory and long-term learning tasks. They showed different cognitive organization of color to both English and another language with the five color terms. Moreover, Categorical Perception effects were found to differ even between languages with broadly similar color categories. The results provide further evidence of the tight relationship between language and cognition.     

习惯的空间术语对空间认知的影响

采用Levinson开创的旋转观察者的实验范式，考察了习惯的空间术语对非语言空间认知的影响。被试是南方和北方的大学生。结果表明，南方大学生和北方大学生在非语言的空间操作任务上所使用的参考框架存在显著差异，南方大学生更多地使用以观察者为中心的相对参考框架（前、后、左、右），北方大学生更多地使用以太阳升落和地球磁场为参照的绝对参考框架（东、西、南、北）。这种参考框架使用上的差异与他们习惯的空间术语一致。上述结果表明习惯的空间术语对非语言空间认知有重要影响。     

The existence of superluminal particles is consistent with relativistic dynamics

Within an axiomatic framework, we prove that the existence of faster than light (FTL) particles is consistent with (does not contradict) the dynamics of Einstein's special relativity. The proof goes by constructing a model of relativistic dynamics where FTL particles can move with arbitrary speeds. To have a complete picture, we not only construct an appropriate model but explicitly list all the basic assumptions (axioms) we use.