Is Intuition Necessary for Defending Platonism?

G?del asserts that his philosophy falls under the category of conceptual realism. This paper gives a general picture of G?del’s conceptual realism’s basic doctrines, and gives a way to understand conceptual realism in the background of Leibniz’s and Kant’s philosophies. Among philosophers of mathematics, there is a widespread view that Platonism encounters an epistemological difficulty because we do not have sensations of abstract objects. In his writings, G?del asserts that we have mathematical intuitions of mathematical objects. Some philosophers do not think it is necessary to resort to intuition to defend Platonism, and other philosophers think that the arguments resorting to intuition are too na?ve to be convincing. I argue that the epistemic difficulty is not particular to Platonism; when faced with skepticism, physicalists also need to give an answer concerning the relationship between our experience and reality. G?del and Kant both think that sensations or combinations of sensations are not ideas of physical objects, but that, to form ideas of physical objects, concepts must be added. However, unlike Kant, G?del thinks that concepts are not subjective but independent of our minds. Based on my analysis of G?del’s conceptual realism, I give an answer to the question in the title and show that arguments resorting to intuition are far from na?ve, despite what some philosophers have claimed.     

Secular and religious: the intrinsic doubleness of analytical psychology and the hegemony of naturalism in the social sciences

In recent years a number of prominent social theorists, including Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, have voiced concern about the hegemony of naturalistic, secular assumptions in the social sciences, and in their different ways have sought to address this by establishing greater parity between secular and religious perspectives. This paper suggests that C.G. Jung's analytical psychology, which hitherto has been largely ignored by social theory, may have something to contribute on this issue as it can be understood coherently both empirically, without reference to transcendent reality, and metaphysically, with reference to transcendent reality. It is argued that, despite his denials of any metaphysical intent, Jung does in fact engage in metaphysics and that together the empirical and metaphysical vectors of his thought result in a rich and distinctive double perspective. This dual secular and religious perspective can be seen as part of Jung's own critique of the hegemony of naturalism and secularism, which for Jung has profound social as well as clinical relevance. The concern and approach that Habermas and Taylor share with Jung on this issue may provide some grounds for increased dialogue between analytical psychology and the social sciences.     

Treadmill Gait Analysis Characterizes Gait Alterations in Parkinson's Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Mouse Models

The effect of anxiety on learning and performance of a complex motor task was determined. In addition the effects of two stressors—competition and failure—and the interactions between these stressors and anxiety were investigated. 40 high and 40 low anxiety Ss (selected by the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale) learned and performed a coincident timing task. Competition was presented by offering the Ss a monetary reward for the best performance, while failure was manipulated by giving false knowledge of results and indicating that the performance level was inferior. Results showed that Ss low in anxiety performed significantly better than Ss high in anxiety during the initial learning of a complex motor task. No difference was found between Ss extreme in anxiety once the task was well-learned. Competition and failure did not affect performance or interact with the anxiety level of Ss.     

Object tracking and search in infancy: A review of data and a theoretical evaluation

Most research on infants' development of object and spatial concepts is based on object search tasks or visual tracking studies. In this review, it is concluded that many phenomena, particularly the tracking data, can be accounted for in terms of objective spatial perception in early infancy. However, some phenomena, particularly the stage IV search error, cannot be explained in these terms. A theoretical framework is put forward that integrates aspects of theory of direct perception with constructionist theory. First, it is proposed that objective properties of the basic spatial array are directly perceived, but that because perception is derived from action in the environment, there are initial limits to the scope and coherence of perception that diminish as the infant gains effective motor control. Second, it is proposed that in attempts to decipher the structure of social interchanges over objects, infants construct functional categorizations of objects that allow them to overcome limited awareness of their physical properties. Finally, it is suggested that these functional concepts provide an adequate means of interpreting the world, so that concepts based on the physical properties of objects, including their permanence, are relatively late developments.     

One answer to the demand for accountability: Selection utility as an investment decision

An examination of selection utility models demonstrates that they bear a considerable resemblance to capital budgeting models well established in the finance literature. Five applications of capital budgeting to selection utility are suggested and discussed. Capital budgeting concepts are recommended as a rich source of further practical and theoretical development of selection Utility models.     

Nonimmediate language style and inconsistency between private and expressed evaluations

It was hypothesized that certain language style variations would reflect apprehension about affirming the validity of communication content. Wiener and Mehrabian (Language within language: Immediacy, a channel in verbal communication. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,1968) have identified a cluster of such variations called verbal nonimmediacy, which they describe as indicators of psychological distance between the communicator and his/her communication. Four experiments are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that communication about positive manifestations of disliked traits and negative manifestations of liked traits was more nonimmediate than when positive manifestations of liked traits or negative manifestations of disliked traits were described. This was true both when one's own or another's personality traits were described. In Experiment 3, nonimmediacy was found to increase when communications involved clear fabrications about either one's liked or disliked traits. Experiment 4 showed that when self-regard was experimentally manipulated, low self-regard subjects showed more opinion conformity and nonimmediacy in their disclosures to a confederate than did high self-regard subjects.     

Effect of mutual acquaintance on the construction of conversation

In a previous investigation, we demonstrated the role of questions as an instructional resource in the social construction of conversation by depriving conversationalists of their use. The resulting conversational structure, measured in terms of the ability of third parties to reconstruct the dialogues after they had been randomized, was impaired. The importance of culturally shared knowledge for the reconstruction (and by implication the construction) task was apparent in the superiority of British over Canadian subjects in reconstructing unconstrained British dialogues. The present study was concerned with the effects of privately shared knowledge on the construction of conversation. Conversational structure and the frequency of questions were greater in strangers' than in mutual acquaintances' unconstrained dialogues. Strangers' dialogues, but not those of mutual acquaintances, were disrupted under a ban on questions. The results were taken to indicate that strangers need to provide one another with continual instruction in how to proceed, whereas mutual acquaintances, in virtue of their privately shared social knowledge, can construct orderly dialogue with less moment-to-moment guidance.     

APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTURA SUA, OR MAYBE WE GOT IT RIGHT AFTER ALL

Abstract. A summary of the progress of biogenetic structuralism as an approach to the social and behavioral sciences is presented, from the publication of Biogenetic Structuralism in 1974 to the present. The difficulty that many scholars have found integrating neuroan-thropology and comparative ethology into an understanding of cultural, and particularly of religious, phenomena over the past almost two decades is considered. More specifically, the articles of James Ashbrook and Mary Lynn Dell published in the same June 1993 issue of Zygon as this article are analyzed and responded to. These authors critique Eugene d'Aquili's work of integrating neuropsychology and religious experience primarily by analyzing Brain, Symbol & Experience , which d'Aquili co-authored with Charles Laughlin, Jr., and John McManus, H. Rodney Holmes's article in the same issue of Zygon analyzes the whole corpus of d'Aquili's religion and science work as it appeared over the years in the pages of Zygon and in other articles and books as well as in Brain, Symbol & Experience. This critique is likewise carefully considered and responded to. Finally a proposed trajectory of d'Aquili's (and Andrew Newberg's) future work in their ongoing project integrating neuropsychology and religious experience is elaborated. This involves, not only expansion of their general theoretical approach, but also empirical testing of hypotheses relating brain function to religious experience using PET scanning and some newer MRI visualization techniques.     

Capacity and strategy for syntactic comprehension after left or right hemidecortication

The left and right hemispheres perform different encoding and decoding operations on a syntactically complex sentence in order to identify its meaning. Hemispheric asymmetry for syntax involves not only variations in capacity, but also differences in the strategy used to effect similar language performance.     

A category theory approach to cognitive development

The category theory concept of a commutative diagram is used to construct a model of the way in which symbolic processes are applied to problem solving. The model provides for a relationship between symbolic processes and the problem which depends on structural isomorphism and consistency, but is independent of similarity between symbol elements and problem elements. It is then shown that several different levels of thought can be distinguished within the basic model. More information is needed to assign symbolic processes to a problem in a consistent way with higher-level thought processes than with lower-level processes. These information-processing requirements permit the approximate age of mastery of each level to be predicted, thereby offering an alternate theory of cognitive developmental stages. Two experiments designed to test the theory are reported.