On Legal Order: Some Criticism of the Received View

The author discusses a number of topics related to the concept of legal order and the structure of legal orders. In particular, the following theses are challenged: (1) legal orders are sets of rules; (2) the criterion of membership to such sets is validity; (3) legal orders are dynamic sets; (4) legal orders are provided with a hierarchical configuration; (5) legal orders are coherent and consistent sets.     

NATURE AS THE IMAGE OF GOD: REFLECTIONS ON THE SIGNS OF THE SACRED

Abstract. This is a brief survey of aspects of the modern scientific view of nature to see if implied therein are signs or traces of the sacred–as early religious apprehension surely supposed. Nature's power and order are discussed as is the strange dialectic of death and life, evident in modern biology as it also is in all early religion.     

Associative isolation: Unifying associative and list memory

Rather than treating paired associate and serial learning as involving the acquisition of distinct types of information [e.g. Murdock (1974). Human memory: Theory and data. New York: Wiley] I propose an Isolation Principle which treats the two as ends of a continuum. According to this principle, consecutive pairs of items are relatively isolated from other studied items in paired associates learning, but not isolated in serial list learning. The consequence is that variability that dominates forward and backward probed recall is highly correlated in pairs but less so, due to differential interference, in lists. This can explain an important dissociation: whereas forward and backward probes of pairs are nearly perfectly correlated, the correlation is only moderate for serial lists. I demonstrate this in a chaining model by varying item-to-item associative strengths and in a positional coding model by varying the similarity structure of item positions. This enables a range of models to account for data on pairs and lists, as well as potential intermediate or hybrid paradigms, within a single theoretical framework.     

聋生汉字加工的自由回忆与词序位置记忆实验研究

本研究采用韵母相同、声母相同、音异形似和音同形似四类汉字字组,对使用手语聋生、使用口语聋生和听力正常大学生进行了自由回忆和词序位置记忆两个实验。结果表明,聋生不论在汉字字组的自由回忆中还是在汉字次序信息的记忆中,对汉字的记忆效果不仅都与字组类型有关,而且都受到了语音干扰,存在语音混淆现象。这就证明,聋生在汉字加工过程中使用了语音编码,语音编码在聋生汉字加工过程中确实起到了非常重要的作用。     

An artificial opposition between grammaticality and frequency: comment on

In a recent Cognition paper (Cognition 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim “show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of grammatical principles during parsing” (p. B21). In this commentary we demonstrate that the posited contrast between grammatical principles and construction (in)frequency as sources of parsing problems is artificial because it is based on factually incorrect assumptions about the grammar of German and on inaccurate corpus frequency data concerning the German constructions involved.     

Border Crossings by Immigrants: Legality,Illegality, and Alegality

What happens to the concept of security if legal disorder manifests itself not only as illegal behavior but also as alegal behavior—acts that challenge the very distinction between legality and illegality, as drawn by a political community? Focusing on European immigration policy, this paper examines how the distinction between illegal and alegal acts critically illuminates the relation between collective (in)security and the concept of legal (dis)order. It concludes by arguing that this distinction sheds new light on the systematic relation—and tension—between security, freedom, and justice.     

Pandora: A Reasoning Toolbox using Natural Deduction Style

Pandora is a tool for supporting the learning of first ordernatural deduction. It includes a help window, an interactivecontext sensitive tutorial known as the "e-tutor" and facilitiesto save, reload and export to LATEX. Every attempt to applya natural deduction rule is met with either success or a helpfulerror message, providing the student with instant feedback.Detailed electronic logs of student usage are recorded for evaluationpurposes. This paper describes the basic functionality, thee-tutor, our experiences of using the tool in teaching and ourfuture plans.     

Temporal order judgment reveals how number magnitude affects visuospatial attention

The existence of spatial components in the mental representation of number magnitude has raised the question regarding the relation between numbers and spatial attention. We present six experiments in which this relation was examined using a temporal order judgment task to index attentional allocation. Results demonstrate that one important consequence of numerical processing is the automatic allocation of spatial attention, which in turn affects the perception of the temporal order of visual events. Given equal onset time, left-side stimuli are perceived to occur before right-side stimuli when a small number (1, 2) is processed, whereas right-side stimuli are perceived to occur before left-side stimuli when a larger number (8, 9) is processed. In addition, we show that this attentional effect is specific to quantity processing and does not generalize to non-numerical ordinal sequences.