Complex Systems from the Perspective of Category Theory: II. Covering Systems and Sheaves

Using the concept of adjunction, for the comprehension of the structure of a complex system, developed in Part I, we introduce the notion of covering systems consisting of partially or locally defined adequately understood objects. This notion incorporates the necessary and sufficient conditions for a sheaf theoretical representation of the informational content included in the structure of a complex system in terms of localization systems. Furthermore, it accommodates a formulation of an invariance property of information communication concerning the analysis of a complex system.     

Infantile Sexuality, Primary Object-Love and the Anthropological Signifi Cance of the Oedipus Complex: Re-Reading Freud's 'Female Sexuality'

The author attempts to show why and in what respect Freud's famous article 'Female sexuality' can still be a source of inspiration for a contemporary metapsychology. In this text, Freud acknowledges the importance of the child's tie to its mother for the fi rst time. Both Balint and Bowlby consider this text to be a distant forerunner of their own theories on primary object-love and attachment respectively. At the same time, Freud's text contains some elements of a 'theory of generalized seduction' as it was developed in the last decades by Jean Laplanche. 'Female sexuality' therefore presents itself as the perfect point of departure for a discussion of the relation between primary object-love (and attachment) and sexuality. Based on his reading of Freud's text, the author argues that human subjectivity is characterized by the lack of attunement between the world of the adult and the world of the child. This insight allows for a reformulation of the anthropological signifi cance of the Oedipus and castration complexes. They are no longer interpreted as universal problems that every child has to face, but as historical and contingent solutions to the lack of attunement between the child and the adult that is essential to human subjectivity.     

The unfolding and healing of analytic boundary violations: personal, clinical and cultural considerations

Jungian analysts are not exempt from an unconscious engagement in a group complex. The author hypothesizes that there is a silent, dark legacy of belief in the superiority of men's judgment and the inferiority of women's, left by Jung, that has had a wounding impact on some Jungian analysands. Conscious and public mourning may be needed to heal our cultural complex. The author, a woman, traces the origins of her own patriarchal complexes and reveals how in her first analysis these mingled with the patriarchal complex shared by Jungian institute, her two male analysts and their former analyst, a pillar of the institute's community. Her first analyst aborted her analysis to begin a personal partnership with her. Her second analyst unconsciously colluded with the first analyst in not exploring this outcome as a violation. This resulted in a second compromised treatment. The senior analyst who had been these two analysts' own analyst was consulted, and he too failed to address the transgression. After experiencing severe symptomatology, the patient entered a third analysis with a woman where transference and regression were the focus. Eventually, meaning was found in the confrontations with the particular Jungian organization and its ethics committee, who acknowledged the first analyst's behaviour to be unethical. The author sees this process as a paradigm for the enactment and healing of a group complex.     

Shedding Dialectical Tiers: A Social-Epistemic View

Is there a duty to respond to objections in order to present a good argument? Ralph Johnson argues that there is such a duty, which he refers to as the “dialectical tier“ of an argument. I deny the (alleged) duty primarily on grounds that it would exert too great a demand on arguers, harming argumentation practices. The valuable aim of responding to objections, which Johnson 's dialectical tier is meant to satisfy, can be achieved in better ways, as argumentation is a social-epistemic activity.     

Is Modernism Really Modern? Uncovering a Fallacy in Postmodernism

Some postmodernists criticize the view that the logics of Western thought can be employed universally. In doing so, they assume without adequate proof that different human societies have greatly different rationalities and employ completely different logics. This essay argues that, on the contrary, widely different cultures often share noteworthy similarities in rationality.     

内隐学习研究方法述评

内隐学习自提出以来就成为认知心理学研究的热点,近40年内隐学习领域的研究在本质上都基于几种经典的研究方法和实验逻辑。本文拟对这些代表性的内隐学习研究方法做系统的介绍和归纳。     

NARRATIVE AND MEANING IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Differences of understanding in science and in religion can be explored via the distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of explanation. Although science is inclusive of the paradigmatic, I propose that in explaining the behavior of complex adaptive systems, and in the human sciences in particular, narratives may well constitute the best scientific explanations. Causal relationships may be embedded within, and expressions of higher-order constraints provided by, complex system dynamics, best understood via the temporal organization of intentionalities that constitute narrative. Complex adaptive systems, out of which intentions emerge, have behavioral trajectories that are in principle unique, contingent, and nondeterministic even in stable states and unpredictable across phase transitions. Given such unpredictability, the only explanation can be an interpretive story that retrospectively retraces the actual changes in dynamics. Without narrative, personality traits and human actions are incomprehensible. Such phenomena do not permit a reduction of purposive acts to nonpurposive elements or of reasons to the causes they constrain. Causality does not exhaust meaning. Given the role of narratives in human lives, religion and mythology provide larger stories within which individual stories make sense. Differences between narrative and historical truth suggest how we can be constituted by what we imagine ourselves to be.     

Parallelism in the Early Moist Texts

Parallelism is present everywhere in the early Moist texts: at the syntactic level, at the semantic level, between sentences, between sets of sentences, between argumentative structures. The present article gives many examples of the phenomenon: parallelism of insistence, insistence from top to bottom, insistence from bottom to top, parallelism with symmetry, parallelism involving negation, subcontraries and negation at deeper levels, parallelism of the argumentative structures. Logic is particularly applied to the study of parallelism involving negation. From the point of view of argumentation, it is shown that many of those constructions have an important role in supporting arguments such as: arguments of generalization, a fortiori arguments, arguments of exemplarity, consequentialist arguments, arguments by comparison. This study draws the attention to the importance of argumentation in the study of Moism and gives a new light on the argument by parallelism (mou 侔) in the “Xiaoqu”: It is a natural extension of what we call “parallelism involving negation,” already very common in the early Moist texts.     

Strategic Maneuvering with the Intention of the Legislator in the Justification of Judicial Decisions

The author gives an analysis of the strategic manoeuvring in the justification of legal decisions from a pragma-dialectical perspective by showing how a judge tries to reconcile dialectical and rhetorical aims. On the basis of an analysis and evaluation of the argumentation given by the US Supreme Court in the famous Holy Trinity case, it is shown how in a case in which the judge wants to make an exception to a legal rule for the concrete case tries to meet the dialectical reasonableness norm by seeing to it that his standpoint is sufficiently defended according to the requirements of the burden of proof of a judge in a rational critical discussion and how he tries at the same time to be rhetorically convincing for the legal audience by presenting the decision as a choice that is in line with the argumentation schemes and starting points that can be considered as accepted by the legal community in the US and by the US community as a whole.