锥指博识说《周易》——钱钟书论《易》述评

钱钟书先生《管锥编》开篇即论《周易》,他以如锥的深见,广博的学识,对《易》之若干重要义理、用象奥秘乃至修辞妙诣,皆用中西比较之法阐明其于昔世、今世,东方、西方的普遍性意义,并且给予颇具启迪性的发挥,使今之读《易》者获得不少生动的意趣。     

Constructing Images of the Divine: Latent Heterogeneity in Americans’ Impressions of God

How do individuals psychologically organize their images of the divine? Most work on this topic is factor‐analytic in nature, finding that God images vary with respect to love, judgment, and engagement. However, few studies look at how individuals spontaneously combine these divine dimensions into composite images of God. To fill this gap, we subject data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey to latent class analysis and find evidence for five depictions of God: (1) a poorly defined, uninvolved deity; (2) a loving, nonjudgmental deity who is engaged with humanity; (3) a nullity or nonentity; (4) a loving deity who is neither judgmental nor engaged with humanity; and (5) a loving deity who is also both judgmental and engaged. We then present evidence that individuals holding these images vary in their denominational background, religious attitudes and behaviors, and general traits. Our findings suggest that individuals may impose not only a dimensional structure on images of the divine, but a categorical one as well.     

AN ESSAY ON DREAMING,PSYCHICAL WORKING OUT AND WORKING THROUGH2

In this paper the author attempts to expand the idea put forward by Freud who considered dreams as a special form of unconscious thinking. It is the author's contention that the psychical working‐out function performed by dreams is a form of unconscious thinking, which transforms affects into memories and mental structures. He also attempts to clarify the way in which meaning is built and transformed in mental life. In that respect the unconscious internal world is seen as a form of unconscious thinking, a private theatre where meaning is generated and transformed. He focuses on what happens to feelings in dreams in connection with the meanings as a result of and an expression of the several stages of working through. The dream world is described as the setting where the mind gives expressive pictorial representation to the emotions involved in a conflict: a first step towards thinkability. The dreamwork also constitutes a process through which meaning is apprehended, built on and transformed at an expressive non‐discursive level, based on representation through figurative/pictorial images. The author draws on Meltzer's formulation to conjecture that the working‐through function of dreams, mainly in response to interpretations, is performed by a process of progression in formal qualities of the representations made available by dreaming in the form he has called affective pictograms. It is through progression in formal qualities of the representation that the thinking capabilities of the affective life develop and become part of the process of what is called metaphorically the metabolisation of emotional life. This process takes place through migration of meaning across various levels of mental process. In this perspective the analyst'sinterpretations of dreams effect what linguists call transmutation of the symbolic basis, a process that is necessary to help the mind to improve its capacity to think. Something expressed on the evocative plane and condensed into a pictographic image is then transformed into verbal language that expresses meaning. These conceptions are illustrated by a detailed clinical case.     

Recognition of natural scenes from global properties: seeing the forest without representing the trees

Human observers are able to rapidly and accurately categorize natural scenes, but the representation mediating this feat is still unknown. Here we propose a framework of rapid scene categorization that does not segment a scene into objects and instead uses a vocabulary of global, ecological properties that describe spatial and functional aspects of scene space (such as navigability or mean depth). In Experiment 1, we obtained ground truth rankings on global properties for use in Experiments 2-4. To what extent do human observers use global property information when rapidly categorizing natural scenes? In Experiment 2, we found that global property resemblance was a strong predictor of both false alarm rates and reaction times in a rapid scene categorization experiment. To what extent is global property information alone a sufficient predictor of rapid natural scene categorization? In Experiment 3, we found that the performance of a classifier representing only these properties is indistinguishable from human performance in a rapid scene categorization task in terms of both accuracy and false alarms. To what extent is this high predictability unique to a global property representation? In Experiment 4, we compared two models that represent scene object information to human categorization performance and found that these models had lower fidelity at representing the patterns of performance than the global property model. These results provide support for the hypothesis that rapid categorization of natural scenes may not be mediated primarily though objects and parts, but also through global properties of structure and affordance.     

On Taboos: The Danish Cartoon Crisis 2005–20081

Abstract : The international crisis following the publication of 12 Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands‐Posten (September 30, 2005) raises the general question of how to exercise the freedom of expression in relation to religious taboos. After briefly reviewing the Cartoon Crisis from September 2005 to the bombings on the Danish Ambassay in Pakistan in June 2008, the article addresses Lutheran resources for coping with secularisation and desecularisation, in particular as regards the taboos that persist as a part of religious and humanistic values. The thesis is that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms has given rise to two models of interpretation that have both been historically active. The doctrine of the two regiments has been interpreted both as a ‘liberalist’ argument for a principled separation of religion and politics, and as a ‘social‐conservative’ (later Social Democratic) argument for the view that the state should take care of its citizens' welfare through education, the legal system and social services. In today's global and multi‐religious world, this leads us to ask the question to what extent a welfare society, for the sake of peace and social order, should, or should not, protect religious sensitivities. Should religious communities always be kept out of public life, or can they be recognised as non‐governmental organizations in civil society, hence as potential partners for the state?     

De l'argumentation comme métamorphose

Linguistic rhetoric and argumentative reasoning are generally identified. Certain types of problems, however, make use of non-verbal systems of representation, and, among them, image. Image is not just matter but also form, and computer processing in AI makes it possible to grasp this form by linguistic means (logico-mathematical languages). The synthesis of animated images has made it possible to represent metamorphoses, the thought of the unexpected. The fact that language produces image (and conversely) does not fail to transform the standard ways of thinking about epistemology.

     

Convergence theory for partial images and revision of the definition of total images

Guttman's assumption underlying his definition of “total images” is rejected: Partial images are not generally convergent everywhere. Even divergence everywhere is shown to be possible. The convergence type always found on partial images is convergence in quadratic mean; hence, total images are redefined as quadratic mean-limits. In determining the convergence type in special situations, the asymptotic properties of certain correlations are important, implying, in some cases, convergence almost everywhere, which is also effected by a countable population or multivariate normality or independent variables. The interpretations of a total image as a predictor, and a “common-factor score”, respectively, are made precise.     

Frank Ebersole on Wittgenstein and Pictures in Philosophy

How do we get into trouble in philosophy, and what do pictures have to do with it? This article addresses Frank Ebersole's thoughts on (Wittgenstein's remarks on) pictures in philosophy. It identifies the puzzlement generated for Ebersole by what Wittgenstein says and also considers some puzzling aspects of Ebersole's own renderings of pictures. It distinguishes between the philosophical picture and the pictorial form in which it may be crystalized and shows how philosophy's reliance on situationally disembedded grammatical stories (pictorial or not) leads us into trouble. Accordingly, responding to such trouble consists not in recovering the picture, in the sense of a single “object” or image we had before our mind's eye, but in—what is better described as Ebersole's strategy of—supplying a grammatical example (pictorial or otherwise) to go with our thinking, an example that makes what we think and say clear to ourselves.     

A computer touch-screen apparatus for training visual discriminations in rats.

We describe an operant conditioning apparatus that uses computerized touch-screen technology and is designed for the versatile and highly controlled testing of rats in a potentially wide variety of behavioral paradigms. Although computer-controlled touch-screen systems have been developed for use with pigeons, monkeys, and humans, analogous technologies and methods have not yet been developed for rats. The development of a touch-screen system for rats could enhance the efficiency of behavioral research with rats, and may offer a unique tool for studying animal learning. In the first test of the utility of the apparatus, 3 Sprague-Dawley rats learned to activate the touch screen only after the touch-screen panel was made slightly movable. These animals then learned to discriminate visual stimuli presented on the computer monitor, but only after the food magazine and pellet dispenser were moved to the rear of the chamber opposite the stimulus display and response window. In a test of the utility of the modified apparatus, 6 Long-Evans rats learned to activate the touch screen and learned one of three different simple discriminations using computer-generated, visually presented stimuli. A basic method for training rats to activate the computer touch screen and for visual discrimination training is described. Results show that rats learned to activate the touch screen and discriminate visual stimuli presented on a computer monitor. Potential applications and advantages of the touch-screen-equipped rat operant conditioning chamber are discussed.     

Adult Attachment and Motivated Attention to Social Images: Attachment-Based Differences in Event-Related Brain Potentials to Emotional Images

Differences in adult attachment may concord with differences in social perception. The present study aimed to measure neural activity associated with the presentation of visual social stimuli. In an affective oddball paradigm, event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral images of people and categorized them according to valence. Brain response amplitudes were examined across valence categories and across attachment groups. Results revealed differences between anxious and avoidant groups in “emotion bias”. The avoidant group displayed a bias towards more neural activation in response to negative compared to positive images. The anxious group trended in the opposite direction. Results are discussed in terms of possible attachment-based differences in motivated attention to social stimuli.