Explication Defended

How can formal methods be applied to philosophical problems that involve informal concepts of ordinary language? Carnap answered this question by describing a methodology that he called “explication." Strawson objected that explication changes the subject and does not address the original philosophical problem; this paper shows that Carnap’s response to that objection was inadequate and offers a better response. More recent criticisms of explication by Boniolo and Eagle are shown to rest on misunderstandings of the nature of explication. It is concluded that explication is an appropriate methodology for formal philosophy.     

整体-局部范式下的负启动效应

在通常的负启动范式基础上 ,以小数字构成的大数字 ,即以同时具有整体特征和局部特征的复合数字为实验材料 ,采用数字命名任务 ,将刺激画面中复合数字的数目和注意指向作为变量进行实验。大学生充任被试。结果发现 ,在单个复合数字条件下对同一客体的非注意指向的特征进行忽略重复 ,注意整体时出现负启动 ,而注意局部时不出现负启动 ;在两个复合数字条件下对启动刺激中充当干扰项的复合数字进行忽略重复 ,则注意整体与注意局部都出现了负启动。该研究表明 ,在不同注意指向时 ,整体 -局部范式下的负启动效应具有知觉组织的层次性 ,并显示出客体内选择和客体间选择对负启动的不同影响。     

Axiomatic Quantum Theory

The basis of a rigorous formal axiomatization of quantum mechanics is constructed, built upon Dirac's bra–ket notation. The system is three-sorted, with separate variables for scalars, vectors and operators. First-order quantification over all three types of variable is permitted. Economy in the axioms is effected by, e.g., assigning a single logical function * to transform (i) a scalar into its complex conjugate, (ii) a ket vector into a bra and a bra into a ket, (iii) an operator into its adjoint. The system is accompanied by a formal semantics. Further papers will deal with vector subspaces and projection operators, operators with continuous spectra, tensor products, observables, and quantum mechanical probabilities.     

认知匹配策略和形式匹配策略的实验研究

将用以调节学生学习心向的两条教材内容的情感性处理策略——认知匹配策略和形式匹配策略分别运用于语文和外语教学中,进行现场教学实验研究。研究结果表明：分别运用这两条策略对教材内容进行情感性处理,对调节学生的学习心向,促进学生的认知和情感学习、提高课堂教学质量是可行而有效的。     

Affirming the consequent

The thesis of this paper is that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent does not suffice to make its premises at all favorably relevant to its conclusion. In support of this thesis I assume two premises and argue for a third. My two assumptions are these: (1) that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent does not suffice to make its conclusion certain relative to its premises (this is widely, if not universally, acknowledged by writers on logic), and (2) premises are favorably relevant to a conclusion only if it is certain or probable relative to them (I argued for this in an earlier paper). The premise I argue for in this paper is that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent does not suffice to make its conclusion probable relative to its premises. To establish this third premise, I first refute a defense of the contrary position (namely, that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent suffices to make its conclusion probable relative to its premises), then offer counterexamples to that position, and finally demonstrate the failure of several attempts to save it.An earlier draft of this paper was read at the meeting of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Portland on March 27, 1992. I am indebted to Terry Parsons, John Woods, and this journal's anonymous referees for their comments.     

Eine Auch Sich Selbst Missverstehende Kritik: Über das Reflexionsdefizit Formaler Explikationen

The criticism formulated by L. B. Puntel concerning the theory of dialectic proposed by the author is rejected. Puntel's attempt at explicating predication by means of (second order) predicate logic fails: It misjudges predication being already presupposed for the possibility of predicate logic, thus belonging to the transcendental conditions of formal predicate logic, so that predication itself cannot be further explicated by means of such logic. What is in fact criticized by Puntel is something like an artefact of formalization. The unreflected application of formal logic here generates problems instead of solving them.     

Development of manipulatory skills and the deployment of attention

Two independent tasks, object manipulation and auditory-visual matching, were used to examine the relationship between developing manual action skills and attention to intermodal object properties in 3.5- and 5.5-month-olds. Although handling skills improved with age, with older infants demonstrating more varied manipulation, there were no age differences for the matching task. When grouped by handling skills, a significant interaction between skill and event type was found for the two age groups combined and for 5.5-month-olds alone. Auditory-visual matching of social events did not vary with handling skills, whereas auditory-visualmatching of object events did. Infants at higher skill levels responded similarly to social and object events, whereas less skilled infants' matching preferences were weaker for object events. These findings indicate that infants increase their attention to auditory and visual properties of objects as this information becomes useful for guiding new actions. This effect is independent of age due to considerable individual variability in the development of object handling skills.     

Cognitive influences on cross-language speech perception in infancy

Previous research has shown that young infants can discriminate both native and nonnative phonetic contrasts with ease. By 10 to 12 months of age, however, infants—like adults—typically have difficulty discriminating consonant contrasts that are not used to distinguish meaning in their native language. Although the timing of this change in speech perception has been firmly established, little is currently known about the processes or mechanisms involved in this selective and adaptive reorganization in nonnative phonetic discrimination. This study was designed to determine if there is a relation between age-related changes in speech perception performance and other developing cognitive abilities. A total of 40 8- to 10-month-old infants were tested on a nonnative consonant discrimination task and then on two additional tasks (a visual categorization task and an object search task) in an attempt to determine whether changes in nonnative consonant perception coincide with changes in these other areas of cognitive/perceptual functioning. The results indicate that changes in task performance occur in synchrony across all three tasks, and that this synchrony is not explained by simple age effects. These findings suggest that domain-general cognitive/perceptual competencies may influence developmental changes in speech perception by the end of the 1st year of life.     

Argument practices

The move to Postmodernism in argumentation is often predicated on the rejection of the formal basis of argument in logic. While this rejection may be justified, and is widely discussed in the literature, the loss of logic creates problems that a Postmodern theory of argument must address without recourse to logic and its attendant modernist assumptions. This essay argues that conceiving of argument in terms ofpractices will address the key problematics of Postmodernism without abandoning those features of argumentation that make it an important social, cultural and political practice. Implications for both theory and pedagogy are discussed.The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable commentary of, and discussions with, John Lyne, Charles Willard, Steven Fuller, and Ed Schiappa.