A factor simplicity index

We propose an index for assessing the degree of factor simplicity in the context of principal components and exploratory factor analysis. The new index, which is called Loading Simplicity, is based on the idea that the communality of each variable should be related to few components, or factors, so that the loadings in each variable are either zero or as far from zero as possible. This index does not depend on the scale of the factors, and its maximum and minimum are only related to the degree of simplicity in the loading matrix. The aim of the index is to enable the degree of simplicity in loading matrices to be compared.The author would like to thank the review team for their insights and recommendations. This work was supported by a grant SEC2001-3821-C05-C02 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.     

易简工夫终久大--《周易》与陆九渊的心学

陆九渊以心解《易》,以此为其心学理论体系的建立和展开寻找到经典根据。其心学的本体论、工夫论和境界论与其对《周易》天地人三才一体的理论、三陈九卦之序、《艮》卦"艮背行庭"之旨、太极本体的解释关系密切。他的心学智慧也反过来丰富了《易》学的文化宝藏。     

The simplicity principle in human concept learning

How do we learn concepts and categories from examples? Part of the answer might be that we induce the simplest category consistent with a given set of example objects. This seemingly obvious idea, akin to simplicity principles in many fields, plays surprisingly little role in contemporary theories of concept learning, which are mostly based on the storage of exemplars, and avoid summarization or overt abstraction of any kind. This article reviews some evidence that complexity minimization does indeed play a central role in human concept learning. The chief finding is that subjects' ability to learn concepts depends heavily on the concepts' intrinsic complexity; more complex concepts are more difficult to learn. This pervasive effect suggests, contrary to exemplar theories, that concept learning critically involves the extraction of a simplified or abstracted generalization from examples.     

THE epistemologies of parsimony: A review of Ockham's razors: A user's manual by Elliott Sober

Sober analyzes two paradigms of parsimony that have been used successfully in science. These are associated with two interpretations of probability: Bayesian and frequentist. Sober applies these paradigms to problems in biology, psychology, and philosophy. In the chapter on psychology, he argues that objective data consisting of environmental input and two or more concurrent responses could be used to refute empirically the radical behaviorist thesis that probability of learned responses can be accounted for solely on the basis of environmental variables. Sober believes that such data are readily available and offers a thought experiment to illustrate his point. Behavior analysts, however, would want actual experimental data, undoubtedly with animals, before accepting any such refutation. Nonetheless, Sober's philosophical point about the type of experiment that would be capable of refuting this thesis is valid. The behavior analytic program, however, does not depend upon the truth of this thesis.     

Processing of the Korean Eojoel Ambiguity

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension. In experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading, we examined how readers resolve the Eojoel ambiguity, where the grouping of syllables is ambiguous with respect to whether a phrase-final syllable is a case marker or a part of a word. This Eojoel ambiguity offers an opportunity to test how relative frequency of the lexical entries and complexity of morphological decomposition affect ambiguity resolution. Overall, the results of the experiments presented here showed that readers noticed and processed the Eojoel ambiguity very rapidly using information about the relative frequency of alternative interpretations, while the complexity of the morphological decomposition had little effect. These results are discussed in terms of constraint-based accounts (MacDonald et al. Psychol Rev 101:676–703, 1994) of ambiguity resolution.     

古人论文学语言和意象

本文介绍古人对如何解决语言和意象不相一致这一问题的一些意见,并从中归纳出四种解决问题的方法：１．让形象说话,２．抓住事物主要特征,３．不即不离地描写,４．语言浅近     

The Simplest Axiom System for Plane Hyperbolic Geometry

We provide a quantifier-free axiom system for plane hyperbolic geometry in a language containing only absolute geometrically meaningful ternary operations (in the sense that they have the same interpretation in Euclidean geometry as well). Each axiom contains at most 4 variables. It is known that there is no axiom system for plane hyperbolic consisting of only prenex 3-variable axioms. Changing one of the axioms, one obtains an axiom system for plane Euclidean geometry, expressed in the same language, all of whose axioms are also at most 4-variable universal sentences. We also provide an axiom system for plane hyperbolic geometry in Tarski's language L _B which might be the simplest possible one in that language.     

易之"生"意与理学的生生之学

"生生之谓易"既是哲学家对宇宙相状的揭示,也是"易"本身的性质。从"天地之大德日生"到"易简"之善和"复其见天地之心",贯穿的都是同一个"生"意。理学继承前人又广加扩展,天地生物之心既是静与动的综合集成,又是天地生物与仁德流行的统一。从静体到动用,从"动之端"到"动之机",现象存在虽有生死显微,"生"之理却通贯不息。     

The simple duality: Humean passions

Hume views the passions as having both intentionality and qualitative character, which, in light of his Separability Principle, seemingly contradicts their simplicity. I reject the dominant solution to this puzzle of claiming that intentionality is an extrinsic property of the passions, arguing that a number of Hume's claims regarding the intentionality of the passions (pride and humility in particular) provide reasons for thinking an intrinsic account of the intentionality of the passions to be required. Instead, I propose to resolve this tension by appealing to Hume's treatment of the ‘distinctions of reason’, as explained by Garrett (Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).     

The Caveman's Conscience: Evolution and Moral Realism

An increasingly popular moral argument has it that the story of human evolution shows that we can explain the human disposition to make moral judgments without relying on a realm of moral facts. Such facts can thus be dispensed with. But this argument is a threat to moral realism only if there is no realist position that can explain, in the context of human evolution, the relationship between our particular moral sense and a realm of moral facts. I sketch a plausible evolutionary story that illuminates this relationship. First, the sorts of adaptive pressures facing early humans would have produced more than just potent prosocial emotions, as evolutionary antirealists like to claim; it would have produced judgments—often situated within emotions—to the effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit of conduct, for an early human who cared deeply about how others might respond to her action enjoyed the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans who did not. Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism, moral facts just are facts about how others, ideally situated, would respond to one's conduct. Thus if any objectivist moral constructivism story is true, then we can intelligibly assert that a) our capacity for moral judgment is the product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans and b) some moral judgments are objectively true.