We study the uncertain dichotomous choice model. In this model a set of decision makers is required to select one of two alternatives, say âsupportâ or ârejectâ a certain proposal. Applications of this model are relevant to many areas, such as political science, economics, business and management. The purpose of this paper is to estimate and compare the probabilities that different decision rules may be optimal. We consider the expert rule, the majority rule and a few in-between rules. The information (...) on the decisional skills is incomplete, and these skills arise from an exponential distribution. It turns out that the probability that the expert rule is optimal far exceeds the probability that the majority rule is optimal, especially as the number of the decision makers becomes large. (shrink)
Language and Ontology: Linguistic Relativism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) vs. Universal Grammar Universal Ontology vs. Ontological Relativity Semiotics and Ontology: Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. First part: 1965-1998 Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. Second part: 1999-2010 The Rediscovery of John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas).
For over a century, the question of the relation of language to thought has been extensively discussed in the case of color categorization, where two main views prevail. The relativist view claims that color categories are relative while the universalistic view argues that color categories are universal. Relativists also argue that color categories are linguistically determined, and universalists that they are perceptually determined. Recently, the argument for the perceptual determination of color categorization has been undermined, and the relativist view has (...) regained some ground. This paper argues that although the universalistic account of color categorization has been called into question, this is not enough to establish relativism. Color categories can still be said to be universal or particular, independent of the accounts of their universality or relativity. Because of its polarization, the debate has disregarded some issues that are key in our understanding of color categorization: the question of what a color category is and how to identify it. (shrink)
Language and Ontology: Linguistic Relativism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) vs. Universal Grammar Universal Ontology vs. Ontological Relativity Semiotics and Ontology: Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. First part: 1965-1998 Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. Second part: 1999-2010 The Rediscovery of John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas).
Edmund Husserl gave his famous London Lectures (in German) in June 1922 where he says his purpose is to explain “transcendental sociological [intersubjective] phenomenology having reference to a manifest multiplicity of conscious subjects communicating with one another”. This effective definitionof semiotic phenomenology as Communicology was reported in English (1923) by Charles K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in the first book on the topic titled The Meaning of Meaning. This groundwork was in full development by 1939 with the first detailed (...) use of Husserl’s phenomenology to explicate human communication, i.e., the publication of Wilbur Marshal Urban’s Language and Reality. My paper addresses Urban’s use of Husserl’s philosophy toboth explicate the phenomenological method and to explore the constitutive elements of human communication and culture. Urban makes use of the workon language and culture by his famous colleagues at Yale University (USA): Edward Sapir (the linguist), Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s graduate student),and Ernst Cassirer. My own teacher at the University of New Mexico (USA) was Hubert Griggs Alexander, a doctoral student under Urban and a classmateof Whorf. The interdisciplinary focus on Culture and Communicology by Professors Cassirer, Sapir, Urban, and their doctoral students, Alexander and Whorf are collectively known as the “Yale School of Communicology.” Typical empirical examples of theoretical points are provided in the footnotes. (shrink)
This is an essay about language, thought, and culture in general, and about Ancient Greek and Classical Chinese in particular. It is about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language influences the mind, and applies this hypothesis to Greek and Chinese. It is also an essay in comparative philosophy as well as a contribution to the history of ideas. From the language side, I rely on the nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and from the culture side on the (...) contemporary French sinologist François Jullien. Combining their ideas, I give substance to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and explain some of Jullien's claims about the historical and political developments of Chinese culture. The central .. (shrink)
Monogenesis of language is widely accepted, but the conventional argument seems to be mistaken; a simple probabilistic model shows that polygenesis is likely. Other prehistoric inventions are discussed, as are problems in tracing linguistic lineages. Language is a system of representations; within such a system, words can evoke complex and systematic responses. Along with its social functions, language is important to humans as a mental instrument. Indeed, the invention of language,that is the accumulation of symbols to represent emotions, objects, and (...) acts may be the most important event in human evolution, because so many developments follow from it. For example, Edward Sapir speculated that some embryonic form of language must have been available to early man to help him fashion tools from stone (Sapir,1921). Sophisticated biface stone tools date to early Homo erectus some 1.5 million years ago, suggesting a similar age for language. This paper considers whether the invention of language occurred at only one pre-historic site or at several sites. In other words, did language emerge by monogenesis or polygenesis? Early thinkers believed in monogenesis, against a background of divine creation. Perhaps the best known account is the biblical story of Adam giving names to plants and animals in the Garden of Eden. Similar legends are found among many peoples. Modern linguists too assume monogenesis, but on probabilistic grounds (see, for instance, Southworth and Daswani, 1974, p.314). The argument seems to be that the invention of language is an extremely unlikely event, because symbolization involves abstraction and requires synchronized insight by several individuals; therefore, the probability of occurrence at more than one site must be vanishingly small. We have found no explicit quantitative treatment of this question in the literature, but the underlying logic has to be the multiplication of probabilities. If p is small at one site,then p.p for two sites is smaller still, and so on. This reasoning is false, as we show here. The fallacy lies in the focus on two particular sites rather than consideration of all pairs of sites. (shrink)
Language and Ontology: Linguistic Relativism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) vs. Universal Grammar Universal Ontology vs. Ontological Relativity Semiotics and Ontology: The Rediscovery of John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas) Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. First part: 1965-1998 Annotated Bibliography of John Deely. Second part: 1999-2010..
Rabbis of thirteenth-century Spain were often exposed to two traditions, that of Northern France-Germany and that of Moslem Spain. Until now, the dominant discussion of how they balanced the contrast has been Bernard Septimus' analysis of Nahmanides (Ramban), who managed to draw fruitfully on both. Rabbenu Yonah b. Abraham of Gerona, Ramban's only slightly less famous relative, presents a useful counterexample.Rabbenu Yonah's early works reflect an almost-total immersion in Northern French ways of thinking and writing. Only gradually does he engage (...) ideas from Moslem Spain, suggesting that the mixing of the two traditions in his later writings resulted from years of slow growth and exposure to such Moslem Spanish authors as Rif, R. Bahye ibn Paquda, and Maimonides.His example suggests that how to react to these differing influences was a continuing issue for these rabbis, and that tracking it offers an important key to understanding the intellectual history of the rabbis of that era. (shrink)
“Everyone knows that language is variable.” This is the bald sentence with which Sapir (1921:147) begins his chapter on language as an historical product. He goes on to emphasize how two speakers’ usage is bound to differ “in choice of words, in sentence structure, in the relative frequency with which particular forms or combinations of words are used”. I should add that much sociolinguistic and historical linguistic research has shown that the same speaker’s usage is also variable (Labov 1966, (...) Kroch 2001:722). However, the tradition of most syntacticians has been to ignore this thing that everyone knows. (shrink)
The beginnings of unity and order in living things, by C. M. Child.--On the structure of the unconscious, by K. Koffka.--The genesis of social reactions in the young child, by J. E. Anderson.--The unconscious of the behaviorist, by J. B. Watson.--The unconscious patterning of behavior in society by E. Sapir.--The configurations of personality, by W. I. Thomas.--The prenatal and early postnatal phenomena of consciousness, by M. E. Kenworthy.--Values in social psychology, by F. L. Wells.--Higher levels of mental integration, by (...) W. A. White. (shrink)
Everett's main claim is that language is a “cultural tool“, created by hominids for communication and social cohesion. I examine the meaning of the expression “cultural tool“ in terms of the influence of language on culture (i.e. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) or of the influence of culture on language (Everett's hypothesis). I show that these hypotheses are not well-supported by evidence and that language and languages, rather than being “cultural tools“ as wholes are rather collections of tools used in different (...) language games, some cultural or social, some cognitive. I conclude that the coincidence between language and culture is due to the fact that both originate from human nature. (shrink)
Łukasiewicz and, more recently, other philosophers have cast doubts on arguments from one version of determinism to another: roughly, from the view that every event (condition, state) has a cause or is determined, to the view that the remotest possible past determines the present and future. This paper defends a special class of such arguments. It identifies constraints on the relation of determination under which the arguments concerned are valid. And, by reference to the overall causal or determinational structure of (...) the universe, it argues that the constraints themselves are highly plausible. (shrink)
This paper outlines a general theory of efficient causation, a theory that deals in a unified way with traditional or deterministic, indeterministic, probabilistic, and other causal concepts. Theorists like Lewis, Salmon, and Suppes have attempted to broaden our causal perspective by reductively analysing causal notions in other terms. By contrast, the present theory rests in the first place on a non-reductive analysis of traditional causal concepts — into formal or structural components, on the one hand, and a physical or metaphysical (...) component, on the other. The analyzans is then generalised. The theory also affords a more general propensity notion than is standard, one that helps solve major problems facing propensity interpretations of probability. (shrink)
