A propositional framework of formal reasoning is proposed, which emphasises the pattern of entering and exiting context. Contexts are modelled by an algebraic structure which reflects the order and manner in which context is entered into and exited from.The equations of the algebra partitions context terms into equivalence classes. A formal semantics is defined, containing models that map equivalence classes of certain context terms to sets of interpretations of the formula language. The corresponding Hilbert system incorporates the algebraic equations as (...) axioms asserted in context.In semigroups of contexts, where combination of contexts is associative, finite ground algebraic equations correspond to contingent equivalence between certain logical formulas. Systems for sets and multisets of contexts are obtained by presenting their respective algebras as associativity plus finite ground equations. Soundness and completeness results are proved.Some contextual reasoning systems in the literature are inherently associative, and we present those as special cases. (shrink)

The First International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modelling and Using Context, Rio de Janeiro, January 1997, gave rise to the present book, which contains a selection of the papers presented there, thoroughly refereed and revised. The treatment of contexts as bona fide objects of logical formalisation has gained wide acceptance, following the seminal impetus given by McCarthy in his Turing Award address. The field of natural language offers a particularly rich variety of examples and challenges to researchers concerned with the (...) formal modelling of context, and several chapters in the volume deal with contextualisation in the setting of natural language. Others adopt a purely formal-logical viewpoint, seeking to develop general models of even wider applicability. The 12 chapters are organised in three groups: formalisation of contextual information in natural language understanding and generation, the application of context in mechanised reasoning domains, and novel non-classical logics for contextual application. (shrink)

Based on the premise that what is relevant, consistent, or true may change from context to context, a formal framework of relevance and context is proposed in which • contexts are mathematical entities • each context has its own language with relevant implication • the languages of distinct contexts are connected by embeddings • inter-context deduction is supported by bridge rules • databases are sets of formulae tagged with deductive histories and the contexts they belong to • abduction and revision (...) are supported by a notion of consistency of formulae and sets of formulae which are relative to a context, and which can, in turn, be seen as constituents of agendas. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

Pathological morphogenesis on leaves of Fraxinus ornus (ash) and Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) under the influence of mites (Aceria fraxinivora and Eriophyes cladophthirus respectively) leads to a range of structures whose morphology and development cannot be reduced to the classical categories of plant morphology, but present a heterogeneous continuum which links fundamental structural categories. These findings support the pyramid model of plant construction.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images (...) of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music. (shrink)

Combining testimonial reports from independent and partially reliable information sources is an important epistemological problem of uncertain reasoning. Within the framework of Dempster–Shafer theory, we propose a general model of partially reliable sources, which includes several previously known results as special cases. The paper reproduces these results on the basis of a comprehensive model taxonomy. This gives a number of new insights and thereby contributes to a better understanding of this important application of reasoning with uncertain and incomplete information.

Silence in organizations refers to a state in which employees refrain from calling attention to issues at work such as illegal or immoral practices or developments that violate personal, moral, or legal standards. While Morrison and Milliken (Acad Manag Rev 25:706–725, 2000) discussed how organizational silence as a top-down organizational level phenomenon can cause employees to remain silent, a bottom-up perspective—that is, how employee motives contribute to the occurrence and maintenance of silence in organizations—has not yet been given much research (...) attention. In this paper, we argue that this perspective is a meaningful complementation of the existing literature and that it is sensible to conceptualize distinct forms of employee silence (Pinder and Harlos, Research in personnel and human resources management. JAI Press, Greenwich, 2001; van Dyne et al., J Manag Stud 40:1359–1392, 2003). Drawing on past research and theory we conceptualize four forms of employee silence, namely quiescent, acquiescent, prosocial, and opportunistic silence. We present scales to assess the four forms and provide empirical tests for their distinctiveness and patterns of relationships to various correlates and potential antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

In many systems, the tensors used to describe physical properties must acquire their structure from one vector. Knowledge of that fact alone leads to an interesting line of analysis for such systems. The analysis begins with a discussion of the types of dyadics that can be constructed from one vector. Attention is focused on certain exemplary dyadic operators, which, because of their geometrical properties, would appear particularly basic; the algebra of these dyadics is developed in detail. The algebra is then (...) used in a derivation of the expansion of general functions of these dyadics. Several applications of the general expansion are presented: the inverse of a general dyadic operator (when it exists), a general rotation operator that includes strains and reflections, the determinant of a general dyadic operator, and operators, including some new ones, used in constructing Lorentz boosts. Finally, a coordinate-free representation of the Levi-Civita tensor is provided. (shrink)

Replication of the main chromosome in the halophilic archaeon Haloferax volcanii was recently reported to continue despite deletion of all active replication origins. Equally surprising, the deletion strain grew faster than the parent strain. It was proposed that origin‐less H. volcanii duplicate their chromosomes via recombination‐dependent replication. Here, we recall our present knowledge of this mode of chromosome replication in different organisms. We consider the likelihood that it accounts for the viability of H. volcanii deleted for its main specific replication (...) origins, as well as possible alternative interpretations of the results. The selective advantages of having defined chromosome replication origins are discussed from a functional and evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

Zeki and co-workers recently proposed that perception can best be described as locally distributed, asynchronous processes that each create a kind of microconsciousness, which condense into an experienced percept. The present article is aimed at extending this theory to metacognitive feelings. We present evidence that perceptual fluency—the subjective feeling of ease during perceptual processing—is based on speed of processing at different stages of the perceptual process. Specifically, detection of briefly presented stimuli was influenced by figure-ground contrast, but not by symmetry (...) or the font of the stimuli. Conversely, discrimination of these stimuli was influenced by whether they were symmetric and by the font they were presented in , but not by figure-ground contrast. Both tasks however were related with the subjective experience of fluency . We conclude that subjective fluency is the conscious phenomenal correlate of different processing stages in visual perception. (shrink)

We investigated how color preferences vary according to season and whether those changes could be explained by the ecological valence theory. To do so, we assessed the same participants’ preferences for the same colors during fall, winter, spring, and summer in the northeastern United States, where there are large seasonal changes in environmental colors. Seasonal differences were most pronounced between fall and the other three seasons. Participants liked fall-associated dark-warm colors—for example, dark-red, dark-orange, dark-yellow, and dark-chartreuse—more during fall than other (...) seasons. The EVT could explain these changes with a modified version of Palmer and Schloss’ weighted affective valence estimate procedure that added an activation term to the WAVE equation. The results indicate that color preferences change according to season, as color-associated objects become more/less activated in the observer. These seasonal changes in color preferences could not be characterized by overall shifts in weights along cone-contrast axes. (shrink)

This is the first full English translation of Bernard Bolzano's masterwork, the Theory of Science (1837)--a monumental and revolutionary study in logic, epistemology, heuristics, and scientific methodology. Each volume includes an introduction which illuminates the historical context of Bolzano's work and its continuing relevance.

Theoretical Laws and Normative Rules: Kant and Bolzano's Views on Logic'"1" Anita Von Duhn, Genf Does logic instruct us how to think correctly? ...

In everyday life, as well as in science, we have to deal with and act on the basis of partial (i.e. incomplete, uncertain, or even inconsistent) information. This observation is the source of a broad research activity from which a number of competing approaches have arisen. There is some disagreement concerning the way in which partial or full ignorance is and should be handled. The most successful approaches include both quantitative aspects (by means of probability theory) and qualitative aspect (by (...) means of graphical or causal models or logic). Some of these approaches have important impacts on various disciplines including philosophy, computer science, statistics, mathematics, physics, and social science. Most notably, the relation between causal and probabilistic information is a topic of interest in all of these fields. The general question of how uncertainty is related to ignorance, and the connection thereof to causality, have been the key topics of the international summer school at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in August 2004. This was the third event in a series of summer schools organized by the interdisciplinary research group “Philosophy, Probability, and Modeling”. The group was in operation from September 1st, 2001, until August 31, 2005. The first summer school, held in September 2002, focused on the application of probability theory to topics of philosophical interest. Problems and questions that arise when probabilistic models and techniques are being applied in the special sciences were then discussed during the second summer school, held in July 2003. The fourth and final event in the series, in August 2005, was devoted to philosophical questions related to the application and interpretation of probabilities in physics. Each of the four summer schools attracted 40–50 people from many different countries. It was an inspiring forum for an interdisciplinary discussion among researchers and students from many different areas. This special issue collects a selection of the invited and contributed papers presented at the summer school in 2004. We acknowledge the generous support of the Center for Junior Research Fellows at the University of Konstanz, the Gesellschaft für analytische Philosophie e.V., the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Program for the Investment in the Future (ZIP) of the German Government through a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award. We thank the referees of the papers for their work, and James Moor for his interest in dedicating a special issue of this journal to Causality, Uncertainty and Ignorance. (shrink)

Ricoeur developed a very elaborated philosophy of religion. At the same time, he always moved along interdisciplinary borders of philosophy, theology, exegesis, historical and language sciences. His religious concerns are in this sense related to pre-philosophical experiences that within certain fields lend themselves to hermeneutical articulation. His analysis of the Scriptures in terms of narrativity deals with biblical texts. However, he doesn’t speak as a theologian,but as a philosopher, since the question of a philosophical and theological hermeneutics is from his (...) own point of view closely related to the fundamentaltension between autonomy and heteronomy. This paper regards his work as a new form of French philosophy of religion, and as a result of this includes a criticalconsideration of the pre-textual sphere understood as an absolute “priority”. This absolute “priority” should be presupposed by any hermeneutics of the written revelation, even when it is not able to provide a final response to its radical-phenomenological implications. (shrink)

If two stimuli need different times to be processed, this difference should in principle be reflected both by response times (RT) and by judgments of their temporal order (TOJ). However, several dissociations have been reported between RT and TOJ, e.g., RT is more affected than TOJ when stimulus intensity decreases. One account for these dissociations is to assume differences in the allocation of attention induced by the two tasks. To test this hypothesis, different distributions of attention were induced in the (...) present study between two stimulus positions (above and below fixation). Only bright stimuli appeared in one position and either bright or dim stimuli in the other. In the two RT experiments, participants had to respond to every stimulus appearing in one of the two positions. Reaction times to bright stimuli were faster when they appeared in the position where dim stimuli were likely to occur. This finding suggests that the allocation of attention was adapted to the asymmetrical arrangement of stimuli, not suggested by explicit instruction. In the two TOJ experiments, the temporal order of stimuli appearing in the two positions had to be judged. Although bright stimuli appearing at the bright-and-dim location were judged to be earlier, this effect was small and insignificant. Further, the intensity dissociation between RT and TOJ was insensitive to random vs blockwise presentations of intensities, therefore was not modified by attentional preferences. Thus, asymmetrical arrangement of stimuli has an impact on the allocation of attention, but only in the RT task. Therefore dissociations between TOJ and response times cannot be accounted for by an attentional bias in the TOJ task but probably by different use of temporal information in the two tasks. (shrink)

The studies in this book set out to examine the labile resonances of phenomenology and art in Michel Henry, by examining the different figures of movement given to the concept of the aesthetic by the philosopher. They are preceded by one of Michel Henry’s own texts. Les études qui composent ce livre proposent d’interroger les résonances labiles de la phénoménologie et de l’art chez Michel Henry, en examinant les différentes figures du déplacement imprimé par le philosophe au concept d’esthétique. Le (...) tout est précédé d’un texte de Michel Henry. (shrink)

Come l'individuo, radicalmente e fenomenologicamente, nasce nella sua Prima Ipseità della vita assoluta, Henry trova nel prologo di S. Giovanni tre condizioni trascendentali di una tale intelligibilità primordiale: Il processo vitale del 'Padre', autogenerandosi 'in inizio', riconosce in se una 'Parola' di questa autorivelazione assoluta, la quale, nella sua materialità fenomenologica, è al contempo la 'Incarnazione' intradivina del 'Figlio'. Questo costituisce una 'Cristologia primordiale', che rende riconoscibili i discorsi di prima persona di Cristo come auto-manifestazioni di una tale 'mutua interiorità'. (...) Dato che ogni vivente nasce in questa ipseità carnale-relazionale del Figlio, anche lui partecipa immediatamente, nella sua affezione vitale, alla verità originaria della vita divina; da qui derivano conseguenze per un 'cogito cristiano' di oggi nell'ambito della fenomenologia, etica, esegesi e filosofia della religione. (shrink)

Die Kultur ist nicht nur das Hervorbringen von Werken, sondern ursprünglich-phänomenologisch die Selbststeigerung des Lebens. Im Bedürfen empfängt die absolute Subjektivität des Menschen dieses Leben und will es in allem wiedererkennen, was besonders auch für die Ökonomie maßgeblich ist. In Abhebung von hermeneutischen, historischen, soziologischen oder "postmodernen" Sichtweisen der Kultur wird so ein originaler Beitrag zur "Interkulturalität" und "Wirtschaftskultur" geleistet.

A referência central do presente artigo é a fenomenologia material da vida de Michel Henry (1922-2002), fenomenologia essa mediante a qual se evidencia o quanto Karl Marx (1818-1893) merece ser reconhecido como o pensador de uma subjectividade radical em processo de realização mediante uma praxis imanente dos indivíduos, anterior a toda a abstracção política, económica ou institucional Assim, para o autor do artigo, a aplicação desta fenomenologia à economia mostra até que ponto esta última, com as suas equivalências de mercado (...) e capital, não constitui nem uma realidade nem uma teoria autónomas. Por outro lado, o artigo salienta também a enorme importância que para as nossas vidas reais e concretas pode e deve ter uma verdadeira meta-genealogia do processo real da produção e do consumo, especialmente no contexto de uma mundialização cada vez mais objectivista, baseada na aliança entre a ciência e a técnica. Com efeito, o perigo da alienação não é permanente apenas no contexto de uma tal evolução, pois, segundo Michel Henry, o cienti-fismo moderno, ao evacuar a vida subjectiva dos indivíduos, constitui também meio propício para o desenvolvimento de um fascismo latente baseado na negação "metafísica" da individualidade, assim como na "morte" associada às abstracções vazias de uma economia que facilmente se dispensa do "factor humano" ao nível de uma racionalização metodológica sem limite. The central matter of this paper is the material phenomenology of life of Michel Henry (1922-2002), a phenomenology through which it becomes evident how much Karl Marx (1818-1893) deserves to be recognised as the thinker of a radical subjectivity in the process of realization through an immanent praxis of the individuals, prior to all political, economic or institutional abstraction. Therefore, to the paper's author, the application of this phenomenology to economics shows the measure in which the later, with its equivalences of market and capital, neither constitutes an autonomous reality nor an autonomous theory. On the other hand, the paper also underlines the enormous importance which, to our real and concrete lives, a true meta-genealogy of the real process of production and consumption can and should have, especially in the context of a more and more objectivistic globalization, based on the alliance between science and technology. Indeed, the danger of alienation is not only permanent in the context of such an evolution, then, according to Michel Henry, modern scientism, as much as it tends to empty the subjective life of the individuals, is also a propitious means to the development of a latent fascism based on the negation of the "metaphysics" of individuality and, also, on the "death" associated to the empty abstractions of an economics which easily discards the "human factor" at the level of a methodological rationalization without limit. (shrink)