It is argued, on the basis of ideas derived from Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Husserl's Logical Investigations, that the formal comprehends more than the logical. More specifically: that there exist certain formal-ontological constants (part, whole, overlapping, etc.) which do not fall within the province of logic. A two-dimensional directly depicting language is developed for the representation of the constants of formal ontology, and means are provided for the extension of this language to enable the representation of certain materially necessary relations. The (...) paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between formal logic, formal ontology, and mathematics. (shrink)

Fechner's conception of psychophysics included both “outer psychophysics” the relation between stimulus intensity and the response reflecting sensation strength, and “inner psychophysics” the relation between neurelectric responses and sensation strength. In his own time outer psychophysics focussed on the form of the psychophysical law, with Fechner espousing a logarithmic law, Delboeuf a variant of the logarithmic law incorporating a resting level of neural activity, and Plateau a power law. One of the issues on which the dispute was focussed concerned the (...) appearance of contrasts if the overall illumination was increased or decreased; another issue was the question of whether a sensation of a “just noticeable difference” established for one value of a sensory dimension appeared the same for a value elsewhere on the dimension. The development of “inner psychophysics” led through the works of Delboeuf, Solomons, Jastrow, and Thurstone to modern signal detection theory. A third line of research, devoted to the question of what was meant by the “measurement” of sensation strength, stemmed from the criticism of Fechner's work by von Kries and others. Although a valid body of science could be built up without the intervening variable called “sensation strength,” such a science might be a cumbersome representation of reality. When an optical contrast is set up, and its overall illumination is increased or decreased, subjective contrasts involving medium levels of lightness vary little as illumination varies, but subjective contrasts involving extreme levels of lightness might be subject to the effects of other variables. (shrink)

Modern literary theory has opened up a variety of new approaches to reading texts of all kinds, however these have been applied mainly to works of prose fiction. This volume contains a collection of essays which attempts to apply these theoretical techniques to works of poetry.

‘Force and Understanding’ is the title, or part of the title, of the third section of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes , his ‘phenomenology of spirit’. That was his first book; it was published in 1807 as Volume One of his System of Science . A second volume, he announced, would contain ‘the system of Logic as speculative philosophy, and of the other two parts of philosophy, the sciences of Nature and Spirit’. But no such volume appeared: although in 1812 his (...) Science of Logic was published as ‘the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit in an expanded arrangement of the system’, Hegel added to the 1831 edition a note explaining that since then he had brought out his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ‘in place of the projected second part’. (shrink)

‘Force and Understanding’ is the title, or part of the title, of the third section of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes, his ‘phenomenology of spirit’. That was his first book; it was published in 1807 as Volume One of his System of Science. A second volume, he announced, would contain ‘the system of Logic as speculative philosophy, and of the other two parts of philosophy, the sciences of Nature and Spirit’. But no such volume appeared: although in 1812 his Science of (...) Logic was published as ‘the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit in an expanded arrangement of the system’, Hegel added to the 1831 edition a note explaining that since then he had brought out his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ‘in place of the projected second part’. (shrink)

Using a particular formula for quantifying the effortlessness that Perruchet & Vinter suggest accompanies the detection of repetition among a set of representations concurrently in consciousness, it is shown that both the Sternberg function and the Cavanagh function, associated with immediate probed recognition tasks and memory span tasks, can be predicted.

According to a “presence/absence hypothesis,” the hippocampus is not necessary for the formation of learned associations between currently present stimuli and responses (as in classical conditioning), but is necessary whenever a stimulus, if it is to activate a particular response, must first activate a memory-representation of something not present in the here-and-now. The distinction between responses made to present stimuli as opposed to (memories of) absent stimuli was first stressed by Romanes (1889), but we find evidence in the target article (...) that supports the relevance of this distinction to our understanding of hippocampal functioning. (shrink)

Grodzinsky has argued that the traces deleted in Broca's aphasia are “phonetically silent but syntactically active” (sect. 2.). If we assume such traces to be visuospatial in nature, and adopt the term “overwriting” from the author's partial matching theory (1998), we can account for the errors made by Broca's aphasics in comprehending Grodzinsky's Examples (5a), (5b), and (6).

Partial matching theory, which maintains that some memory representations of target items in immediate memory are overwritten by others, can predict both a “theoretical” and an “actual” maximum memory span provided no chunking takes place during presentation. The latter is around 4 ± 2 items, the exact number being determined by the degree of similarity between the memory representations of two immediately successive target items.