An appraisal of the Guttinger statistic 611

Using the Systems Design procedure developed at Cranfield, an appraisal of the Guttinger Statistic 611 has been carried out; in particular, the interface of the machine has been redesigned

Seeing Numbers

In 1890 William James listed several “elementary mental categories” that he postulated as having a natural origin. Among them, alongside the ideas of time and space, he also listed the idea of number. A symptomatic feature of Informatics as well as Cognitive Science today is the tendency not to talk so much about ideas as about their representations, either in the computer or in the brain. Taking up somewhat different perspective I will discuss the way natural numbers, viewed as counts of real or imagined objects, may be experienced phenomenally. I put forth even some speculative ideas about mental number processing by numerical savants

Qualities, objects, sorts, and other treasures : gold digging in English and Arabic

In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined

Identity and Significance in the Design Team

The paper examines the nature of personal identity individuals in the design team are perceived to have, derived from behavioural evidence provided by other members of the team. Personal identity is conceived to comprise of acceptance, security and significance. The evidence for this study comprises of behaviours related to personal significance. The levels of significance and the types of behavioural patterns are analysed for the design team as a whole and by professional role. Particular behaviours are analysed, conceptualised in terms of performance related behaviours, appearance related behaviours, blame based behaviour, shame based behaviour, humility based behaviours, and confidence related behaviours

Interactive Learning-Based Realizability for Heyting Arithmetic with EM1

We apply to the semantics of Arithmetic the idea of ``finite approximation'' used to provide computational interpretations of Herbrand's Theorem, and we interpret classical proofs as constructive proofs (with constructive rules for $\vee, \exists$) over a suitable structure \StructureN for the language of natural numbers and maps of G\"odel's system \SystemT. We introduce a new Realizability semantics we call ``Interactive learning-based Realizability'', for Heyting Arithmetic plus \EM_1 (Excluded middle axiom restricted to $\Sigma^0_1$ formulas). Individuals of \StructureN evolve with time, and realizers may ``interact'' with them, by influencing their evolution. We build our semantics over Avigad's fixed point result, but the same semantics may be defined over different constructive interpretations of classical arithmetic (Berardi and de' Liguoro use continuations). Our notion of realizability extends intuitionistic realizability and differs from it only in the atomic case: we interpret atomic realizers as ``learning agents''

Particularity as Paradigm: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Hegel’s Subjective Logic

I provide a distinctively Wittgensteinian interpretation of Hegel’s Subjective Logic, including the parts on the concept, the judgement and the syllogism. I argue that Wittgenstein implicitly recognised the moments of universality, particularity and individuality; moreover, he was sensitive to Hegel’s crucial distinction between abstract and concrete universals. More specifically, for Wittgenstein the moment of particularity has the status of a paradigmatic sample which mediates between a universal concept and its individual instances. Thus, a concrete universal is a universal that includes every individual via its paradigmatic sample. Next, I provide a generic account of the emergence of concrete universals through a series of negations that follows the basic structure of Hegel’s judgement—“the individual is the universal”—and the syllogism—“the individual is the universal mediated by the particular”. This development is illustrated with examples from Hegel (a plant, Socrates, Caesar, a Stoic sage, Jesus) as well as from Wittgenstein (colour samples, the standard metre, works of art). I take Wittgenstein’s argument against private language as implying that we cannot do without paradigms in our epistemic practices. If the conclusion of the section “Subjectivity” in Hegel’s Science of Logic is that the moment of particularity cannot be ignored or dispensed with, then it would mean that we cannot do without paradigms in our epistemic practices: that is, that private rules are impossible

Typological parameters of genericity

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.