102,242 research outputs found
The right to ignore: An epistemic defense of the nature/culture divide
This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics
Scaling Construction Grammar up to Production Systems: the SCIM
While a great effort has concerned the development of fully integrated
modular understanding systems, few researches have focused on the problem of
unifying existing linguistic formalisms with cognitive processing models. The
Situated Constructional Interpretation Model is one of these attempts. In this
model, the notion of "construction" has been adapted in order to be able to
mimic the behavior of Production Systems. The Construction Grammar approach
establishes a model of the relations between linguistic forms and meaning, by
the mean of constructions. The latter can be considered as pairings from a
topologically structured space to an unstructured space, in some way a special
kind of production rules
Closed String Tachyons, AdS/CFT, and Large N QCD
We find that tachyonic orbifold examples of AdS/CFT have corresponding
instabilities at small radius, and can decay to more generic gauge theories. We
do this by computing a destabilizing Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for
twisted operators of the corresponding quiver gauge theories, generalizing
calculations of Tseytlin and Zarembo and interpreting them in terms of the
large-N behavior of twisted-sector modes. The dynamically generated potential
involves double-trace operators, which affect large-N correlators involving
twisted fields but not those involving only untwisted fields, in line with
large-N inheritance arguments. We point out a simple reason that no such small
radius instability exists in gauge theories arising from freely acting
orbifolds, which are tachyon-free at large radius. When an instability is
present, twisted gauge theory operators with the quantum numbers of the
large-radius tachyons aquire VEVs, leaving a gauge theory with fewer degrees of
freedom in the infrared, analogous to but less extreme than ``decays to
nothing'' studied in other systems with broken supersymmetry. In some cases one
is left with pure glue QCD plus decoupled matter and U(1) factors in the IR,
which we thus conjecture is described by the corresponding (possibly strongly
coupled) endpoint of tachyon condensation in the M/String-theory dual.Comment: 28 pages, harvmac big. v2: references added; improved discussion of
RG improvemen
Encoding Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars with a Nonmonotonic Inheritance Hierarchy
This paper shows how DATR, a widely used formal language for lexical
knowledge representation, can be used to define an LTAG lexicon as an
inheritance hierarchy with internal lexical rules. A bottom-up featural
encoding is used for LTAG trees and this allows lexical rules to be implemented
as covariation constraints within feature structures. Such an approach
eliminates the considerable redundancy otherwise associated with an LTAG
lexicon.Comment: Latex source, needs aclap.sty, 8 page
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