The problem of misrepresentation meets connectionist representations : a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy

Page 162 is missing from the original copyTheories of semantics try to explain the relationship between a mental representation and the thing it represents; to explain, for instance, how my coffee representation represents coffee. (Here and in the rest of this thesis, I use the convention of writing the label for a representation in bold type.) In many traditional theories of semantics, the relationship between my coffee representation and coffee is usually explained by recourse to causal relations between coffee and this representation. But attempts at explanations along these lines have many problems, among them the problem that it is difficult to find a plausible way of accounting for the fact that representations are able to misrepresent-or have false content. Sometimes I can think "that's coffee" when what's actually in the cup being handed to me is tea. Getting this fact to sit happily with accounts of the relation between my coffee representation and coffee hasn't been an easy task. Traditional approaches to this problem haven't had a lot of success so far in explaining how a representation can misrepresent. In this thesis I aim to avoid the problems with these traditional approaches, and find a causally-based, biologically realistic way to explain semantic relations between mental representations and objects in the world, which is also capable of explaining misrepresentation. The best place to start such an endeavour is to examine what the problem of representation and misrepresentation is, and the general tactics used in traditional attempts to solve this problem. This will illustrate why misrepresentation appears to be so intractable. Through such an examination we can get a close look at the traditional approaches, and their assumptions about what representations are, what sorts of things they represent, and how they can represent what they represent. We can also get a good view of the unquestioned assumptions these traditional theories are based on. This will give us a good place to start. I'm going to argue that if we want to achieve our aim of a biologically realistic theory of semantics which shows how representations can misrepresent, we'll need an approach to the problem which does not take these assumptions as foundations. In this thesis I aim to construct an account which isn't based on these assumptions.[FROM INTRODUCTION

Characterization of the Plasma Shape of the TIG Welding Arc

Tungsten electrodes were prepared to analyse the plasma geometry at TIG welding. The investigated electrodes were La02, Th02 alloyed. Tip flatted electrodes were grinded as well. The shape of plasma were analysed for 36 different electrodes. Analysing of digital pictures, the plasma geometry were measured. Whole and brightest plasma area was checked as well. Measured values were represented as a function of taper angles. Main conclusion is that the maximum of the diagrams, which characterise the effect of taper angle for sharpened electrodes, were at taper angle of 20-30°. The properties of the red and the black electrodes are running collaterally. Despite of them the characteristics of the gold electrode shift to higher taper angles causing by the high La02 content of the electrode. There was no clear correlation between the electrode taper angle and the shape characteristics of plasma for the electrodes, which were prepared with a flat tip

Negation, 'presupposition' and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing

LMI approach to mixed performance objective controllers: application to Robust ℋ2 Synthesis

The problem of synthesizing a controller for plants subject to arbitrary, finite energy disturbances and white noise disturbances via Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) is presented. This is achieved by considering white noise disturbances as belonging to a constrained set in ℓ2. In the case of where only white noise disturbances are present, the procedure reduces to standard ℋ2 synthesis. When arbitrary, finite energy disturbances are also present, the procedure may be used to synthesize general mixed performance objective controllers, and for certain cases, Robust ℋ2 controllers

Policy Externalism

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies

Some basics on tolerances

In this note we deal with sensitivity analysis of combinatorial optimization problems and its fundamental term, the tolerance. For three classes of objective functions (?, ?, MAX) we prove some basic properties on upper and lower tolerances. We show that the upper tolerance of an element is well defined, how to compute the upper tolerance of an element, and give equivalent formulations when the upper tolerance is +? or > 0. Analogous results are proven for the lower tolerance and some results on the relationship between lower and upper tolerances are given.