Probability for the Revision Theory of Truth

We investigate how to assign probabilities to sentences that contain a type-free truth predicate. These probability values track how often a sentence is satisfied in transfinite revision sequences, following Gupta and Belnap’s revision theory of truth. This answers an open problem by Leitgeb which asks how one might describe transfinite stages of the revision sequence using such probability functions. We offer a general construction, and explore additional constraints that lead to desirable properties of the resulting probability function. One such property is Leitgeb’s Probabilistic Convention T, which says that the probability of φ equals the probability that φ is true.publishe

Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database

This dissertation explores the situation of twentieth-century art and literature becoming digital. Focusing on relatively small online collections, I argue for materially invested readings of works of print, sound, and cinema from within a new media context. With bibliographic attention to the avant-garde legacy of media specificity and the little magazine, I argue that the “films,” “readings,” “magazines,” and “books” indexed on a series of influential websites are marked by meaningful transformations that continue to shape the present through a dramatic reconfiguration of the past. I maintain that the significance of an online version of a work is not only transformed in each instance of use, but that these versions fundamentally change our understanding of each historical work in turn. Here, I offer the analogical coding of these platforms as “little databases” after the little magazines that served as the vehicle of modernism and the historical avant-garde. Like the study of the full run of a magazine, these databases require a bridge between close and distant reading. Rather than contradict each other as is often argued, in this instance a combined macro- and microscopic mode of analysis yields valuable information not readily available by either method in isolation. In both directions, the social networks and technical protocols of database culture inscribe the limits of potential readings. Bridging the material orientation of bibliographic study with the format theory of recent media scholarship, this work constructs a media poetics for reading analog works situated within the windows, consoles, and networks of the twenty-first century

Origins of Human Language

This book proposes a detailed picture of the continuities and ruptures between communication in primates and language in humans. It explores a diversity of perspectives on the origins of language, including a fine description of vocal communication in animals, mainly in monkeys and apes, but also in birds, the study of vocal tract anatomy and cortical control of the vocal productions in monkeys and apes, the description of combinatory structures and their social and communicative value, and the exploration of the cognitive environment in which language may have emerged from nonhuman primate vocal or gestural communication

Enacting the Curriculum in English for Academic Purposes: A Legitimation Code Theory Analysis

This doctoral research project sought to better understand and articulate how English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is locally enacted. The context selected was a university summer pre-sessional programme for international students. At the time of data collection, I was the course director and the questions shaping the research emerged over a number of years in this role, primarily through the observation of teaching staff. Taking a case study approach and informed by a social realist lens (Bernstein, 1990; 2000; Maton, 2014), the research asked: How is EAP locally enacted? What are the organising principles underpinning this enactment? Drawing on Bernstein's notion of recontextualisation and theorising of the epistemic pedagogic device (Maton, 2014, after Bernstein, 1990), the study explored the 'double enactment' of EAP: firstly, from the values and beliefs shaping the pre-sessional ethos into curriculum, and then from pedagogic materials into classroom practices. Data collection and analysis combined interviews with the course designers, examination of curriculum materials, and exploration of videos of teaching. The analytical framework drew on two dimensions of Maton's Legitimation Code Theory, or 'LCT' (Maton, 2014), a development of Bernstein's code theory (Bernstein, 1977; 1990; 2000). These two dimensions were Specialisation and Semantics (Maton, 2014). Specialisation's component concepts of epistemic relations (relations between knowledge and its object of study) and social relations (relations between knowledge and knowers) were used to explore the macro-orientation and goals of the pre-sessional programme. The Semantics concept of semantic gravity (the relative context dependency of meaning) was then enacted to analyse the structuring principles of materials design and classroom recontextualisation. LCT Specialisation analysis revealed a programme characterised by a stronger orientation to knowledge practices than to knower practices - i.e. an emphasis on understanding particular concepts and developing particular analytical skills, what Maton calls a trained gaze (Maton, 2014). Some curriculum-internal variation was also observed, however, enabling a nuanced view into practices. This orientation was found to shape programme thinking and design in important ways, informing both materials development and expectations of teaching. LCT Semantics analysis revealed a local curriculum characterised by a relatively wide semantic range. Learning outcomes are geared towards both explicit understanding of core course concepts and scaffolded, spiralling opportunities for students to ground these concepts in academic writing and speaking practice. Movements across curriculum threads between concepts and practice create shifts in the context-dependency of curricular knowledge. These semantic gravity waves (Maton, 2013; Macnaught, Maton, Martin & Matruglio, 2013) over curriculum time may enable students to transfer some pre-sessional learning to texts, tasks and assessments not met on the course. LCT Semantics analysis of the principles structuring lesson design and classroom practice suggest there may be underlying patterns, or what might be considered 'signature profiles'. Illustrations of practice are analysed and interpreted as exhibiting shifts in semantic gravity. These shifts are theorised as perhaps enhancing, but also sometimes hindering, effective enactment of the espoused curriculum. LCT tools enacted for this research study enable making visible how local course values are reflected and refracted throughout an EAP programme, from the macro-design of curriculum, through individual lessons on the page to their material enactment in the classroom as pedagogic practice. The findings and the conceptual toolkit itself have implications and applications for EAP programme development, teacher education and wider sector understandings of the situated realisation of university-based curriculum and pedagogy

Developing a Polyrhythmic Idiolect

This practice-based multi-media study sets out to reveal how procedural methodologies effect transformative change in a polyrhythmic drum-set idiolect, premised on the idea that archetypal variants and phraseological patterning constituting my musical “voice” are, primarily, results of a procedural mind rather than aggregations of replicative ideas acquired from elsewhere. The thesis accordingly sets out a detailed participant-observer study designed to reveal methodological processes and outcomes pertaining to the cultivation of a unique sonic identity. In revealing how structural-organisational processes can evolve personalised ways of manipulating rhythm, this research offers new analytical tools for understanding what improvising drummers do. Two important aims of the study are (a) to effect and document transformative change in my drum-set language through the application of improvisational methodologies, and (b) to reveal these procedures in operation from a participant-observer perspective, thereby showing how sonic identity can be individuated through personal agency and decision-making/selection processes operating within constraints. Original generative methodologies for hybridizing vocabulary and propagating unique archetypal variants – namely, the Iterative Loop Cycle and Transitional Synthesis - are central to this project, which targets six developmental areas: Suspended Primary Pulsation, Densities, Pulse Streaming, Transposing Rhythm, Isochronous Asymmetry and Mixed Rates