16,862 research outputs found
Duhem Before Breakfast
This essay traces some of Pierre Duhem's motives for his celebrated "Quine- Duhem thesis" to a specific worry about theory underdetermination that arises within classical mechanics, concerned with the rivalry between Duhem's own thermomechanical approach and the more narrowly "mechanical" treatment pursued by Hertz and others. In the context of the treatments of "physical infinitesimals" common at the time, these two approaches seem empirically indistinguishable. After an exposition of the basic issues, this alleged "underdetermination" is then evaluated from a more modern perspective
Determinism and the Mystery of the Missing Physics
This article surveys the difficulties in establishing determinism for classical physics in the context of several distinct foundational approaches to the discipline. It also explains that such formulations commonly appear in an incomplete condition due to a deeper problem of "missing physics.
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The Campbell Paradigm as a Behavior-Predictive Reinterpretation of the Classical Tripartite Model of Attitudes.
In this article, we introduce the Campbell Paradigm as a novel variant of Rosenberg and Hovlands (1960) tripartite model of attitudes. The Campbell Paradigm is based on a highly restricted measurement model that speaks of a compensatory relation between a persons latent attitude and the costs that come with any specific behavior. It overcomes the overarching weakness of the original tripartite model (i.e., its relative irrelevance for actual behavior) and offers a parsimonious explanation for behavior. Even though this seems attractive, we also discuss why the paradigm has not gained momentum in the 50Â years since it was originally proposed by Donald T. Campbell. To demonstrate the paradigms suitability even when implemented with an unrefined instrument in a domain where it has not been used previously, we apply the paradigm to a classic data example from attitude research from the 1984 US presidential election to account for the electorates voting intentions and actual voting behaviors
Congruence successions in compositions
A \emph{composition} is a sequence of positive integers, called \emph{parts},
having a fixed sum. By an \emph{-congruence succession}, we will mean a pair
of adjacent parts and within a composition such that . Here, we consider the problem of counting the compositions of
size according to the number of -congruence successions, extending
recent results concerning successions on subsets and permutations. A general
formula is obtained, which reduces in the limiting case to the known generating
function formula for the number of Carlitz compositions. Special attention is
paid to the case , where further enumerative results may be obtained by
means of combinatorial arguments. Finally, an asymptotic estimate is provided
for the number of compositions of size having no -congruence
successions
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