Two Paradigmatic Strategies for Reading Zhuang Zi\u27s Happy Fish Vignette as Philosophy: Guo Xiang\u27s and Wang Fuzhi\u27s Approaches

One of the most beloved passages in the Zhuang-Zi text is a dialogue between Hui Zi and Zhuang Zi at the end of the “Qiu-shui” chapter. While this is one of many vignettes involving Hui Zi and Zhuang Zi in the text, this particular vignette has recently drawn attention in Chinese and comparative philosophy circles. The most basic question concerning these studies is whether or not the passage represents a substantial philosophical dispute, or instead idle chitchat between two friends. This vignette has not only received much attention as of late, but commentators from at least Guo Xiang onward have taken the conversation as substantial rather than merely charming. Of the traditional readings that take the passage as substantial, there are two main strategies for taking Zhuang Zi as “winning” a substantial dispute: (1) One that argues Zhuang Zi is undermining Hui Zi’s position without offering a positive position, and (2) another that argues that Zhuang Zi is undermining Hui Zi’s position by offering a positive position. Guo Xiang’s “official commentary” is paradigmatic of the first “negative” strategy, while Wang Fuzhi’s reading is paradigmatic of the second “positive” strategy. The goal in the present article is to present these two strategies for reading the passage by translating and analyzing Guo’s and Wang’s annotations, thereby showing how the passage might be and has been taken as more than frivolous chitchat

Hadronic production of a Higgs boson and two jets at next-to-leading order

We perform an update of the next-to-leading order calculation of the rate for Higgs boson production in association with two jets. Our new calculation incorporates the full analytic result for the one-loop virtual amplitude. This new theoretical information allows us to construct a code including the decay of the Higgs boson without incurring a prohibitive penalty in computer running time. Results are presented for the Tevatron, where implications for the Higgs search are sketched, and also for a range of scenarios at the LHC.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

The Link between Cognition and the Complexity of Engineering Systems Design

This paper focuses on the role of human cognition in the design of large complex systems. It contrasts the physical system that is the product of the design with the cognitive model that is used by the designer to “understand” the system. The complexity of the system relevant to the designer is a function not only of the physical system, but also of the cognitive model that the designer holds in his mind. Furthermore, the level of cognitive model available to an experienced designer depends on the state of domain knowledge. To be useful in answering the question, “How complex is this system to design?” the state of the domain knowledge available to the designer must be assessed with respect to the level at which the design problem is posed. The concept of conceptual distance is introduced that depends on the disparity between the present level of integrated knowledge and the conceptual level of the design problem. This “distance” is a measure of the complexity of the design task and is called the cognitive complexity of the design. To investigate the concept of cognitive complexity a model of human knowledge is proposed along with a set of graphical abstractions. It is concluded that the cognitive complexity of the design task is neither wholly intrinsic (a property of the system) nor wholly subjective (a property of the mind) but requires an objective evaluation of the engineering problem with respect to present knowledge. It is noted that the structure of knowledge in a specific domain can be mapped and therefore a research program can be launched to systematically determine the difficulty of various engineering endeavors