A Defence of Direct Surface Realism

Philosophy ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 57 (221) ◽  
pp. 339-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick Millar
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Representative Realism ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

It is commonly believed that there are, in the world, large numbers of objects which occupy three-dimensional space. It is also commonly believed that at least a large part of people's experience is of the surfaces of these material objects. Nevertheless, arguments have been adduced in favour of the view that we are never aware of such surfaces but only of distinct items called ‘sense-data’. It has also been suggested that if we couple the view that experience is limited to sense-data with an empiricist thesis to the effect that knowledge is limited by experience then we are forced to the conclusion that we cannot have any knowledge of material objects. There have been many attempts to reconcile the sense-data thesis with common beliefs about material objects. Among them have been representative realism and phenomenalism. However, a view which may have found favour recently is the Quinean one that ‘the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience’.1

Mathematical Elucidation of the Traditional Japanese Fan Focusing on Its Structure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keiko Yamazaki ◽  
Fujiko Abe ◽  
Ichiro Hagiwara
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Digital Museum ◽  
Plan View ◽  
Original Plan ◽  
The World ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

Abstract The Japanese traditional fan, which is a form of origami originating in Japan with a folding culture, has a variety of three-dimensional expression that differs from two-dimensional expression. The image painted on the fan deforms when the fan is folded. In this study, we create a digital fan model for clarifying the deformation on the fan face according to parameters such as length of the bamboo bones. We then validate the digital model with an actual fan. Furthermore, we obtain the original plan view from images of the folded fan as a reverse problem. Because folding fans are made of paper and bamboo and held in the hand, old traditional folding fans are more or less damaged; for example, many culturally valuable folding fans have lost their bones and have damaged edges, have been stretched flat, and have been framed like paintings. Reproducing the original fan without information of the original form is difficult. In the present study, we provide a digital fan model for examining the original fan shape. Old valuable folding fans are treasured by museums and collectors around the world. In future research, we would like to capture such precious folding fans in three-dimensional space applying our digital fan model and to exhibit these fans in a digital museum, providing opportunities not only to enjoy the value of the fans but also to encourage the research of Japanese traditional culture.

scholarly journals The Thinness of the Ocean in S–Θ–p Space and the Implications for Mean Diapycnal Advection

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 1714-1732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor J. McDougall ◽  
David R. Jackett
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
World Ocean ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Lateral Motion ◽  
Hydrographic Data ◽  
Mixing Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

Abstract It is shown that the ocean’s hydrography occupies little volume in the three-dimensional space defined by salinity–temperature–pressure (S–Θ–p), and the implications of this observation for the mean vertical transport across density surfaces are discussed. Although ocean data have frequently been analyzed in the two-dimensional temperature–salinity (S–Θ) diagram where casts of hydrographic data are often locally tight in S–Θ space, the relatively empty nature of the World Ocean in the three-dimensional S–Θ–p space seems not to have received attention. The World Ocean’s data lie close to a single surface in this three-dimensional space, and it is shown that this explains the known smallness of the ambiguity in defining neutral surfaces. The ill-defined nature of neutral surfaces means that lateral motion along neutral trajectories leads to mean vertical advection through density surfaces, even in the absence of small-scale mixing processes. The situation in which the ocean’s hydrography occupies a large volume in S–Θ–p space is also considered, and it is suggested that the consequent vertical diapycnal advection would be sufficiently large that the ocean would not be steady.

scholarly journals Psychiatry in free fall: In pursuit of a semiotic foothold

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 533-546
Author(s):  
Stepan Davtian ◽  
Tatyana Chernigovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Free Fall ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
A Chain ◽  
A Site ◽  
Purposeful Activity ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

Diagnostics of a mental disorder completely bases on an estimation of patient’s behaviour, verbal behaviour being the most important. The behaviour, in turn, is ruled by a situation expressed as a system of signs. Perception of a situation could be seen as a function, which depends on the context resulting from the previous situations, structuring personal world. So the world is not given — it is being formed while the person is in action. We argue that distinctive features of behaviour, including its abnormal variants, can be explained not in categories of characters and diseases but in terms of situations taking place in individual worlds. The situation in which a person perceives himself is not simply a site in a three-dimensional space at a certain moment, but a part of the world and an episode of his life. Like a text composed of words, individual world is composed of situations. Each of them needs certain context to cope with ambiguity. This context is induced by the world as a whole. And the world, in turn, is presented as a chain of situations. If the context cannot help to interpret a situation adequately, uncertainty can be eliminated by actions clarifying a situation, which is changed in a predictable way. Thus, purposeful activity, skills to make predictions and corrections of one’s own actions are crucial. Weakness of any of them inevitably leads to the distortion of the presentation of the world, to wrong evaluation of situations and, as a result, to inadequate actions that finally reduce the activity as being ineffective. Thus, the lack of activity becomes the key factor in the development of disorder, being simultaneously its cause and effect. In periods of insufficient activity conditions for violated (and violating) sign processing arise. Possible variants of sign malfunction are: oligosemia (reduction of the number of perceivable signs), hyposemia (decrease of significance of signs), hypersemia (increase of significance of some signs at the expense of others), ambisemia (uncertainty of sign, when situation remains unclear), cryptosemia (recognition of signs not obvious for other observers), and parasemia (perverted interpretation of signs influenced by a false context).

Evidence from Motion

2019 ◽  
pp. 104-116
Author(s):  
Dale Purves
Keyword(s):  
Moving Objects ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Nervous Systems ◽  
Physical Measurements ◽  
Lag Effect ◽  
The World ◽  
Perceived Motion ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

Perceived motion is defined as the apparent speed and direction of objects that are translating and/or rotating in three-dimensional space. It has long been clear, however, that the perceived speeds and directions of moving objects disagree with physical measurements of motion. With respect to speed, the flash-lag effect has been a major focus; with respect to direction, the emphasis has been on the effects of apertures. These phenomena—and many others—raise the question of how we routinely succeed in the world despite blatant discrepancies between the motions we see and the physical speeds and directions of the objects we must deal with. Resolving this puzzle presents another body of evidence pertinent to whether empirical ranking is the way nervous systems link objective and subjective domains.

Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger N. Shepard
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
Euclidean Group ◽  
Dimensional Vector Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Geodesic Paths ◽  
Abstract Spaces ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe – provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three-dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is canceled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily-shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum-entropy priors.

scholarly journals Zero-Oneness of the World: Geometries of Space and Time Between Subtext and Surface – Re-coding the Structures of Life

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Mirna Radin Sabadoš
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Enhanced Reality ◽  
First Time ◽  
Early Novel ◽  
Time Continuum ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

The proposal that the world is made of sequences of zeros and ones, overtly expressed in DeLillo’s early novel Ratner’s Star (1976), marks the first time in DeLillo’s fiction that he introduces the idea that the (creation of) reality is of mathematical nature. The “zero-oneness” of the world thirty odd years later, although it still may be an uncommon thought in literature, is ubiquitous in the visual arts, in film and in architecture, and binary code has become the basis of our digitally enhanced reality. Looking at DeLillo’s Millennial novels, this paper seeks to explore models of the space-time continuum of the fictional reality that DeLillo constructs; focusing on Ratner’s Star as a literary exploration of a three-dimensional space and on the novel Body Artist as an investigation of the fourth dimension, pondering time, we hope to register the “sum total of one’s data” (WN) as the only palpable texture of DeLillo’s reality.

A Defense of Locke and The Representative Theory of Perception

1978 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Martha Brandt Bolton
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Representative Realism ◽  
Representative Theory

This paper is a defense of the “representative theory of perception” in general, and Locke's views about perception in particular. It is intended only as a limited defense, but one against those objections which recently have been taken thoroughly to discredit both the general theory and Locke's particular position. The chief of these objections is that the representative theory leads inevitably to skepticism about the existence of objective material things. George Pitcher finds this objection to the representative theory completely persuasive and so well established that it scarcely requires discussion:It is just here [in the area of justifying perceptual knowledge of the world] that the most serious and notorious deficiencies of sense-datum theories are encountered. If the sense-datum theorist maintains the existence of physical objects, … as ordinarily conceived, then his claim that sense-data are metaphysically distinct from anything in the physical world commits him to a version of representative realism. The enormous epistemological difficulties [due to their skeptical consequences] faced by theories of this kind are well known, and I shall not say anything about them, except that I regard them as insuperable ….

Extension of the Spatial PDI Model to Three Dimensions

1997 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-178
Author(s):  
Frank O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Population Density ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Finite Lattice ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Upper Bounds ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Lower And Upper Bounds ◽  
Density Index ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

The author's population density index ( PDI) model is extended to three-dimensional distributions. A derived formula is presented that allows for the calculation of the lower and upper bounds of density in three-dimensional space for any finite lattice.

A Peptoid with Extended Shape in Water

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jumpei Morimoto ◽  
Yasuhiro Fukuda ◽  
Takumu Watanabe ◽  
Daisuke Kuroda ◽  
Kouhei Tsumoto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Spectroscopic Analysis ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Biomolecular Recognition ◽  
Biological Application ◽  
New Class ◽  
Proteolytic Resistance ◽  
Pharmacokinetic Properties ◽  
Optically Pure ◽  
Three Dimensional Space

<div> <div> <div> <p>“Peptoids” was proposed, over decades ago, as a term describing analogs of peptides that exhibit better physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties than peptides. Oligo-(N-substituted glycines) (oligo-NSG) was previously proposed as a peptoid due to its high proteolytic resistance and membrane permeability. However, oligo-NSG is conformationally flexible and is difficult to achieve a defined shape in water. This conformational flexibility is severely limiting biological application of oligo-NSG. Here, we propose oligo-(N-substituted alanines) (oligo-NSA) as a new peptoid that forms a defined shape in water. A synthetic method established in this study enabled the first isolation and conformational study of optically pure oligo-NSA. Computational simulations, crystallographic studies and spectroscopic analysis demonstrated the well-defined extended shape of oligo-NSA realized by backbone steric effects. The new class of peptoid achieves the constrained conformation without any assistance of N-substituents and serves as an ideal scaffold for displaying functional groups in well-defined three-dimensional space, which leads to effective biomolecular recognition. </p> </div> </div> </div>

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