Taking Up Thagard’s Challenge: A Formal Model of Conceptual Revision

Thagard (1992) presented a framework for conceptual change in science based on conceptual systems. Thagard challenged belief revision theorists, claiming that traditional belief-revision systems are able to model only the two most conservative types of changes in his framework, but not the more radical ones. The main aim of this work is to take up Thagard’s challenge, presenting a belief-revision-like system able to mirror radical types of conceptual change. We will do that with a conceptual revision system, i.e. a belief-revision-like system that takes conceptual structures as units of revisions. We will show how our conceptual revision and contraction operations satisfy analogous of the AGM postulates at the conceptual level and are able to mimic Thagard’s radical types of conceptual change.

HOLISTIC MONITORING OF MACHINING SYSTEM

Nowadays, the part program describes only the process itself and not the obtained performance. The operator monitors just some of the variables describing the actually obtained product and appropriately adjusts the values of the programmed variables. This adjustment is realised with a considerable delay and without an adequate fundament (many times even intuitively). Moreover, process monitoring currently follows only to notice the occurrence of perturbations and, hence, of deviations from process plan. As consequence, the performance in accomplishing the manufacturing task might be diminished due to an insufficient knowledge about both the system dynamics and the conditions in which the process is performed. Starting from these premises, the challenge addressed here is to rebuild at conceptual level the monitoring system such us the monitoring becomes holistic, this meaning evaluation & reveal of machining system current state & dynamics. In other words, the holistic monitoring concerns both the values of the variables describing the system state and the relations of causality between them. In this paper, the holistic monitoring is introduced through an illustrative sample. The monitoring variables and functions are defined and sampled.

The Stalin Cult as Political Religion

Political religion is a concept that gained prominence around the middle of the twentieth century, being associated for many with the idea of a totalitarian regime. Political religion was seen as a secular ideology whose followers took it up with the enthusiasm and commitment normally associated with adherence to religion. Comprising liturgy, ritual and the sacralization of politics, it created a community of believers, and usually had a transcendental leadership and a millennial vision of a promised future. This paper will explore the utility of this concept for understanding leader cults in authoritarian regimes. Such cults have been prominent features of authoritarian regimes but there is little agreement at the conceptual level about how they should be understood. One of the most powerful of such cults was that of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953. This paper analyses this cult in terms of liturgy and ritual and concludes that despite some aspects that are common between the cult and religion, most ritualistic aspects of religion find no direct counterpart in the cult.

Художня артикуляція проблеми постлюдства у п’єсі Карела Чапека “Р.У.Р. Россумові універсальні роботи”

In the article Karel Čapek’s play “R.U.R. Rossum’s universal robots” is read not only as an anti-utopia devoted to the confrontation between humans and robots, but also as a work of art that defines a number of humanitarian discourses of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The play correlates with modern humanitarian studies of posthumanity, posthumanism and transhumanism, examines various projects of posthumanistic reduplication of man – the archetype of the homunculus, types of humanized robots, cyborgs, iron warriors, predicts the decline of masculine discourse and the origins of feminism. The impact factor of this dramatic text goes beyond fiction and theatre and extends to the whole culture, because the concept of “robot” introduced by Karel Čapek is a stable concept of culture, transformation and technology. At the conceptual level, the article deals with the ability of artistic thinking to forecast, identify promising general scientific issues and structure future humanitarian discourses.

Song Transmission as a Formal Cultural Practice

From a biological point of view, the singing of songs is based on the human vocal learning capacity. It is universally widespread in all cultures. The transmission of songs is an elementary cultural practice, by which members of the older generations introduce both musico-linguistic rules and affect-regulative means to the younger ones. Traditionally, informal singing in familiar settings primarily subserves affect-regulation goals, whereas formal song transmission is embedded in various normative claims and interests, such as preserving cultural heritage and representing collective and national identity. Songs are vocal acts and abstract models that are densely structured and conform to cultural rules. Songs mirror each generations’ wishes, desires, values, hopes, humor, and stories and rest on unfathomable traditions of our cultural and human history. Framed in the emerging scientific field of didactics, I argue that research on formal song transmission needs to make explicit the norms and rules that govern the relationships between song, teacher, and pupils. I investigate these three didactic components, first, by conceptualizing song as rule-governed in terms of a grammar, with songs for children representing the most elementary musico-linguistic genre. The Children’s Song Grammar presented here is based on syllables as elements and on syntactic rules concerning timing, tonality, and poetic language. It makes it possible to examine and evaluate songs in terms of correctness and well-formedness. Second, the pupils’ learning of a target song is exemplified by an acoustical micro-genetic study that shows how vocalization is gradually adapted to the song model. Third, I address the teachers’ role in song transmission with normative accounts and provide exemplary insights into how we study song teaching empirically. With each new song, a teacher teaches the musico-linguistic rules that constitute the respective genre and conveys related cultural feelings. Formal teaching includes self-evaluation and judgments with respect to educational duties and aesthetic norms. This study of the three-fold didactic process shows song transmission as experiencing shared rule-following that induces feelings of well-formedness. I argue that making the inherent normativity of this process more explicit – here systematically at a descriptive and conceptual level – enhances the scientificity of this research domain.

Territorial justice and equity criteria – spatial planning in Ticino

This paper analyses from a philosophical and interdisciplinary point of view two master plans of the canton Ticino – the first one from 1990, Keynesian, and the second one from 2009, neoliberal. The differences between the former and the latter are highlighted on a conceptual level. While the former stresses the importance of rebalancing and maintaining internal solidarity between the regions of the canton, the latter aims to make the canton more competitive and specialised. The discussion highlights how this type of analysis, by showing the political and moral concepts and criteria underlying a master plan, favours their political discussion and thus, ultimately, the implementation of a more inclusive planning process.

Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.

Variation in embodied metaphors: a contrastive analysis of taste metaphors in Spanish and English

Whereas in the late 90s the universal character of many embodied conceptual metaphors was overemphasised, in the last years some authors have claimed that culture plays a crucial role in the motivation of all kinds of conceptual metaphors, including those grounded on universal bodily experiences. In order to shed some light on this issue, we carry out a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors with basic tastes as a source domain in Spanish and in English. To this end, we employ a mixed approach, combining data from dictionaries and linguistic corpora. Our analysis reveals that variation is higher at the level of linguistic expression and lower, but still significant, at the conceptual level. Although most taste metaphors are shared by Spanish and English, a few language-specific conceptual metaphors are also found, proving that food culture has an influence on the motivation of conceptual metaphors.

The midwife of truth: The nature of irony and a rationale for its prevalence in the Gospel of John

<p>The Gospel of John is renowned for its pervasive use of irony. While this phenomenon is widely recognized by scholars, there have been only a few attempts to explain the “how” of Johannine irony and no meaningful attempt to explain its “why.” The last major treatment of the topic was by Paul Duke in his 1985 work, Irony in the Fourth Gospel, which provides an account of how Johannine irony works through an analysis of local and extended ironies. Other examinations, such as Gail O’Day’s Revelation in the Fourth Gospel in 1986, explore irony as a corollary of some other thematic concern. The reticence of scholars to delve deeper into the nature of Johannine irony is understandable given that as Duke puts it, irony laughs at all pretensions, especially the pretension of claiming to have grasped irony. This study undertakes the demanding but necessary task of describing irony to a level that allows meaningful engagement with ironic texts, while accepting that it remains ultimately indefinable. Particular attention is paid to historical shifts of understanding of the nature of irony and the implications this has for appreciating irony at a conceptual level. From a survey of the Johannine scholarship, a comprehensive but non-exhaustive overview of the Fourth Gospel’s use of irony is derived. No previous work has attempted to approach the subject in this way. The main advantage of doing so is that it allows for the identification of broad patterns of irony and the way it functions in the narrative. This in turn provides a framework for proceeding to an examination of particular texts and the identification of a possible rationale. The present study assesses several hypotheses to explain why the author of the Fourth Gospel makes such sustained use of irony. The preferred hypothesis is that it is intrinsically linked to a predominant Johannine theme of alētheia (truth). Drawing on the conceptual link between irony and truth, it argues that the truth theme is a deliberate literary strategy employed by the author to entice the reader to seek certain propositional truths within the narrative. This ultimately serves the author’s desire to evoke revelation and response in line with the Gospel’s purpose statement in 20:31. The argument that irony serves the Johannine truth theme is tested with particular reference to the Prologue (1:1-18) and the Passion Narrative (chapters 18-19). The study establishes that irony serves as the link between appearance and reality in the narrative. Its subtle and engaging qualities make irony the most suitable vehicle to testify to the Gospel’s propositional statements in a manner that fulfils the author’s stated Christological (a revelation of Jesus’ true identity) and soteriological (a response that leads to salvation) purposes.</p>

The midwife of truth: The nature of irony and a rationale for its prevalence in the Gospel of John

<p>The Gospel of John is renowned for its pervasive use of irony. While this phenomenon is widely recognized by scholars, there have been only a few attempts to explain the “how” of Johannine irony and no meaningful attempt to explain its “why.” The last major treatment of the topic was by Paul Duke in his 1985 work, Irony in the Fourth Gospel, which provides an account of how Johannine irony works through an analysis of local and extended ironies. Other examinations, such as Gail O’Day’s Revelation in the Fourth Gospel in 1986, explore irony as a corollary of some other thematic concern. The reticence of scholars to delve deeper into the nature of Johannine irony is understandable given that as Duke puts it, irony laughs at all pretensions, especially the pretension of claiming to have grasped irony. This study undertakes the demanding but necessary task of describing irony to a level that allows meaningful engagement with ironic texts, while accepting that it remains ultimately indefinable. Particular attention is paid to historical shifts of understanding of the nature of irony and the implications this has for appreciating irony at a conceptual level. From a survey of the Johannine scholarship, a comprehensive but non-exhaustive overview of the Fourth Gospel’s use of irony is derived. No previous work has attempted to approach the subject in this way. The main advantage of doing so is that it allows for the identification of broad patterns of irony and the way it functions in the narrative. This in turn provides a framework for proceeding to an examination of particular texts and the identification of a possible rationale. The present study assesses several hypotheses to explain why the author of the Fourth Gospel makes such sustained use of irony. The preferred hypothesis is that it is intrinsically linked to a predominant Johannine theme of alētheia (truth). Drawing on the conceptual link between irony and truth, it argues that the truth theme is a deliberate literary strategy employed by the author to entice the reader to seek certain propositional truths within the narrative. This ultimately serves the author’s desire to evoke revelation and response in line with the Gospel’s purpose statement in 20:31. The argument that irony serves the Johannine truth theme is tested with particular reference to the Prologue (1:1-18) and the Passion Narrative (chapters 18-19). The study establishes that irony serves as the link between appearance and reality in the narrative. Its subtle and engaging qualities make irony the most suitable vehicle to testify to the Gospel’s propositional statements in a manner that fulfils the author’s stated Christological (a revelation of Jesus’ true identity) and soteriological (a response that leads to salvation) purposes.</p>