Relational Rules and Communist Single-Party Regimes

Relational rules structure the relationship between the oligarchs and the elite, and the oligarchs and the institutions of the regime. The chapter analyses how the 11 relational rules functioned in the Soviet Union and China over the life of the respective regimes. It explains how the oligarchs sought to insulate themselves from below and, in looking at the role of political institutions, tackles the idea that institutions serve little more than a symbolic function in authoritarian regimes. A major focus is also the power of the individual leader, its nature and bases and how this related to those institutions.

A Procedure for the Assessment of Individual Differences in Relational Discrimination Behavior in the Pigeon (Columba livia)

Raven’s progressive matrices (RPM) is a nonverbal intelligence test that examines abstract reasoning by asking subjects to correctly complete a stimulus matrix where transformations between stimuli in the matrix follow one or more relational rules. While this test has been used since 1936, and has been modified to accommodate a variety of humans, this is the first adaptation for non-human animals. We trained pigeons on a task in which the complexity of the rules could increase progressively. Pigeons initially were trained on one rule, and if discrimination reached criterion performance, were tested on novel exemplars to assess relational control. After learning one rule, some pigeons were trained on a second rule, followed by transfer tests. We chose pigeons because of their previous success in abstract and relational rule learning. Pigeons varied in how many rules could be learned and in how well they could transfer learning to novel images, indicating that this test can measure individual differences in learning abstract properties such as stimulus relations. One pigeon successfully learned and transferred two relational rules, and was tested on a matrix combining both rules together. In the future, our modified RPM procedure could be used to investigate abstract reasoning across species.

Relational rule discovery in complex discrimination learning

Failure to learn and generalise abstract relational rules has critical implications for education. In this study, we aimed to determine which training conditions facilitate relational transfer in a relatively simple (patterning) discrimination versus a relatively complex (biconditional) discrimination. The amount of training participants received had little influence on rates of relational transfer. Instead, trial-sequencing of the training contingencies influenced relational transfer in different ways depending on the complexity of the discrimination. Clustering instances of relational rules together during training improved transfer of both simpler patterning and more difficult biconditional rules, regardless of individual differences in cognitive reflection. However, blocking all trials of the same type together improved rule transfer only for biconditional discriminations. Individual differences in cognitive reflection were also more predictive of relational rule use under suboptimal training conditions. The results highlight the need for comprehensive accounts of relational learning to consider how learning conditions and individual differences affect the likelihood of engaging in learning relational structures.

A Topological Approach to Australian Cosmology and Social Organisation

Aboriginal kinship has stimulated many mathematicians. In the 1980’s, Glowczewski showed that there is a non euclidian ‘topologic’ that is common to what Indigenous Australians call their “Law”: a non hierarchical system of classificatory ritual kinship, a projection of the mythical travels of totemic ancestors (the Dreamings) into the landscape and a system of ritual obligations taboos. In other words, the social valorisation of heterogeneity recognises irreducible singularities shared by humans, non humans and the land as a condition for a commons that in no way homogenises society into a hierarchical order. The topological figure of the hypercube was used here to illustrate some complex Aboriginal relational rules that exclude the centralisation of power both in social organisation and in the totemic cosmology. To translate Indigenous spatio-temporal concepts Glowczewski was partly inspired by science fiction, that speculates about the 4th dimension. When shown the hypercube as a tool to account for the kinship logic of their Dreamings, the Warlpiri elders thought it was a ‘good game’! First published in 1989.