Showing papers on "Class (philosophy) published in 1974"

Facts, events and their identity conditions

Abstract: At one time I believed the first two identity statements to be false but I now believe all three to be true (the first, pretend-true, of course). Part of the aim of this paper is to explain and justify all three judgments. In a word, I shall be partly concerned with identity conditions for events. If I spend a lot of time on identity conditions for facts it's just because believe the former are correctly explicated by the latter. Davidson3 has offered the following identity conditions for events: Events are identical if and only if they have exactly the same causes and effects. (p. 231) He goes on to add that although the definition may seem to have an air of circularity about it, it is not a formal circularity, since "no identities appear on the right hand side." But this observation misses the point of identity conditions. The usual criterion for classes is: Two first order classes are identical if and only if every individual which is a member of one class is a member of the other. The right hand side is logically equivalent to: Every individual which is a member of one class is identical with some individual which is a member of the other. This is a bit fancy but would be an unobjectionable statement of identity conditions for classes. The reason is that although it contains the identity sign, what is in question is the identity of members, not of classes themselves. Contrast this with the following: Two first-order classes are identical if every subclass of one class is a sub-class of the other. This is true

Treating Data Collected by the “Small World” Method as a Markov Process

Abstract: This article uses data gathered by the "small world" technique to estimate the distance between social categories, the diffuseness of connection within a category, and the relative isolation of various categories. The critical questions for the data are the adequacy of the categories and the distribution of the chains of booklets which fail to reach the target. If the population can be divided into n categories, the natural model for the data is an n+2 state Markov process where the two additional states are "lost" and "target." The discussion centers around the use of the transition matrix as a description of social structure and the comparison of observed and predicted average chain lengths as a test for the adequacy of the categories as a descriptive system. If the categories are "good," the "lost" column of the transition matrix can be eliminated and the new matrix can then be used to "correct" the observed average chain lengths to estimates of the average chain lengths, had all chains been completed. Milgram (1967; 1969), Korte and Milgram (1970), Shotland (1970; 1971), and Travers and Milgram ( 1969), have used a technique that extends classical sociometry to the study of very large preexisting groups such as nations and campuses. Milgram (1967) called the method the "small world' technique. A booklet is given to a "starter" person with instructions This content downloaded from 207.46.13.86 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 04:26:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 322 / SOCIAL FORCES / vol. 52, mar. 1974 to move the booklet to a person designated as the target. If the starter does not know the target according to the established criterion (for example, knowing the person on a first name basis) then he is instructed to pass the booklet to a person he does know (according to the criterion) who has a better chance of knowing the target. This process is repeated until it reaches the target. If the booklet reaches the target, the number of intermediaries or passes is an index of the social distance from starter to target. Thus Milgram gives an estimate of about five intermediaries as the average social distance of two randomly chosen people in the United States. If the population can be partitioned into exhaustive categories, the average distance from persons in category A to persons in category B can be taken as an index of the distance from class A to class B. The distance from A to B can be estimated from a sample of chains where the starter is randomly selected from A and the target is randomly and independently selected from B. Finally we note that this procedure can be applied to a single class A. However, the average length of chains from one person in A to another person in A will not be zero and is thus not a "distance" measure. Rather this number assesses the diffuseness of social structure in a category and if categories are of the same size it is a measure of average social isolation. For example, the social distances betWeen the students, faculty, and administrators of Michigan State University were measured by Shotland (1970; 1971). His distances are shown in Table 1. Table 1. The Mean Number of Intermediaries Required for a Booklet to Go from People in One University Category to People in Another (Shotland, 1970). Each cell mean is based on 110 booklets

Natural Language Concepts: Additional Evidence.

Abstract: NEIMARK, EDITH D. Natural Language Concepts: Additional Evidence. CHnm DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 508-511. 76 Ss in grades 2, 6, and college were asked to sort 50 pictures with respect to the class labels "food," "things to eat," "clothing," and "things to wear." The first and third categories, as well as the general procedure employed, were used earlier by Saltz, Soller, and Sigel (1972). The remaining class labels were employed to test for effect of label specificity. The classes "food" and "things to eat" are functionally equivalent all ages; both show a slight increase in size with age. However, "clothing" and"things to wear" are functionally equivalent only for second graders, with a decrease in the size and composition of "clothing" with age. Details of inclusion for this class did not support the earlier findings of Saltz, Soller, and Sigel.

A Note on "Pauline Predications" in Plato

Abstract: For to say this is to imply that (3) Snow is hot is always false:' there could never have been an occasion on which snow would be hot; hence (2) would be bound to be always true. Now in the Platonic ontology the nouns, "fire," "snow," and the adjectives, "hot," "cold," get their meaning by referring to their respective Forms. Some scholars have doubted or denied that things like Fire and Snow have a place in the authorized gallery of Platonic Forms. But it is not an eccentric view to hold, as I have held,2 that in the passage on "the clever aitia" in the Phaedo Plato treats Fire, Snow, Fever as et& on a par with ultra-respectable Forms, like Odd and Even. Proceeding on this assumption, I ask: How would Plato want us to understand the "is" in (1), (2), and (3)? Is he using the copula in the same way it is most commonly used in Greek (as in English) subjectpredicate sentences, sc. to indicate that the individual named by the subject-term is a member of the class of those possessing the attribute expressed by the predicate-term? This use of "is" may be conveniently indicated, after Peano, by the letter epsilon (for "=Lr"'), writing "Socrates c wise," for "Socrates is wise." It is beyond dispute that

Thinking and Being

Abstract: We may regard the question of validity as settled for one class of judgments, namely, analytic judgments. They formed the real subject matter of the second part of our inquiry. Since an analytic judgment asserts of an object only what is contained in the definition of the object, it therefore correlates with the object a sign that by agreement is fixed as a sign for that object. It provides a unique correlation in conformity with the definition of uniqueness, and is thus absolutely true. The proposition “Analytic judgments are absolutely valid” is itself an analytic judgment. Such judgments have nothing whatever to do with knowledge of reality, and may therefore be completely separated from it. Their realm is that of thinking, not of being.

Saint Thomas Aquinas'sTheory of Universals

Abstract: St. Thomas is thus quite clear on the fact that only concrete sub stances, individual compositions of matter and form, actually exist in the material world. But though he is at one with Aristotle in denying the separate existence of universals . . . , he also follows Aristotle in asserting that the form needs to be individuated. The form is the universal element, being that which places an object in its class, in its species, making it to be horse or elm or iron. . . .*

Philosophical Investigations Remark 43 Revisited

Abstract: In the first paragraph of 43 Wittgenstein is saying that in many cases, the term 'meaning', where the concern is with the definition (= explanation) of a word, can be defined as the use of the word in the language. One can say this if one is concerned with definition, if one needs or wants to define the word 'meaning'. There is an ambiguity about whether Wittgenstein is concerned with a large class of cases of meaning or a large class of cases of word meaning. D. Gustafson argues that Wittgenstein is concerned with the former, contrasting a large class of cases of word meaning with another class of cases including the meaning of life ('On Pitcher's Account of Investigations ?43,' Philos. and Phen. Research, I967). I think that the latter reading is more plausible. Wittgenstein is concerned with a large class of cases of word meaning which is explainable by use, contrasting it with a smaller class of cases of word meaning which is not explainable in this way. Wittgenstein is not concerned enough with non-linguistic meaning such as the meaning of life or clouds meaning rain to want to set it aside here. MIore important, this reading fits in nicely with the second paragraph of 43 which most commentators simply ignore. The meaning of some words, namely some names, is explained not by use but by pointing to the bearer of the name. There are at least two reasons why Wittgenstein does not write of all word meaning in 43. First, one of Wittgenstein's main themes in the Investigations is that language is diverse and multiform. There are countless kinds of words and sentences (I I, 23). They are not countless because there is an infinite number of them but rather because there are many different ways of grouping kinds of words (17). Language does not have an essence if an essence is something present in all language which makes us

On time-dependent linear transformations

Abstract: We have introduced a definition of a slowly changing time-dependent linear transformation on a class of non-stationary stochastic processes and have studied the "spectral" relationship between the input and output processes. In addition, using this definition, we have extended one important property of coherency and the concept of residual variance bound pertin.nt to the theory of stationary stochastic processes to the non-stationary case.