Showing papers on "Class (philosophy) published in 1975"

Le couturier et sa griffe : contribution à une théorie de la magie

Abstract: The "couturier" and his "signature" : contribution to a theory of magic The field of luxury goods production in which high fashion has its place, is structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between consecrated art and avant-garde art. Because of this opposition, high fashion presents a functional similarity to the structure of fractions (and secondarily, age groups) of the dominating class which predisposes it to keep ahead of the expectations of its clientele : the "young", "inexpensive", "modern", "franck", "intellectual" style is in contrast with the "luxurious", "traditional", "conservative", "bourgeois" style. The succession of a couturier poses problems permitting analysis of the sort of social alchemy realized by the couturier when he imposes his "signature", which can radically modify the social quality of a product without changing its physical nature. The field of fashion betrays with particular transparency certain of the mechanisms characteristic of what can be called an economy of symbolic exchanges. What is described as the crisis of haute couture could be only one sign among others of a restructuring of this mechanism, linked to the apparition of new tokens of distinction (and of new fractions), less naively ostentatious and less insolently luxurious than those couturiers traditionally offered.

Heegaard splittings of branched coverings of

Abstract: This paper concerns itself with the relationship between two seemingly different methods for representing a closed, orientable 3-manifold: on the one hand as a Heegaard splitting, and on the other hand as a branched covering of the 3-sphere. The ability to pass back and forth between these two representations will be applied in several different ways: 1. It will be established that there is an effective algorithm to decide whether a 3-manifold of Heegaard genus 2 is a 3-sphere. 2. We will show that the natural map from 6-plat representations of knots and links to genus 2 closed oriented 3-manifolds is injective and surjective. This relates the question of whether or not Heegaard splittings of closed, oriented 3manifolds are "unique" to the question of whether plat representations of knots and links are "unique". 3. We will give a counterexample to a conjecture (unpublished) of W. Haken, which would have implied that S3 could be identified (in the class of all simply-connected 3-manifolds) by the property that certain canonical presentations for iriS3 are always "nice". The final section of the paper studies a special class of genus 2 Heegaard splittings: the 2-fold covers of S3 which are branched over closed 3-braids. It is established that no counterexamples to the "genus 2 Poincare conjecture" occur in this class of 3-manifolds.

Thinking and Concept Attainment

Abstract: This review draws upon available work in English published during the period 1970 through 1973. The reference list was derived from two computer searches (Medline and Compfile), Psychological Abstracts, and the contents of relevant major journals for the 4 year period. The resulting yield was much too large to be included in this review. A more compelling argument for selectivity and evalua­ tion stems from the state of the field itself: it is diffuse, parochially compartmen­ talized, and lacking in comprehensive theorizing. There is little doubt that the mind is back in style. The words "cognition" and "cognitive" occur in current literature with high frequency in such disparate areas as memory, perception, and even conditioning. The period of review has seen the appearance of three new journals: Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, and Memory and Cognition. But the wide currency of the term has not been free of a certain amount of devaluation; "cognition" has so many variant meanings and connota­ tions that the remaining common core seems to be "any activity involving CNS activity between its initiation and completion ." With so broad a definition there is little, save spinal-level reflex, excluded from the class. This will not, therefore, be a review of "cognition." Rather, it is a review of "thinking" in the old-fashioned sense, where "thinking" is defined as "mental transformations employing sym­ bolic surrogates of events, objects, and processes, or properties and relations thereof." The theoretical framework underlying research on thinking has shifted over the years. There is now very little work explicitly inspired by Gestalt theory or by

Analyticity, necessity and apriority

Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate the extent of overlap between the analytic, the necessary, and the a priori. 'Analytic' is a philosopher's term, and different philosophers have given different definitions of it. For Kant who introduced the term, an 'analytic judgment' is one in which 'the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A'.2 The judgment adds 'nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, but merely (breaks) it up into these constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it, although confusedly'. A synthetic judgment, in contrast, was one in which 'B lies outside the concept A'. Kant's classification of judgments, or, as we should say, statements or propositions, was only meant to apply to 'judgments in which a relation of a subject to the predicate is thought'. For this reason later philosophers have considered Kant's definition too narrow.3 They have felt intuitively that the kind of distinction which Kant made had application not merely within the class of subjectpredicate propositions but within the wider class of all propositions. They therefore sought to define such a distinction. A large number of definitions have been provided, but I would claim that basically they fall into three groups.4 Of these, I argue, definitions of the first type seem inherently unsatisfactory; definitions of the second and third types can both be made satisfactory, and when tidied up, some definitions of the two types prove to be equivalent.

Permission + Protection = Potency: A T.A. Approach to English 101.

Abstract: SOMiE OF THE PRINCIPLES of Eric Bemrne's theory of Transactional Analysis have proven extremely useful to me in teaching English 101. The approach, which I call "going backward to move forward," concentrates on three phases: writing for oneself, writing for the live audience of one's colleagues in class, and ultimately, writing for the "real" world through publication. The course begins with my asking students to close their eyes and to recall all the things former English teachers have asked them to remember or to do when writing. Then they are asked to jot down as many of these directives as they can. Next each person is asked to write several of these on the blackboard, which was recently filled with the following: "use big words," "think before you write," "start each paragraph with your main idea," "follow outline forms," "dot your 'i's,' " "don't use overworked metaphors," "don't use 'when' or 'how' to start a sentence," "never start a sentence with 'and,'" "never use 'in conclusion,'" "never end a sentence with a preposition," "never use a double negative," "never use 'never,'" "have an interest grabbing first sentence," "never start a sentence with because," "don't use the verb 'to be,' " "be more specific,"