Showing papers on "Class (philosophy) published in 1978"

Distributing a Municipal Service: A Case Study of Housing Inspection

Abstract: VALDISTRIBUTION OF PUBLIC SERVICES iS widely believed to be a predictable outcome in city politics. One common supposition is that the quality (or "responsiveness") of municipal services in neighborhoods derives from "policies" deliberately set by highranking "decision-makers." Another is that service patterns vary with the extent of neighborhood "power," which is presumably related to the strength of a district's community groups, which in turn depends on local socio-economic status. Either way the model of "who gets what" is systematic: in the first instance a purposive scheme is being perpetrated. In the second, there is a "pluralist bias" which is also predictable: middle and upper-middle class districts, because of superior organizational resources, get favorable treatment; the "powerless" urban poor are invariably short-changed;'

Principles of Database Conceptual Design

Abstract: Criteria and methodologies for the conceptual design of databases, particularly in large and sophisticated applications, are addressed. For a design to be understandable to user and designer alike, intuitive methods for abstracting concepts from a mass of detail must be employed. Two abstraction methods are particularly important — aggregation and generalization. Aggregation forms a concept by abstracting a relationship between other concepts (called components). Generalization forms a concept by abstracting a class of other concepts (called categories). The principle of "object relativity" is essential for the successful integration of abstractions. This principle states that individuals, categories, relationships and components are just different ways of viewing the same abstract objects. Using this principle a design may be hierarchically organized into independently meaningful abstractions. An "abstract syntax" is introduced to specify these abstraction hierarchies. An advantage of this abstract syntax is that some concepts do not have to be arbitrarily classified as "roles". The principle of "individual preservation" is a minimal requirement for maintaining the semantics of aggregation and generalization. It states that every user-invokeable operation must preserve the integrity of individuals. A methodology for designing an abstract syntax specification is outlined. The simplicity of this methodology is directly due to the principles of object relativity and individual preservation.

On the definition of a close-to-convex function

Abstract: The standard definition of a close-to-convex function involves a complex numerical factor eiβ which is on occasion erroneously replaced by 1. While it is known to experts in the field that this replacement cannot be made without essentially changing the class, explicit reasons for this fact seem to be lacking in the literature. Our purpose is to fill this gap, and in so doing we are lead to a new coefficient problem which is solved for n=2, but is open for n>2.

Presenting A Strategy for Indefinite Integration.

Abstract: Introduction and theoretical overview. Students in a first-year calculus class should, with a reasonable amount of practice, be able to evaluate indefinite integrals with much the same facility as their instructor does. At least, practice is apparently the telling advantage teachers have over their students. Unlike subjects such as "related rates," integration is sufficiently straightforward that the instructor's "cleverness," "insight," or "mathematical ability" should play a minor role except in the most complex problems. Equally important, integration is a technical skill in which one is little helped by theoretical knowledge. In many areas-the mean value theorem and its implications, for example-the instructor's background provides a perspective completely inaccessible to the student, so one could not expect the student to deal with the subject matter the way the teacher does. In integration, however, we would expect an instructor's perspective to be of no more help in evaluating an integral than would a knowledge of abstract group theory be of assistance in determining the product of two three-digit numbers. Thus we could reasonably expect to set very high performance standards for our students. Yet they consistently have more difficulty evaluating integrals than they "should," in spite of many hours of working on practice problems. In this article, we argue (1) that these difficulties occur largely because students lack a coherent and efficient means of approaching problems in integration, and not because they have difficulty learning the important techniques; and (2) that we can enhance students' abilities to evaluate integrals, with no extra study time, by providing them with a coherent approach. We discuss our methodology briefly, in the hope that our readers will consider applying it in other areas. It has been used successfully, in areas ranging from artificial intelligence simulations (for example, Slagle's SAINT program for indefinite integrals) to instruction in the art of juggling. In broad outline, the major phases of experimentation are as follows. 1. Determine, as accurately as possible, what your experimental audience can and cannot do. (The next section of this paper assesses student facility with indefinite integrals, both before and after the "standard" presentation of the material.) 2. Examine, in minute detail, the action of "experts" as they perform the desired task. The purposes of this examination are to: (a) discover regularities, strategies, or implicit rules the "experts" may be using-often without being conscious of them-as they solve problems; and (b) decompose the problem-solving process into smaller, more manageable "chunks" which can be taught individually and then carefully combined. (The third section describes the process of isolating an effective strategy for indefinite integration.) 3. Create a model of the problem-solving process based on the "chunks" discovered in (b), making explicit use of the strategies discovered in (a). Design instructional materials which make both accessible to the students. (The integration materials are described in the fourth section.) 4. Test and revise both the model and the instructional materials. Preliminary test results for the integration strategy are described in the fifth section.

Prolegomenon to a Theory of Religion

Abstract: The issues of definition and theory of Religion continue to be of fundamental importance to Religious Studies. The present essay argues that it is possible (a) to set forth a definition of the term Religion (b) whose analytic components can be construed as systemic "terms" (c) which can then be studied from the perspective of various relations so that all of the important issues in the field of Religious Studies can be exhibited in a systematic manner. Such a systematic clarification could prove useful in constructing a theory or theories of Religion, and it is in this sense that the analysis set forth in this presentation can be taken as "prolegomenon to a theory of Religion." The essay emphasizes the importance of synthetic, conceptual constructs in Religious Studies and attempts to clarify intensional and extensional levels of analysis in our field. Utilizing the theoretical work of L. Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics, the following definitions are proposed. Religion is a 'complete system of human communication' (or a 'form of life) showing in primarily 'commissive,' 'behabitive,' and 'exercitive' modes how a community comports itself when it encounters an 'untranscendable negation of. . . possibilities.' Religious Studies is a 'complete system of human communication' (or a 'form of life) showing in primarily 'verdictive' and 'expositive' modes how a community interprets the relations between and within the intension of Religion and its extension. Religions are the class of "entities" to which the term Religion may be applied. The essay suggests that the "referent" of the intensional definition of Religion is essentially negative and that the "referent" of Religious Studies is the "referent" of the "referent" of Religion. Gerald James Larson is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. His writings include Classical Sidmkhya: An Interpretation of its History and Meaning (Delhi, 1969), soon to be issued in a second revised edition by the University of California Press; and (as editor and contributor) Myth in Indo-European Antiquity (UC Press, 1974). He is also currently editing the Aids to the Study of Religion series of the American Academy of Religion.

On the ontological status of visual mental images

Abstract: There has long been considerable controversy over the ontological status of mental images. Most recently, members of the A.I. community have argued for the sufficiency of "propositional representation" and have resisted the notion that other sorts of representations are functional in the human mind. The purpose of this paper is to review what I take to be the best evidence that images are distinct functional representations in human memory. Before reviewing these data, however, I offer a preliminary definition of what I mean by a "visual mental image." This definition arises out of the "cathode ray tube" metaphor originally introduced in Kosslyn (1974, 1975, 1976) and later implemented in a computer simulation by Kosslyn & Shwartz (1977a, in press). On this view, images are spatial representations in active memory generated from more abstract representations in Long-term memory; these spatial representations are able to be interpreted ("inspected") by procedures that classify them into various semantic categories. 1.0 A preliminar 7 definition of a visual mental image I wish to define a "visual mental image" in terms of five basic kinds of properties. Images are often distinguished from more discrete, propositional or linguistic representations because they supposedly have "analogue" properties. Thus, the first two properties noted below describe analogue representations as a class. Goodman (1968), Palmer (in press), Shepard (1975), Sloman (1975), and others have provided informative and detailed discussions of relevance here, and I will draw freely on these sources in the present discussion. 1) Images can capture continuous variations in shape. This continuity

Second Dialect and Second Language in the Composition Class

Abstract: In linguistics and in other social sciences there are two kinds of facts for describing data-"hard" facts, the measurements of external events, and "soft" facts, the internal responses to these external events. Although these facts exist in all kinds and on all levels of linguistic description, distinguishing between them and defining their boundaries often lead to much confusion. An interesting problem in metatheory would be to take some of the current linguistic oppositions, such as etic-emic, performance-competence, empiricismrationalism, speaker-hearer, and analyze them in terms of this hard-soft distinction. One such pair is treated here: second dialect and second language. When teachers speak of problems with the former they are usually speaking about "hard" facts, or facts of (external) variation; when speaking of second language, though, they often mean "soft" facts, or those that have to do with (internal) categories and stereotypes. The two kinds of speakers will thus benefit from different classroom techniques. The rest of the paper reviews some current pedagogical methods for teaching and testing composition-among these, sentence combining, discourse analysis, and cloze testing-and suggests how these can be differently used for the two kinds of speakers. Lately there has been a lot written about teaching English to foreign speakers and teaching it to non-standard English speakers. Some claim that there should be very little difference between the two approaches and that these ap

Making subsequent references: syntatic and rhetorical constrants

Abstract: Unlike the case of an initial reference, where the choice of description is solely a matter of the speaker's intentions and his/her model of the audience, deciding how to make subsequent references to an object is a hybrid process wherein syntactic context and grammatical convention play a dominant part This is because the expression of co-reference in discourse is highly grammaticsed Very specialized phrases can (and often must) be used: personal, reflexive, and possessive pronouns, special determiners - "this", "my", class nouns like "thing" and "one" and so on We would like to know the conditions that govern the appropriate use of these phrases - how do grammatical constraints interact with a speaker's goals?

Self and Body: How Known and Differentiated

Abstract: I welcome the invitation of Eugene Freeman to contribute a paper on the subject of self, giving my own views. I have been devoted to comparative philosophy all my life, and I am naturally greatly influenced by Indian and Western thought. But I should warn both the Indian and Western readers against equating my views in their entirety with any of the past philosophies. It is also not possible to given an exhaustive theory of the self in a paper of the present size. What is noi given here may place my view in ? wrong light and the reader may draw wrong conclusions.1 I have already written quite a few papers on the problems of the self, which the reader may well consult. Following the Upanisads, I explained the concept of spirit (self) in "The Concept of the Spiritual in Indian Thought."2 There I tried to show the recognition in Indian thought of the self as the "I" in its identification with the physical body, life, mind, rational consciousness, and the Unconscious, all of which together can be treated also as the body, in which case what is called psychological in the West will also be part of the body. That the true particular is only the I-consciousness (self), which does not come under a universal or class concept was explained in "The Nature of the Individual."3 That the self is the I-consciousness and to isolate it for study from its relations to objects, we have to consider it as freeing itself from them in the three states of waking, dream, and deep sleep was discussed in "Die Struktur des Ich-Bewusstseins."4 It was shown that self-consciousness and consciousness of objects are two distinct types of consciousness in "The Ex istential and Phenomenological Consciousness in the Philosophy of R?m?nuja."5 That the self is not merely what appears as the "I" but also comprehends the Unconscious, and that the Unconscious is not merely ab normal as in Freud's psychology but also normal in every one of us was dis cussed in "Approaches to the I-consciousness: Its Depths, Normal and Abnormal."6 In "Man, Logos, and Philosophy,"7 I attempted to show that the identity of my empirical "I" with ultimate Being cannot be realized except through the Logos as Reason or Rational Consciousness and that Reason also has its ontological status?a truth missed or overlooked by many con temporary Western thinkers. In "Being: How known and How Expressed,"8 I attempted to show that at the final depths which can be reached by man's