Showing papers on "Class (philosophy) published in 1985"

The Politics of Development Policy Labelling

Abstract: Labelling a feature of all social communication is an aspect of public policy (utterance and practice) an element in the structure of political discourse. Contributors to this volume have become more sharply aware of this through their preoccupation and experience with development issues in various parts of the 3rd world. The purpose of this focus on labelling is to reveal processes of control regulation and management which are largely unrecognized even by the actors themselves. The significance of labelling has been underestimated as an aspect of policy discourse and especially for its structural impact upon the institutions and their ideologies through which people are managed. Since the process of labelling affects the categories within people are socialized to act and think the object of this concern is fundamental rather than peripheral. Labelling refers to a relationship of power in that the labels of some are more easily imposed on people and situations than those of others. Focus here is on the particular kind of labels or abstractions which arise in development policy areas as an aspect of the donative political discorse associated with the 3rd world development agenda. The interest is in how specific acts of designation or classification reflecting specific interests become universalized. It is not sufficient to say that concept of the state (as an endorsement or imposition of legitimate public actions) is "a condensate of class relations" or is "derived from thelogic of capitalist production relations" "a particular from because of the contradictions of its peripherality." It is necessary to understand how this endorsement actually occurs and can continue to do so how it comes to be constructed and then persists. The process is insidious and centrally involves "labelling." Labelling is the attribute of a certain kind of public management of resources i.e. bureaucratic professional formal institutionalized and often central. It is the counterpart of access in that the authors of labels of designations have determined the rules of access in that particular resources and privileges. A central feature of the labelling proces is the differentiation and disaggregation of the individual and the individuals subsequent identification with a principal label e.g. "landless" or "single parent." Labelling refers to the weighting applied the differentiated elements. "Problems" calling for attention and policy are constructed and defined in this way leading to 1 label or element representing the entire situation of an individual family. Exercises required in an attempt to demcratize the "which" and "whose" aspects of public policy labelling are identified.

A time bound on the materialization of some recursively defined views

Abstract: A virtual relation (or view) can be defined with a recursive statement that is a function of one or more base relations. In general, the number of times such a statement must be applied in order to retrieve all the tuples in the virtual relation depends on the contents of the base relations involved in the definition. However, there exist statements for which there is an upper bound on the number of applications necessary to form the virtual relation, independent of the contents of the base relations. Considering a restricted class of recursive statements, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for statements in the class to have this bound.

A finite axiomatization of the set of strongly valid Ockhamist formulas

Abstract: The subject of this paper is the tense and modal logic called 'Ockhamist' in [1, p. 574]. The main result is a completeness theorem for a finite axiomatization of validity relative to Ockhamist frames. This answers the question (left open in [1]) of the finite axiomatizability of this class of formulas. The Ockhamists' attitude towards tenses is an 'Actualist Indeterminist' point of view. Roughly speaking, Indeterminism pictures time as treelike; although a moment must have exactly one past it may have several possible futures. Actualism figures in the interpretation of the future tense, taking "' will happen" to mean "a holds at some moment of the 'actual' future". One consequence is that in general tensed formulas can be true or false only relative to a possible course of events, construed as the actual future. Ockhamist possibility and necessity are strictly connected with time, in that "necessary" is meant as "necessary given the past (including the present moment)": we say that c is (now) possible, whenever a is true in some possible world having the same past as the actual one. In particular, the principle of the "unpreventability of the past" holds: every proposition concerning only the past is necessarily true or necessarily false. Given a tree representing time, the actual future of a moment x is represented by a branch starting with x; it is natural to assume that the possible futures of x are represented by a set of branches satisfying suitable closure properties. Depending on how the closure properties are selected, various notions of validity can be defined: in particular, the two that in [1] are referred to as (Ockhamist) validity

Inductive inference in the limit

Abstract: There is an enormous and interesting theoretical literature1 on inductive inference which remains largely unknown to philosophers of science, even though a philosopher, Hilary Putnam, may be said to have initiated it2. The work in this tradition concerns algorithms for inferring recursive functions from finite samples of their graphs. Informally, an inductive machine is an algorithm which is given larger and larger samples of the graph of a partial or total recursive function which the machine attempts to identify. The machine or algorithm produces at various stages a program which computes a recursive function. The machine is said to identify the target function if at some point it produces a program which computes that very function, and thereafter, no matter how much more of the graph of the target function it sees, continues to produce the same program. A weaker notion, that of behaviorally correct identification, does not require that in order to identify the target function the machine converge to a single program. Instead it requires only that the machine converge to a (possibly infinite) set of programs, all of which compute the target function. A class of functions is said to be identified by a machine if the machine identifies every function in the class. This framework has been adapted to characterize abstract versions of learning languages in the limit. A natural question is whether a similar framework can be developed for learning first order theories. What follows is an attempt to present such a conception, and to describe what place Hempel’s ideas about confirmation have within it. There are many definitions, some examples, no theorems, and a great deal left to be investigated.

Responding to Students' Drafts: Interdisciplinary Consensus.

Abstract: technical terms, as in the following example: There are far too many vague terms in this paper. As a result, it is uneven-some of your comparisons are sensible with sound causal connections while other similarities made via the key thesis term seem rather superficial. I think the paper will work if you rescue it from a "list" by making even better causal connections between your subthesis pointsi.e., focus on transitions that are not additive transitions. The reactions of the content instructor, an historian, were instructive. He himself had not been subjected to such abstract technical terminology since high school, and he did not much like it then. Unsure whether the terms had shifted meaning in subsequent decades, he avoided using them even in our interdisciplinary project. His response was typical of content instructors and of students as well. Richard Beach and Nancy Sommers assail "formulaic textbook language" because it hinders extensive revising by students.6 Not surprisingly, students seldom knew how to "focus on transitions" or to reorder their "subthesis points." Like the historian, they were often unsure of the definition of the terms. They rarely translated abstract injunctions into concrete action. The variety of abstract terms used by the composition instructor was every bit as daunting as their unfamiliarity and obscurity. A survey of marginal comments uncovered repeated use not only of "redundant," but also "clutter," "wordy," "edit for efficiency," "combine," "repetitive," "reword for accuracy," and "restate more precisely." Not only was the label "transitions" obscure, but there were references to "additive" and "logical" transitions. The precise differences among terms like "redundancy," "clutter," and "repetitive detail" were not self-evident to students or to faculty in other disciplines. While fine nuance might serve an experienced writer or editor, these near-synonyms, when used in comments to beginning writers, seemed intended chiefly to disguise the rubber stamps. It is unlikely that many faculty in the content disciplines will be motivated to learn a large new lexicon of terms for discussion of writing or to teach (or reteach) it to their students using their class or conference time. Still, it became clear from our collaborations that some common terminology, streamlined and useful, would be welcome. It would emphasize the unity and determination of faculty to endorse writing across the curriculum; more important, it would direct the attention of all instructors to certain critically important aspects of student writing and relegate sentence structure and spelling to their proper place. In our first interdisciplinary collaboration, for example, a composition instructor and an historian agreed on two sets of terms now widely used. The This content downloaded from 157.55.39.58 on Fri, 26 Aug 2016 04:56:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 218 College Composition and Communication writing instructor shared with the historian the concept of "thesis-subthesisevidence" taught in the required freshman composition class. Composition instructors at Loyola teach virtually every freshman and transfer student how to use "subthesis sentences," sentences at an intermediate level of generalization, to link the "thesis," or general point of an essay, to the specific "evidence" that supports it. These "subtheses," most often topic sentences for each paragraph that would appear as the first two levels in a formal outline of a paper, should form a "network of ideas" that constitutes a coherent and original discussion of the writer's main point. In the sciences and social sciences, the "network of ideas" is often presented as the abstract of an article. In a freshman writing course, the sequence of evolving thought that works out the implications of a thesis sentence-what we designate as a "network of ideas"might look as follows (the breaks indicate places where the writer would pause to create paragraphs offering specific evidence and discussion): THESIS: Wallpaper is a form of modern art. Wallpaper may at first seem an unlikely art form because of its traditional use. // Yet wallpaper, though practical, has artistic appeal. I// Modern art differs significantly from previous art forms in its union of art and technology; // wallpaper too fuses the ordinary with the extraordinary. // As modern art, wallpaper draws the spectator in by creating a mood, // but wallpaper can also transcend four walls by creating an entire environment. // The power of wallpaper to excite or irritate should not be underestimated. // Still, wallpaper shows all the signs of becoming modern art. When a universal complaint across the curriculum is that students cannot think, their attention needs to be focused on the interplay among "thesis-subthesis-evidence," as in the following two comments:

On interpretation and holding

Abstract: When I sat down to write this paper, my task turned out not to be as straightforward as I had expected. I had assumed that what is meant by "holding" was relatively clear and simple. I discovered, however, that the concept of "holding" as used in the literature covers many things and that it belongs to that class of concepts that have an "elastic" meaning space, that is to say, a meaning that changes according to the specific context in which they are employed.

Decentralized control of a class of distributed systems

Abstract: Many large scale mechanical systems can be modeled in terms of partial differential equations which can then be discretized to give what may be termed "homogeneous interconnected systems" or "cellular structures". In this paper we consider a class of such systems and the relation between performance and information transfer.