127,553 research outputs found
On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution
No full textJerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor's skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus argument" -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the "concepts" underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be "endogenous," rather than evolved or learned
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Network coding schemes for D2D communications based relaying for cellular coverage extension
No full textAlthoughnetwork-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications are known to improve the spectral and energy
efficiency of proximal communications, the performance of cooperative D2D schemes in licenced spectrum is less understood
when employed to extend the coverage of cellular networks. In this paper, we study the performance of D2D-based
range extension in terms of sum rate and power efficiency when a relaying user equipment (UE) helps to improve the coverage
for cell edge UEs. In our design, the relaying UE may have own traffic to transmit and receive to/from the cellular
base station (BS) and can operate either in amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) modes and can make
use of either digital or analogue physical (PHY) layer network coding. In this rather general setting, we propose mode
selection, resource allocation and power control schemes and study their performance by means of system simulations.
We find that the performance of the DF scheme with network coding is superior both to the traditional cellular and the
AF-based relaying schemes, including AF with two-slot or three-slot PHY layer network codin
The "Fodor"-FODOR fallacy bites back
No full textThe paper argues that Fodor and Lepore are misguided in their attack on Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, largely because their argument rests on a traditional, but implausible and discredited, view of the lexicon on which it is effectively empty of content, a view that stands in the long line of explaining word meaning (a) by ostension and then (b) explaining it by means of a vacuous symbol in a lexicon, often the word itself after typographic transmogrification. (a) and (b) both share the wrong belief that to a word must correspond a simple entity that is its meaning. I then turn to the semantic rules that Pustejovsky uses and argue first that, although they have novel features, they are in a well-established Artificial Intelligence tradition of explaining meaning by reference to structures that mention other structures assigned to words that may occur in close proximity to the first. It is argued that Fodor and Lepore's view that there cannot be such rules is without foundation, and..
Nekrológ
No full textRaczky Pál, Vida
Tivadar: Bóna István (Heves 1930. február 10.-Dunaújváros 2001; B. Horváth
Jolán: Bóna István irodalmi munkássága június 4.); Fodor István: Alojz
Habovštiak (1932-2000); Fodor István: Balaguri Eduárd (1931-2004); Vörös
István: Kretzoi Miklós (1907-2005
On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution
No full textJerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor’s skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus argument” -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the “concepts” underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be “endogenous,” rather than evolved or learned
Ryle’s Regress and Cognitive Science
Full text linkRyle’s regress objection to the ‘Intellectualist Legend’ – that intelligent activity requires prior theoretical operations – was recognized by Fodor to present a powerful conceptual obstacle to the premise that underlies cognitivist approaches in the sciences. Fodor attempts to thwart Ryle’s argument in The Language of Thought by accusing him of confusing causal and conceptual explanations and claiming that, by analogy with computers, we can see how the appeal to explicit rules is halted at the first level, since second-order rules are reducible to built-in causal processes. This paper maintains that Fodor’s arguments against Ryle fail. First, Fodor’s appeal to the ‘empirical necessity’ of theoretical operations misfires because he is the one who has misunderstood the difference between causal and conceptual questions. Second, the fact that second-order rules are reducible to causal processes shows, not that the regress is halted, but that we cannot consider intelligent activity by analogy with computers. This paper ends by examining the philosophical motivation for introducing rules into an account of intelligent activity in the first place
Diszkrét geometria és geometriai algebra = Discrete geometry and geometric algebra
No full textNagy G. olyan geometriai struktúrákat vizsgált, melyek Moufang-féle és Bol-féle egységelemes kvázicsoportokkal (loopokkal) koordinátázhatóak. a) Kis Frattini 2-loopok, azaz melyeknél L/A elemi Abel 2-csoport valamely 2-rendű A normális részloopra. A Bol-esetben explicit formulát, a Moufang-esetben új globális konstrukciót adott. b) Moufang-féle p-loopok, p>3. Ilyen loopokra korábban nagyon kevés példa volt ismert. Nagy G. M. Valsecchivel fontos azonosságokat talált nilpotens Moufang-loopokra és egy általános új konstrukciót talált, továbbá osztályozták a p^5 (p>3) rendű Moufang-loopokat is. c) Kis Moufang- és Bol-loopok osztályozása, a P. Vojtechovsky-val közösen készített komputeralgebrai programcsomag felhasználásával. Fodor F. megtalálta 13 és 14 egybevágó kör körbe való legsűrűbb elhelyezéseit. Ambrus G.-vel közösen Fodor F. új alsó korlátot bizonyított 3-dimenziós egységgömb elhelyezésekbeli Voronoi cellák felszínére. T. Bisztriczkyvel és D. Oliverosszal közösen Fodor F. bebizonyította, hogy ha egy páronként diszjunkt körökből álló rendszerben minden 4-elemű részhalmaznak van transzverzálisa, akkor van olyan egyenes, ami legfeljebb egy kivételével a rendszer minden elemét metszi. Ambrus G.-vel és Bezdek A.-val közösen Fodor F. megmutatta, hogy ha egy n-dimenziós egységgömbökből álló rendszerben, ahol a középpontok távolsága legalább 3.6955..., minden n^2-elemű részhalmaznak van transzverzálisa, akkor az egész rendszernek is van transzverzálisa. Fodor F. W. Kuperberggel és T. Bisztriczkyvel közösen ""Discrete Geometry"" című konferenciakötetet szerkesztett. | G. Nagy studied geometric structures which can be coordinatized by Moufang and Bol loops. a) Small Frattini 2-loops are loops L with a normal subloop A of order 2 such that L/A is an elementary Abelian 2-group. Nagy gave an explicit formula in the Bol case and a new global construction in the Moufang case. b) Moufang p-loops with p>3. Before, there were not many examples known for such loops. Together with M. Valsecchi, G. Nagy found some important identities for this class of loops. Using these, they gave a very general new construction and classified all Moufang loops of order p^5 for p>3. c) Jointly with P. Vojtechovsky, G. Nagy wrote a computer algebra package for loops. They used this package to classify small Moufang and Bol loops. F. Fodor found the densest packings of 13 and 14 congruent circles in a circle. Jointly with G. Ambrus, F. Fodor proved a new lower bound for the surface area of Voronoi polyhedra in 3-dimensional unit ball packings. With T. Bisztriczky and D. Oliveros, F. Fodor proved that if in a family of pairwise disjoint unit disks every 4-membered subfamily has a transversal line, then there is a line that intersects all members of the family with the possible exception of at most one. Jointly with G. Ambrus and A. Bezdek, F. Fodor showed that if in a family of n-dimensional unit balls in which the centres of the balls are at least 3.6955... apart every n^2-membered subfamily has a transversal, then the whole family has a transversal. F. Fodor co-edited a conference proceedings volume ""Discrete Geometry"" with T. Bisztriczky and W. Kuperberg
Pragmatic Case Studies as a Source of Unity in Applied Psychology
No full textTo unify or not to unify applied psychology: that is the question. In this article we review pendulum swings in the historical efforts to answer this question—from a comprehensive, positivist, “top-down,” deductive yes between the 1930s and the early 60s, to a postmodern no since then. A rationale and proposal for a limited, “bottom-up,” inductive yes in applied psychology is then presented, employing a case-based paradigm that integrates both positivist and postmodern themes and components. This paradigm is labeled “pragmatic psychology” and, its specific use of case studies, the “Pragmatic Case Study Method” (“PCS Method”). We call for the creation of peer-reviewed journal-databases of pragmatic case studies as a foundational source of unifying applied knowledge in our discipline. As one example, the potential of the PCS Method for unifying different angles of theoretical regard is illustrated in an area of applied psychology, psychotherapy, via the case of Mrs. B. The article then turns to the broader historical and epistemological arguments for the unifying nature of the PCS Method in both applied and basic psychology.Peer reviewe
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