Shame and shame reactions are two of the most delicate and difficult issues of psychotherapy and are among the most likely to defy our usual dynamic, systemic, and behavioral theories. In this groundbreaking new collection, _The Voice of Shame_, thirteen distinguished authors show how use of the Gestalt model of self and relationship can clarify the dynamics of shame and lead us to fresh approaches and methods in this challenging terrain. This model shows how shame issues become pivotal in therapeutic (...) and other relationships and how healing shame is the key to transformational change. The contributors show how new perspectives on shame gained in no particular area transfer and generalize to other areas and settings. In so doing, they transform our fundamental understanding of psychotherapy itself. Grounded in the most recent research on the dynamics and experience of shame, this book is a practical guide for all psychotherapists, psychologists, clinicians, and others interested in self, psychotherapy, and relationship. This book contains powerful new insights for the therapist on a full-range of topics from intimacy in couples to fathering to politics to child development to gender issues to negative therapeutic reactions. Filled with anecdotes and case examples as well as practical strategies, _The Voice of Shame_ will transform your ideas about the role of shame in relationships - and about the potential of the Gestalt model to clarify and contextualize other approaches. (shrink)

This book offers a close-up look at theological education in the U.S. today. The authors' goal is to understand the way in which institutional culture affects the outcome of the educational process. To that end, they undertake ethnographic studies of two seminaries-one evangelical and one mainline Protestant. These studies, written in a lively journalistic style, make up the first part of the book and offer fascinating portraits of two very different intellectual, religious, and social worlds. The authors go on to (...) analyze these disparate environments, and suggest how in each case corporate culture acts as an agent of educational change. They find two major consequences stemming from the culture of each school. First, each culture gives expression to a normative goal that aims at shaping the way students understand themselves and from issues of ministry practice. Second, each provides a "cultural tool kit" of knowledge, practices, and skills that students use to construct strategies of action for the various problems and issues that will confront them as pastors or in other forms of ministry. In the concluding chapters, the authors explore the implications of their findings for theories of institutional culture and professional socialization and for interpreting the state of religion in America. They identify some of the practical dilemmas that theological and other professional schools currently face, and reflect on how their findings might contribute to their solution. This accessible, thought-provoking study will not only illuminate the structure and process by which culture educates and forms, but also provide invaluable insights into important dynamics of American religious life. (shrink)

While in principle probabilistic logics might be applied to solve a range of problems, in practice they are rarely applied at present. This is perhaps because they seem disparate, complicated, and computationally intractable. However, we shall argue in this programmatic paper that several approaches to probabilistic logic into a simple unifying framework: logically complex evidence can be used to associate probability intervals or probabilities with sentences.

According to the extended cognition hypothesis (henceforth ExC), there are conditions under which thinking and thoughts (or more precisely, the material vehicles that realize thinking and thoughts) are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that the external (beyond-the-skin) factors concerned are rightly accorded fully-paid-up cognitive status.1 According to functionalism in the philosophy of mind, “what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way (...) it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part” (Levin 2008). The respective fates of these two positions may not be independent of each other. The claim that ExC is in some way a form of, dependent on, entailed by, or at least commonly played out in terms of, functionalism is now pretty much part of the received view of things (see, e.g., Adams and Aizawa 2008; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2005, 2008, this volume a, b, forthcoming; Menary 2007; Rupert 2004; Sprevak manuscript; Wheeler forthcoming). Thus ExC might be mandated by the existence of functionally specified cognitive systems whose boundaries are located partly outside the skin. This is the position that Andy Clark has recently dubbed extended functionalism (Clark 2008, forthcoming; see also Wheeler forthcoming). (shrink)

Drawing on biosemiotic theory and the Peircean idea of ‘abduction’, I shall propose the idea of a layered structure of bio / semiotic evolution, in which humanknowledge is systemic and recursive — and thus emergent both from what is forgotten and from earlier evolutionary strata. I will argue that abductions are those processes by which we move creatively between often unacknowledged types of knowledge which are rooted in our natural and cultural evolutionary past (e.g., unconscious, preconscious, or tacit knowledge; knowledge (...) that is experienced affectively) and the more familiar types of knowledge associated with self-conscious deductive and inductive reasoning. I shall suggest that these processes of ‘hooking back’ into the past in order to make new sense in the light of subsequent experience, are characteristic of all human inventiveness in both the arts and the sciences, and are facilitated by what Peirce called ‘The Play of Musement’.My reasons for attempting this task are that I hope to offer a semiotic and biosemiotic corrective to the widespread and culturally dominant idea that the progress ofhuman knowledge and cultural evolution depends on self rational efficiency, conceived of in terms of self-conscious deduction and induction alone — a conception which runs the risk of excluding from the account what is actually the most creative part of human knowing. Second, I will suggest that a properly semiotically informed understanding of human creativity — i.e., one which understands the Peircean semiotic as triadic and which draws on the post-Peircean theory that the semiotic drive in nature and in culture derives from the need to model the world as accurately as possible — should provide a very stern warning against the dangers of confusing the map with the territory. For creative artists and scientists (and life-livers, in general) progress, I shall suggest, inasmuch as they ignore the utilitarian dogma in practice. A biosemiotic understanding of human reasoning as an evolutionary semiotic process should thus contribute to a removal of the impediments of modernity which lie in the failure to properly grasp both what language (and semiosis in general) is, as well as the historical and prehistorical evolution that makes such semiosis possible. (shrink)

Statistical Default Logic (SDL) is an expansion of classical (i.e., Reiter) default logic that allows us to model common inference patterns found in standard inferential statistics, e.g., hypothesis testing and the estimation of a population‘s mean, variance and proportions. This paper presents an embedding of an important subset of SDL theories, called literal statistical default theories, into stable model semantics. The embedding is designed to compute the signature set of literals that uniquely distinguishes each extension on a statistical default theory (...) at a pre-assigned error-bound probability. (shrink)

Critique de la possibilité d'individus non-substantiels récurrents que G. E. L. Owen repère dans l'«Organon» d'Aristote. Soulevant le problème ontologique de l'un et du multiple, des entités particulières et des entités universelles chez Aristote, l'A. montre qu'un individu unique en nombre ne peut se reproduire périodiquement et que le statut modal des individus récurrents contredit la définition du sujet présent dans les «Catégories» . Conformément aux conditions de la ressemblance établies par Aristote dans les «Topiques», l'A. conclut à l'impossibilité d'individus (...) substantiels ou non-substantiels universels. (shrink)

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics deals with these problems is reviewed. A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, is presented. The basic element of this interpretation is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced and retarded waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The transactional interpretation is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully (...) causal. A detailed comparison of the transactional and Copenhagen interpretations is made in the context of well-known quantum-mechanical Gedankenexperimenre and "paradoxes." The transactional interpretation permits quantum-mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge" as in the Copenhagen interpretation. The transactional interpretation is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum-mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse." It also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Born probability law (P = ii iij*), basic elements of the Copenhagen interpretation. (shrink)

The original Feynman-Wheeler perfect absorber theory lead to the Instantaneous Action at a Distance formulation. We observe that this is perfectly meaningful in the light of recent studies pointing to a small but non-zero photon mass. The Quantum Mechanical effects within the Compton scale of such a small mass photon would lead to the above formulation.

The problem of the direction of electromagnetic time, i.e., the complete dominance of retarded electromagnetic radiation over advanced radiation in the universe, is considered in the context of a generalized form of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in an open expanding universe with a singularity atT=0. It is shown that the application of a four-vector reflection boundary condition at the singularity leads to the observed dominance of retarded radiation; it also clarifies the role of advanced and retarded waves in the (...) emission of very weakly absorbed radiation such as neutrinos. (shrink)

Ch. 1. Filosofskoe osmyslenie kulʹtury -- ch. 2. Problemy mnozhestvennosti kulʹtur.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2005, held in Elliottville, NY, USA in September 2005. The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on vagueness, uncertainty, and gradation; paths and routes; ontologies and semantics; ontologies and spatial relations; spatial reasoning: cognitive maps and spatial reasoning; time, change, and dynamics; landmarks and navigation; geographic information, and spatial behaviour.

Hirschfeld and Wheeler proved in 1975 that ∑1 ultrapowers (= “simple models”) are rigid; i.e., they admit no non-trivial automorphisms. We later noted, essentially mimicking their technique, that the same is true of Δ1 ultrapowers (= “Nerode semirings”), a class of models of Π2 Arithmetic that overlaps, but is mutually non-inclusive with, the class of Σ1 ultrapowers. Hirschfeld and Wheeler left as open the question whether some Σ1 ultrapowers might admit proper isomorphic self-injections. We do not answer that (...) question; but we do answer the corresponding question, in the negative, for the Δ1 case. (shrink)

This paper describes the topological aspect of a logic-based, artificial intelligence approach to formalising the qualitative description of spatial properties and relations, and reasoning about those properties and relations. This approach, known as RCC theory, has been under development for several years at the University of Leeds. The main rationale for this project is that qualitative descriptions of spatial properties and relationships, and qualitative spatial reasoning, are of fundamental importance in human thinking about the world: even where quantitative spatial data (...) are most important, they must be attached to the components of a perceived spatial structure if we are to make use of them. RCC theory covers other qualitative aspects of spatial description and reasoning, but the topological properties and relations of spatially extended entities are fundamental to our work. The topological formalisms used by mathematicians are, in general, not well suited to the task of formalising the kinds of ‘common-sense’ or ‘everyday’ qualitative spatial description and reasoning which are our primary interest. Nevertheless, we must come to grips with the concepts of topology as practised by mathematicians if we are not to risk constantly ‘reinventing wheels’. (shrink)

It was with this bitter intervention from Thrasymachus, occurring halfway through the first of its ten Books, that that work begins to come urgently alive. For the remainder of Book I the Socrates of the Dialogue asks questions and raises objections, while Thrasymachus keeps urging that in fact the just become through their very justice the victims of exploitation–the suckers!

Bateson's belated acceptance of the chromosome theory came in two main stages, and was permanent, although he retained to the end reservations about some implications and extensions of the theory. Coleman's attempt to explain Bateson's resistance in terms of his conservative mode of thought is critically examined, and rejected: the attributes Coleman assigns to Bateson are all either inappropriate, or irrelevant to chromosome theory, or both. Instead, the diverse factors which contributed to Bateson's resistance are enumerated and discussed. These include (...) deficiencies in the evidence then available to support the theory; embryological difficulties; Bateson's aversion to microscopy combined with the lack of a close colleague skilled in cytology; his iconoclastic temperament, and the fact that he found T. H. Morgan, the leader of the Drosophila school, an uncongenial personality. Taken together, these factors suffice to account for his resistance. Bateson's position is contrasted with that of the other most eminent opponent, W. Johannsen, whose organismic outlook was the main obstacle to acceptance. (shrink)