A hypothesis about sensorimotor integration (the λ model) is described and applied to movement control and kinesthesia. The central idea is that the nervous system organizes positional frames of reference for the sensorimotor apparatus and produces active movements by shifting the frames in terms of spatial coordinates. Kinematic and electromyographic patterns are not programmed, but emerge from the dynamic interaction among the system s components, including external forces within the designated frame of reference. Motoneuronal threshold properties and proprioceptive inputs to (...) motoneurons may be cardinal components of the physiological mechanism that produces positional frames of reference. The hypothesis that intentional movements are produced by shifting the frame of reference is extended to multi-muscle and multi-degrees-of-freedom systems with a solution of the redundancy problem that allows the control of a joint alone or in combination with other joints to produce any desired limb configuration and movement trajectory. The model also implies that for each motor behavior, the nervous system uses a strategy that minimizes the number of changeable control variables and keeps the parameters of these changes invariant. Examples are provided of simulated kinematic and electromyographic signals from single- and multi-joint arm movements produced by suggested patterns of control variables. Empirical support is provided and additional tests of the model are suggested. The model is contrasted with others based on the ideas of programming of motoneuronal activity, muscle forces, stiffness, or movement kinematics. (shrink)

À partir de l’observatoire d’une « consultation antialcoolique » ouverte en 1954 dans le 13e arrondissement de Paris, cet article étudie la manière dont le travail social a investi le nouveau champ d’action du suivi psychiatrique de l’alcoolisme, dans un contexte de mutations de la prise en charge médicale de cette maladie. Le contenu autant que la structure des dossiers de patients de la consultation, que nous mettons en regard avec des publications issues de revues médicales et de travail social, (...) permettent d’approcher le travail quotidien des assistantes sociales, au plus près des alcooliques et de leurs familles. Nous montrons que l’action de l’assistante sociale, devenue centrale bien que subordonnée à celle du médecin psychiatre, s’enrichit d’une dimension psychothérapique et se caractérise par la recherche de la confiance du malade et de son adhésion au traitement, marquant ainsi une inflexion nette dans le rapport aux populations assistées. Cependant, ces évolutions ne suffisent pas à débarrasser le travail social de ses ambiguïtés constitutives et notamment de ses fonctions de contrôle et de surveillance, sources de difficultés, de malentendus et de conflits avec les malades et leurs proches. (shrink)

This book expounds and defends a new conception of the relation between truth and meaning. Atlas argues that the sense of a sense-general sentence radically underdetermines its truth-conditional content. He applies this linguistic analysis to illuminate old and new philosophical problems of meaning, truth, falsity, negation, existence, presupposition, and implicature. In particular, he demonstrates how the concept of ambiguity has been misused and confused with other concepts of meaning, and how the interface between semantics and pragmatics has been misunderstood. (...) The problems he tackles are common to philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and his conclusions will be of interest to all those working in these fields. (shrink)

This fresh look at the philosophy of language focuses on the interface between a theory of literal meaning and pragmatics--a philosophical examination of the relationship between meaning and language use and its contexts. Here, Atlas develops the contrast between verbal ambiguity and verbal generality, works out a detailed theory of conversational inference using the work of Paul Grice on Implicature as a starting point, and gives an account of their interface as an example of the relationship between Chomsky's Internalist (...) Semantics and Language Performance. Atlas then discusses consequences of his theory of the Interface for the distinction between metaphorical and literal language, for Grice's account of meaning, for the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, for Meaning Holism, and for Formal Semantics of Natural Language. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophy of language and will appeal to philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the Atlas-Kempson Thesis that sentences of the form The A is not B are not ambiguous but rather semantically general (Quine), non-specific (Zwicky and Sadock), or vague (G. Lakoff). This observation refutes the 1970 Davidson-Harman hypothesis that underlying structures, as full semantic representations, are logical forms. It undermines the conception of semantical presupposition, removes a support for the existence of truth-value gaps for presuppositional sentences (the remaining arguments for which are viciously circular), and (...) lifts the Russell-Strawson dispute of 1950–1964 from stalemate to a formulation in which a resolution is possible for the first time. Suggestions of Davidson, Montague, Stalnaker, Kaplan and H. P. Grice are shown to be inadequate semantic descriptions of negative, presuppositional sentences. I briefly discuss the radical Pragmatics view of my 1975 publications and suggest that it too fails to do justice to the linguistic data. I speculate that Semantic Representations should be given the form (more or less) of computer programs, describable in Dana Scott's mathematical semantics for programming languages. (shrink)

The seeming absence of negative evidence in the input that children receive during language acquisition has long been regarded as a serious problem for non-nativist linguistic theories. Among the solutions that have been suggested for this problem, preemption by competing structures is doubtless the most intensively researched and widely accepted. However, while preemption works well in the domain of morphology, it cannot apply categorically in the domain of syntax, as this would preclude the existence of semantically overlapping constructions, such as (...) the ditransitive and the prepositional dative, which can be used alternatively with many, but not all, verbs of literal or metaphorical transfer. This paper investigates one specific version of preemption briefly entertained by Pinker (Language learnability and language development, Harvard University Pressm, 1984), which would account both for the existence of semantically overlapping constructions and for the fact that these constructions may preempt each other in the case of individual verbs. Typically, such pairs of grammatical constructions differ in their information-structural restrictions and speakers tend to choose the construction that best fits a given discourse context; when speakers use a construction even though there is an alternative that fits the discourse context better, children may take this as evidence that the alternative is not available for the specific verb in question. Two corpus studies are presented, comparing the information-structural profile of prepositional dative constructions containing verbs that may alternate between the dative and the ditransitive with the information structural profile of verbs that are restricted to the prepositional dative. For Pinker's preemptive mechanism to be feasible, there should be a clear and systematic difference in the information-structural profile of these two classes of verbs. However, no such difference can be found in actual usage. (shrink)

The presented article is an attempt to describe in a synthetic way an own vision of a German front-line soldier of the First World War. It also tries to show an image of some enemies – the French, the British and the Russians. The attempt was made on the basis of recollection material and literary forms created either during or soon after the war. The conclusion is unequivocal – the more contact the authors of the texts had with the opponent, (...) the more balanced image of the enemy they presented in their texts and the less were they prone to overestimate the German soldier. Yet the press material contained a lot of exaggeration. The authors created a haughty and sometimes even superhuman image of the German soldier. At the same time the image of the enemy was inhuman and deserving contempt. (shrink)

In this essay I use my Non-Monotonic account of “Only Proper Noun” sentences to challenge the Standard Views on the Downard Monotonicity of “Few N” Quantifier sentences. I also review the history of the L. Horn – J.D. Atlas Debate on ‘Only Proper Noun’ sentences and its implications for quantifier noun phrases like “Few N”, and I assess the promise of L. Horn’s Pragmatic Theory of Negative Polarity Item Licensing.

The basic concepts of motor control formulated in our target article were derived from specific experiments, a fact which is disregarded in Dalenoort's comments. A purely academic approach to motor control may not result in a clearer understanding of control concepts.

The cerebellum probably obeys the rules of sensorimotor integration common in the nervous system. One such a rule is formulated: the nervous system organizes spatial frames of reference for the sensorimotor apparatus and produces voluntary movements by shifting their origin points. We give examples of spatial frames of reference for different single- and multi-joint movements including locomotion and also illustrate that the process of motor development and learning may depend critically on the formation of appropriate frames of reference and the (...) organism's ability to manage them. We suggest that a solution to the problem of sensorimotor integration may not be trivial and may actually change the mental and experimental paradigms used in the understanding of the cerebellum and other brain structures, [HOUK et al.; SIMPSON et al.; SMITH; TIIACH]. (shrink)

The information required for perception may be available in the energy arrays that stimulate sensory organs but in a form not directly suitable for the planning and execution of the organism's actions in the environment. The requisite form of information is obtained, with no loss of adequate perception, by representation of sensory stimuli in frames of reference determined by internal control signals producing actions. This process seems evolutionarily advantageous but makes perception essentially non-direct, regardless of the degree of intra- or (...) inter-modal sensory integration. (shrink)

ExcerptWeak government is a negation of liberty.Francis LieberAfter the experiences of the past generation, it should be apparent that all too much of liberal internationalist thinking in America is not “internationalist” in any real sense at all. Internationalism, if it is to have any meaning as a word, must mean peace and cooperation between different nations, which by nature will have not merely different interests that must be reconciled but different political systems that must coexist.

The potential for dual use of research in the life sciences to be misused for harm raises a range of problems for the scientific community and policy makers. Various legal and ethical strategies are being implemented to reduce the threat of the misuse of research and knowledge in the life sciences by establishing a culture of responsible conduct.

At the end of the first book of Apollonius' Argonautica, Telamon accuses Jason of plotting to leave Heracles behind, an insult for which Telamon later apologizes. This article suggests that their reconciliation unites the Alexandrian interest in what is appropriate for epic with Aristotelian views on anger and political friendship, two themes that resonate throughout the poem. While Telamon's apology and Jason's moderate response revise the structure of traditional epic quarrels, the portrayal of self-control in this episode constitutes a moral (...) exemplar in keeping with those Homeric scenes that were admired by ancient philosophers. (shrink)

We consider one aspect of the problem of specification and verification of reactive real-time systems which involve operations and constraints concerning time. Time is continuous what is motivated by specifications of hybrid systems. Our goal is to try to find a framework that is based on applied first order logic that permits to represent the verification problem directly, completely and conservatively , and that is apt to describe interesting decidable classes, maybe showing way to feasible algorithms. To achieve this goal (...) we use a first order timed logic that is an extension of a decidable theory of reals with timed functions. This logic permits, on the one hand, to rewrite directly and completely requirements and, on the other hand, to describe executions of various timed algorithms—here we consider block Gurevich abstract state machines because of their theoretical clarity and sufficient expressive power. Then we describe one decidable class of the verification problem that is based on notions reflecting finiteness properties of systems of control. These notions may be of independent interest, as, in particular, they give a way to describe a limited usage of arithmetics preserving decidability that is not covered by existing model-theoretic approaches. As an example we consider the generalized railroad crossing problem that we analyze in its entirety. (shrink)

This book contains a variety of essays aimed at developing a philosophical defense of public goods against neo-liberal criticisms. Looking at concepts such as collective action, common property, intellectual property and issues such as health, education, welfare, environment, media, cities, and the prison industrial complex.

The socialist project is burdened by a history of brutal failures. The authors of the papers collected in this volume are convinced that a democratic and humane socialism is both desirable and possible. They lay out their view of different aspects of this new socialism in this book. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt are both the editors and contributors to this book. -/- Select chapters translated into Spanish have appeared in a volume in Barcelona, Spain.

Capitalism is in crisis. Is a better world possible and what would it look like? Taking Socialism Seriously breaks important new paths for significant social change by examining detailed questions seriously that had previously been neglected.