In this series of articles the life and work of the young Julian Schwinger are explored. In this second article in the series, Schwinger's work at Columbia University, up to the completion of his doctorate and a little after, is discussed. Schwinger soon matured into a brilliant theoretical physicist.

In this series of articles the early life and work of the young Julian Schwinger are explored. In the present article, we discuss Schwinger's winding up his work at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, being offered a tenured professorship at Harvard University, getting married, and settling down into a highly productive teaching and research career.

In this series of articles the early life and work of the young Julian Schwinger is explored. After a brilliant beginning at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D., Schwinger went to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer in Berkeley. His stay, work, and interactions with Oppenheimer are discussed.

In this series of articles the early life and work of the young Julian Schwinger are explored. In this first article, Schwinger's childhood, growing-up, and early education are discussed.

In this series of articles the early life and work of the young Julian Schwinger are explored. In the present article, Schwinger's work at the MIT Radiation Laboratory during the Second World War is described.

The arts are an integral part of our culture, and they invite us to investigate, express ideas, and create aesthetically pleasing works. Of interest to educators is clear scholarship that links the arts to cognitive and intellectual development. The processes of creating art and viewing and interpreting art promote cognitive and skill development.1 Elliot Eisner, who has written extensively on this topic, argues that "Artistic activity is a form of inquiry that depends on qualitative forms of intelligence."2 Eisner suggests that (...) children can use art to question and reflect on sensory information from their daily lives, and from this reflection develop insight, awareness, and critical thinking skills.3 Expanding on .. (shrink)

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind, reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral intention; participants (...) made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction, and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent. These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information. (shrink)

These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differentiations that give rise to an array of conceptual and ontological entities which are said to constitute culture. In (...) the second part of the essay, cultural techniques are analyzed as a concept that allows theorists to overcome certain biases and impasses characteristic of that domain of German media theory associated with the work of the late Friedrich Kittler. (shrink)

The goal of this study was to develop and demonstrate a new ethical model for crisis communication. This article examined the crisis communication practices as well as literature and found essential elements—what, how, and when—for ethical and effective crisis communication. Based on these three variables, a new three‐part model, the TTR Test, was proposed, utilizing three principles: Transparency (what), Two‐way symmetrical communication (how), and Right time (when). To investigate how the test can be applied to the real world, this article (...) examined BP's crisis communication during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. (shrink)

During the interwar years psychologists Louis Leon Thurstone and Rensis Likert produced newly standardized forms of questionnaires. Both built on developments in mental testing, including the use of restricted sets of answers and the emergence of statistical techniques, to create questionnaires that employed numerical scaling. This transformation in shape of questionnaires was intimately tied up with both psychologists’ nominal subject of investigation: attitudes. Efforts to render psychology a socially valuable and influential science spurred psychologists to create sophisticated and increasingly precise (...) means of measuring social attitudes. Reducing mental dispositions to mere numbers on a scale, these developments also initiated new relationships between psychology and the public. Rather than engage a wide spectrum of the public directly in the research process, questionnaire research was limited to those within academic circles. Even so, research with questionnaires aimed to comment on attitudes in the public more broadly. The kind of ‘thin description’ afforded by numerical scales, though used to measure individual psychological subjects, afforded psychologists the opportunity to craft their vision of an increasingly attitudinal public, one positioned as best governed with the aid of psychological expertise. (shrink)

In recent times, explanations of the Capgras delusion have tended to emphasise the cognitive dysfunction that is believed to occur at the second stage of two-stage models. This is generally viewed as a response to the inadequacies of the one-stage account. Whilst accepting that some form of cognitive disruption is a necessary part of the aetiology of the Capgras delusion, I nevertheless argue that the emphasis placed on this second-stage is to the detriment of the important role played by the (...) phenomenology underlying the disorder, both in terms of the formation and maintenance of the delusional belief. This paper therefore proposes an interactionist two-stage model in which the phenomenal experience of the Capgras patient is examined, emphasised, and its relation to top-down processing discussed. (shrink)

The paper discusses some of the key factors that shaped Friedrich Kittler’s anglophone reception. Four points are of special importance: the truncated appropriation of Kittler’s ‘middle period’ by American academics; the structural and ideological reasons for the failure of North American German Studies to capitalize on the growing interest in Kittler; the charges of technodeterminism; and Kittler’s difficult role in the debate over posthumanism.

Even the simplest known living organisms are complex chemical processing systems. But how sophisticated is the behaviour that arises from this? We present a framework in which even bacteria can be identified as capable of representing information in arbitrary signal molecules, to facilitate altering their behaviour to optimise their food supplies, for example. Known asion/Representation theory, this framework makes precise the relationship between physical systems and abstract concepts. Originally developed to answer the question of when a physical system is computing, (...) AR theory naturally extends to the realm of biological systems to bring clarity to questions of computation at the cellular level. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Jc Beall has employed what he calls ‘shriek rules’ in a putative solution to the long-standing ‘just false’ problem for glut theory. The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, I distinguish the ‘just false’ problem from another problem, with which it is often conflated, which I will call the ‘exclusion problem’. Secondly, I argue that shriek rules do not help glut theorists with either problem.

There has been a lot of strong evidence showing that human cognition works not in a central processing way but in a distributed way. As well known, human brain processes huge information in a parallel and distributed way. Recently cognitive scientists have contended that the minds are embodied in environment. These two ideas of distribution in cognition and embodiment in the mind can go along overall, but there is a tension between them in some specific respects, especially in the matter (...) of representation. The aim of this paper is to examine the possibility of the embodied distributed cognition by focusing on the concept of mental representation. Firstly, I shall examine the nature of embodied mind and distributed cognition. Secondly I shall make a distinction between those ideas that the notion of embodiment can be confined to the mind but the notion of distribution can be applied to both the mind and to its environment. This implies a difference of applicability of those notions. That is, while the suitable application domain of the latter is scientific cognition, that of the former is our mind. This difference can throw light upon untangling the dispute between Churchland's internalism and Giere's externalism of presentation. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between knowing how to G and the ability to G, which is typically presented in one of the following ways: knowing how to G entails the ability to G; knowing how to G does not entail the ability to G. In an attempt to reconcile these two putatively opposing positions, I distinguish between type and token actions. It is my contention that S can know how to G in the absence of an ability to \, (...) where this action is derived from an action-type, but not in the absence of the ability to perform the action-type itself \\). This refinement is an attempt to reconcile differences between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism with regard to knowledge how and ability. (shrink)

Professor Eames explores the development of Russell’s own philosophy in interaction with ten of his contemporaries: Bradley, Joachim, Moore, Frege, Meinong, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Schiller, James, and Dewey. Her examination of these interactions affords a new historical perspective on 20th century analytic philosophy as well as a deeper understanding of Russell’s philosophy and its influence.

The aim of this paper is to explore the minimal representational requirements for pointing. One year old children are capable of pointing – what does this tell us about their representational capacities? We analyse three options: (1) pointing presupposes non-perceptual representations, (2) pointing does not presuppose any representation at all, (3) pointing presupposes perceptual representations. Rather than fully endorsing any of these three options, the aim of the paper is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each.

The circumstance that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only half a day's labor, while on the other hand the very same labor power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what he [the capitalist] pays for that use, this circumstance is without a doubt a piece of good luck for the buyer but by no means an injustice [Unrecht] to the seller [the (...) worker].[T]he surplus product [is] the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labor power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of. (shrink)

This article aims to challenge the thesis of the craft origins of scientific empiricism by demonstrating how the empirical practices of early experimentalism differed in significant ways from the activities of artisans. Through a phenomenological analysis of instrumental observation and experimental demonstrations, I aim to show how experimentalism privileged modes of experience that were foreign to craft traditions and which facilitated a newfound estrangement of human subjects from the objects of their knowledge. Firstly, we will review concerns surrounding the promotion (...) of optical instruments by early experimentalists to reveal how these technologies were understood not only to amplify the senses but also to obscure contextual and relative qualities available to unaided visual perception. Secondly, we will examine the experimental practices of the early Royal Society, to see how experimental demonstrations were deliberately structured to facilitate experiences of the natural world that were divorced from practical and personal contexts. It is here that the divergence from artisanal epistemology is rendered most apparent. For in contrast to craft practices, which favored forms of experience which were personal and engaged, I will argue that the new scientific practices of the 17th century played a central role in effecting the researcher's transformation into a new kind of epistemological subject – the spectator. (shrink)