This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work--their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world--so that outsiders can understand it. Martin H. Krieger explains that physicists employ a small number of everyday notions to get at the world experimentally and conceptually.

This chapter studies the scattered career of Prince Frederick August of Augustenburg (1830–1881). Caught between the German-Danish conflict within the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, the Prince escaped from parental pressure as well as a lack of perspectives by delving into the riches of the Indian past. As an amateur-Indologist, he reshaped his self-perception and finally wrote the first Western biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The study draws on the Prince’s publications and his surviving handwritten documents and tries to highlight India’s (...) role in his process of gaining self-confidence and self-awareness. (shrink)

O presente Trabalho de Conclusão de Residência multidisciplinar em Saúde possui o objetivo de conhecer a percepção e a prática de profissionais médicos, atuantes na Estratégia de Saúde da Família (ESF), no que concerne aos Cuidados Paliativos (CP) na Atenção Primária à Saúde (APS). Os seis profissionais desta amostra estão vinculados a ESF de uma Unidade Básica de Saúde (UBS) localizada em Canoas/RS. O estudo possuimetodologia de natureza qualitativa e abordagem descritiva. O referencial teórico utiliza-se de áreas da psicologia da (...) saúde, medicina paliativa, e do Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS). Os resultados apontam para necessidade de incluir nas práticas de CP dimensões subjetivas no cuidado e a interdisciplinaridade como método de trabalho. Ademais, identificaram-se lacunas referentes acapacitações e formações especificas em CP, sobrecarga de trabalho e insatisfação profissional. Essa pesquisa pretende ampliar a discussão dos muitos desafios éticos a serem vencidos na APS, referente aos CP. (shrink)

Mathematical theorems are cultural artifacts and may be interpreted much as works of art, literature, and tool-and-craft are interpreted. The Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus, the Central Limit Theorem of Statistics, and the Statistical Continuum Limit of field theories, all show how the world may be put together through the arithmetic addition of suitably prescribed parts (velocities, variances, and renormalizations and scaled blocks, respectively). In the limit — of smoothness, statistical independence, and large N — higher-order parts, such as accelerations, (...) are, for the most, part irrelevant, affirming that, in the end, most of the world's particulars may be averaged over (a very un-Scriptural point of view). (We work out all of this in technical detail, including a nice geometric picture of stochastic integration, and a method of calculating the variance of the sum of dependent random variables using renormalization group ideas.) These fundamental theorems affirm a culture that is additive, ahistorical, Cartesian, and continuist, sharing in what might be called a species of modern culture. We understand mathematical results as useful because, like many other such artifacts, they have been adapted to fit the world, and the world has been adapted to fit their capacities. Such cultural interpretation is in effect motivation for the mathematics, and might well be offered to students as a way of helping them understand what is going on at the blackboard. Philosophy of mathematics might want to pay more attention to the history and detailed technical features of sophisticated mathematics, as a balance to the usual concerns that arise in formalist or even Platonist positions. (shrink)

It is difficult to overestimate the impact, beginning in the 1960s, which Gombrich’s discussion of visual representation made on a good number of theorists in an entire generation of thinking about art and—even more—about literary art. For literary theory and criticism were at least as affected by his work as were theory and criticism in the plastic arts. Art and Illusion radically undermined the terms which had controlled discussion of how art represented “reality”—or, rather, how viewers or members of the (...) audience perceived that representation and related it to their versions of “reality.” And, for those who accompanied or followed him—from Rosalie Colie to Wolfgang Iser—Gombrich helped transform for good the meaning of a long revered term like “imitation” as it could be applied to both the visual and verbal arts. I believe he must, then, be seen as responsible for some of the most provocative turns that art theory, literary theory, and aesthetics have taken in the last two decades.In much of his work since the 1960s, however, Gombrich has appeared more and more anxious to dissociate himself from those who have treated his earlier books and essays as leading to the theoretical innovations which have claimed support from them. In The Image and the Eye, the statements which put distance between himself and such followers seem utterly unambiguous. And against the charge that his work has become more conservative with the passing years, I suspect Gombrich would argue that any claim of difference between, say, Art and Illusion and The Image and the Eye is a result of an original misreading, that the recent work is only more explicitly defending a traditional position which was quietly there all along, though supposedly friendly theorists wrongly saw him as subverting it in the earlier work. Thus Gombrich is now self-consciously committed to undoing what he sees as our errors of reading rather than his own errors of writing. Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and, most recently, Arts on the Level. He is presently working on Ekphrasis: Space, Time, and Illusion in Literary Theory . His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor,” appeared in the Summer 1979 issue. (shrink)

I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the apologist for (...) imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered. Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

The ArgumentMost lay users of statistics think in terms of means (averages), variances or the square of the standard deviation, and Gaussians or bell-shaped curves. Such conventions are entrenched by statistical practice, by deep mathematical theorems from probability, and by theorizing in the various natural and social sciences. I am not claiming that the particular conventions (here, the statistics) we adopt are arbitrary. Entrenchment can be rational without its being as well categorical (excluding all other alternatives), even if that entrenchment (...) claims also to provide for categoricity. 1 provide a detailed description of how a science is “normal” and conventionalized. A characteristic feature of this entrenchment of conventions by practice, theorems, and theorizing, is its highly technical form, the canonizing work enabled by apparently formal and esoteric mathematical means. (shrink)

I am troubled by the temper of E. H. Gombrich’s response, “Representation and Misrepresentation” , to my “Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective” and by his preferring not to sense the profound admiration—indeed, the homage—intended by my essay, both for his contributions to recent theory and for their influence upon its recent developments. But I am more troubled by the confusions his remarks may cause in the interpretation of his own work as well as in the (...) judgment of mine. There are important issues at stake, I feel, especially as regards the relation between scientific and aesthetic inquiry.The very irritated tone of his reaction helps make what I see as my major point: his work has contained a conflict between two Gombrichs—one, the skeptical humanist and, the other, the positive scientist—and with the passing years the second has increasingly sought to obliterate signs of the first, becoming increasingly impatient with any attempt to revive those signs or remind us of their existence. On the other side, since the line of literary criticism with which I associate myself has drawn strength from the first Gombrich, this development in his work and in his attitudes has caused some disappointment. Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California. He is the author of many works, including The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and Arts on the Level. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality” , “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor” , and “The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective”. (shrink)

Many philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians have wondered about the remarkable relationship between mathematics with its abstract, pure, independent structures on one side, and the wilderness of natural phenomena on the other. Famously, Wigner found the "effectiveness" of mathematics in defining and supporting physical theories to be unreasonable, for how incredibly well it worked. Why, in fact, should these mathematical structures be so well-fitting, and even heuristic in the scientific exploration and discovery of nature? This book argues that the effectiveness of (...) mathematics in physics is reasonable. The author builds on useful analogies of prime numbers and elementary particles, elementary structure kinship and the structure of systems of particles, spectra and symmetries, and for example, mathematical limits and physical situations. The two-dimensional Ising model of a permanent magnet and the proofs of the stability of everyday matter exemplify such effectiveness, and the power of rigorous mathematical physics. Newton is our original model, with Galileo earlier suggesting that mathematics is the language of Nature. (shrink)

Our usual view of the Renaissance poetic, as we derive it from the explicit statements which we normally cite, sees it primarily as a rhetorical theory which is essentially Platonic in the universal meanings behind individual words, images, or fictions. Accordingly, poetic words, images, or fictions are taken to be purely allegorical, functioning as arbitrary or at most as conventional signs: each word, image, or fiction is seen as thoroughly dispensable, indeed interchangeable with others, to be used just so long (...) as we can get beyond it to the ultimate meaning which it presumably signifies. This rather simple—if not simplistic—semiology leaves the body of poetry as empty as modern post-Saussurean linguistics often leaves the body of language. By treating all poetic devices as transparent elements through which various universal "truths" are revealed, the rhetorical/allegorical theory converts all the poet's dispositions of words into devices of persuasion on the service of a function higher than that of poetry. Such is the way that, for example, a conservative, widely influential theorist like Scaliger clearly formulated the principle. And for as careful a commentator on Renaissance imagery as Rosemund Tuve, these are the farthest reaches of the Renaissance poetic; she argues that any more subtle a claim is merely the consequence of the modern mind trying anachronistically to sophisticate an older tradition. Her examination of explicit statements by major Renaissance writers on poetics finds reinforcement in the logic of Petrus Ramus as she extends it to a total stylistics, or even to a linguistics.1 · 1. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics . Murray Krieger, University Professor of English and director of The Irvine School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, and, most recently, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System. The present essay is part of his book, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory. "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

A major distinction in the social organization of ant societies is the number of reproductive queens that reside in a single colony. The fire ant Solenopsis invicta exists in two distinct social forms, one with colonies headed by a single reproductive queen and the other containing several to hundreds of egg‐laying queens. This variation in social organization has been shown to be associated with genotypes at the gene Gp‐9. Specifically, single‐queen colonies have only the B allelic variant of this gene, (...) whereas multiple‐queen colonies always have the b variant as well. Subsequent studies revealed that Gp‐9 shares the highest sequence similarity with genes encoding pheromone‐binding proteins (PBPs). In other insects, PBPs serve as central molecular components in the process of chemical recognition of conspecifics. Fire ant workers regulate the number of egg‐laying queens in a colony by accepting queens that produce appropriate chemical signals and destroying those that do not. The likely role of GP‐9 in chemoreception suggests that the essential distinction in colony queen number between the single and multiple‐queen form originates from differences in workers' abilities to recognize queens. Other, closely related fire ant species seem to regulate colony social organization in a similar fashion. BioEssays 27:91–99, 2005. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Exact solutions for the partition function of the two-dimensional classical statistical mechanics Ising model may be classified using a scheme of analogy having three moments--analysis, algebra, and arithmetic--developed by Dedekind and Weber in 1882 for providing an algebraic understanding of Riemann’s work. In effect, we have two analogies, a physical one and a mathematical one, coming from very different problems. What is it about the mathematical realm that allows for this threefold analogy, and what is it about the Ising model (...) that allows for such varied modes of solution, and why are the analogies analogous to each other? (shrink)

Krieger revisits the ideas of his now infamous article of some thirty years ago in Science magazine. His aim is to give an account of design, one that experienced designers will say,'Yes, That's just what it is like!' At the same time, Krieger offers an analysis of the tensions that design operates within; between perfection and contingency, between wholes and parts, between the talk we make about the world and the world itself. Krieger takes design—in architecture, landscape, interiors, engineering, and (...) in systems and computer science—to be modeled by traditional theological and artistic problems. And here, he claims, design has traditionally been a redesign of nature. For nature is, as Durkheim would describe it, a totem. Our collective ritual devotion to it allows us to enliven or animate it, and so it may animate us as well. Curiously, much of design and discourse about it now takes place in the computer software engineering world, especially among those concerned with patterns and object- oriented programming. In developing a notion of plastic trees, Krieger probes just what could be wrong with such artifices. As he illustrates, what we call nature is almost always a product of deliberate design. It is as if people make discoveries in exploration, discoveries of places already occupied aboriginally. In essence, he asserts what we actually have is a virtual authenticity, more real than any original could possibly be—since the original was never meant to be sacralized or featured in our lives. A provocative analysis that scholars and students of architecture and planning, environmental studies, engineering and computer science will find stimulating. (shrink)