Using Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance Principle to Learn Exemplars

The introduction of the notion of family resemblance represented a major shift in Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the meaning of words, moving away from a belief that words were well defined, to a view that words denoted less well defined categories of meaning. This paper presents the use of the notion of family resemblance in the area of machine learning as an example of the benefits that can accrue from adopting the kind of paradigm shift taken by Wittgenstein. The paper presents a model capable of learning exemplars using the principle of family resemblance and adopting Bayesian networks for a representation of exemplars. An empirical evaluation is presented on three data sets and shows promising results that suggest that previous assumptions about the way we categories need reopening.

History of Science: Looking Ahead to the 21st Century Editorial

(Theauthor.ProfessorLiuDunisthecurrentDirectoroftheInstitutefortheHistoryofScience,theChineseAcademyofSciences.andeditorofthejournalStudiesintheHistoryofNaturalSciences.ThisEditorialwasoriginallypublishedinChineseinthisjournal,Vol.18,No.3,pp.193~195...     

《从存在到演化》(From Being to Becoming)

普利高津的新著《从存在到演化》已由上海科技出版社出版,全书256页,定价1.90元。此书的英文版1980年出版,1984年作者又作了修订。普利高津在书中对耗散结构理论作了一个比较简明、系统而又尽可能通俗的讲解,对理论的数学部分作了大量精简,突出讲了它的物理内容和科学意义。此书为具有一定物理学、化学和热力学知识的读者说明了一个远离平衡态的开放系统,怎样从混沌无序演化为复杂的结构,例如大气的循环,化学波的传播,单细胞生物的聚集等。书中对过去和未来的不对称性——时间的不可逆性提出了新的解释,描述了一个演化的而不是静止的宇宙。本书回答了如何从混沌中产生     

Transmission of Islamic Exact Science to India and its Neighbours and Repercussions Thereof

LetmefirstclarifythatscienceasdevelopedinIslamicculturalareasorsocietiesduringtheMiddleAgesisabbreviatedhereasIslamicScience.Inthatcontext,theExactScienceis confinedtoastronomy(includingmathematicalgeography)andmathematicsonly;physicswas thenapartofnatura…     

Civic Meaningfulness ‘Revisited’: A Final Reply to Honohan and Dekker

This final reply responds to Honohan’s invitation to articulate the Arendtian tone of the key-note paper. It spells out the philosophical intuition that the political life of citizens, at least potentially, is capable of making visible what makes human life worthwhile and fully meaningful, and the philosophical curiosity to see whether traces of this deep political awareness can be retrieved in dialogues with volunteers. In response to Dekker’s critical doubts, this final reply clarifies the central stakes of Claes’s paper. The core argument was not to show that the biographical model of meaningfulness is the prevailing approach of meaning in/of volunteering, but to assess the potentials and limits of the model’s interpretive power. Moreover, the paper argues for an alternative, existential model of meaningfulness. This approach refers to deep experiences of meaning that emerge from the practice of volunteering and that shift into powerful political experiences of hope, and a lived sense of equality.     

Inference to the Best Manipulation – A Case Study of Qualitative Reasoning in Neuropharmacy

How can new drug lead suggestions beinferred from neurophysiological models? This paperaddresses this question based on a case study ofresearch into Parkinson's disease at the GroningenUniversity Department of Pharmacy. It is argued thatneurophysiological box-and-arrow models can beunderstood as qualitative differential equationmodels. An inference task is defined to helpunderstand and possibly aid the discovery andexplanation of new drug lead suggestions.     

‘The Economic’ According to Aristotle: Ethical, Political and Epistemological Implications

A renewed concern with Aristotle’s thought about the economic aspects of human life and society can be observed. Aristotle dealt with the economic issues in his practical philosophy. He thus considered ‘the economic’ within an ethical and political frame. This vision is coherent with a specific ontology of ‘the economic’ according to Aristotle. In a recent paper, I analysed this ontology and left its consequences, especially for Ethics and Politics, for another paper. In this article, I firstly summarise the reasoning and conclusions of the aforementioned paper. Then, I extract the ethical and political “lessons” of the Aristotelian conception. I finally add a section with epistemological “lessons”, and consequences for the teaching of Economics.     

The Reality Doesn't Correspond to Its Appellation of“无氟冰箱”(wufubingxiang)

当代最大的环境问题之一就是大气臭氧层的破坏.各新闻媒体对这个问题进行了大量的报道,主要目的在于唤醒广大公众的环境意识,其功绩不小.但是在宣传报道中对于臭氧层破坏的问题有的提法不科学,形成了某些误解,其中"无氟冰箱"就是最明显的实例之一.     

Who is Afraid of the Political? A Response to Robert Scharff and Michel Puech

In their respective commentaries to my article “Postphenomenology and the Politics of Sustainable Technology” both Robert Scharff and Michel Puech take issue with my postphenomenological inroad into the politics of technology. In a first step I try to accommodate the suggestions and objections raised by Scharff by making my account of the political more explicit. Consequently, I argue how an antagonistic relational conceptualisation of the political allows me to address head on Puech’s plea to leave politics behind and move towards an ethically informed, post-political approach to sustainability. “But perhaps the question philosophy is confronted with—through the question of the political—might be whether not all reasoning, including a purely theoretical reasoning, can truly only be a political reasoning, resulting in an inevitable, indeed necessary circular structure” (Boehm 2002; author’s translation). In a footnote to my original article ‘Postphenomenology and the Politics of Sustainable Technology’, I wrote that “for the purpose of this paper, it suffices to say that I use the adjective ‘political’ to indicate all aspects of human and non-human agency that are related to ‘shaping the good life’ (Goeminne 2011a).” With hindsight, brought about by the commentaries of Scharff (2011) and Puech (2011), I now see that I could not have been more optimistic. Or should I say naïve? Indeed, although coming from different angles and resulting in very different suggestions, both commentaries precisely target my postphenomenological inroad into the ‘politics’ of technology. In challenging my grounding of the politics of technology in a postphenomenological perspective, Scharff in particular invites me to make my notion of the political more explicit. In what follows, I will therefore first elaborate my take on the political dimension of technology in dialogue with Scharff’s comments and suggestions. Armed with this deepened concept of the political, I will then address Puech’s plea to leave politics behind and move towards an ethically informed, post-political approach to sustainability. Evidently, within the limits of this piece, I can only indicate the broader direction my conceptualisation of the political takes. It suffices perhaps to say that, partly induced by the commentaries of Scharff and Puech, the question of the political has meanwhile taken a much more prominent place in my research as can be seen from a few recent publications [e.g. Goeminne (2012) and Goeminne (forthcoming)]. In saying this, I am also expressing my indebtedness to the commentators for nudging me in this political direction.     

THE LI FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP OF NEW YORK to honour the memory of Dr Lu Gwei-djen

A visiting Fellowship tenable atthe Needham Research Institute in Cambridge,England,is offeredfor one year by the L i Foundation of New York.This is to enable a Chinese scholar from the People' sRepublic of China to conduct research in a subjectrelevant t…     

How Can We Teach the Chemical Elements to Make the Memorization Task More Enjoyable?

In this commentary to Leal (2013), we argue that the memorization of the names and symbols of the chemical elements is necessary in the study of that topic because this task is the key for the later understanding of the Periodic Table. We can make the memorization task in an enjoyable, but effective way, using some educational games in chemistry class. Some recent puzzles, card games, mnemonics rules or games based on drawings to learn the chemical elements are addressed in this paper.     

The Chinese Term“邮船”Ought Not to Be Used for “Cruise Ship”

经常看到关于"邮船"的报道,如"超豪华邮船‘曙光'号抵达上海,载有2 700名游客","去年两次到沪的‘狮子星'号邮船","大型豪华邮船‘奥丽安娜'号"……在<辞海>和<现代汉语词典>中均列有"邮船(轮)"词条,<现代汉语词典>的定义是"海洋上定线、定期航行的大型客运轮船.     

The Constructive Realist Account of Science and Its Application to Ilya Prigogine’s Conception of Laws of Nature

Sciences are often regarded as providing the best, or, ideally, exact, knowledge of the world, especially in providing laws of nature. Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of non-equilibrium chemical processes—this being also an important attempt to bridge the gap between exact and non-exact sciences [mentioned in the Presentation Speech by Professor Stig Claesson (nobelprize.org, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977)]—has had this ideal in mind when trying to formulate a new kind of science. Philosophers of science distinguish theory and reality, examining relations between these two. Nancy Cartwright’s distinction of fundamental and phenomenological laws, Rein Vihalemm’s conception of the peculiarity of the exact sciences, and Ronald Giere’s account of models in science and science as a set of models are deployed in this article to criticise the common view of science and analyse Ilya Prigogine’s view in particular. We will conclude that on a more abstract, philosophical level, Prigogine’s understanding of science doesn’t differ from the common understanding.

“沙”(sha) and“砂”(sha)Are Difficult to Differentiate One from the Other

在汉语形成发展的长河中,产生了不少难分难舍的一对对同义或近义字词,如坐与座、做与作、阴与荫、分与份、联与连、碱与硷、气与汽、急与亟、痛与疼、浑与混等等,但很少是像"沙"与"砂"这样一对令科技界钟情,令语文学家头痛,应用又非常普遍的"冤家".