Coal to Diamonds

In this commentary to Napoletani et al. (Foundations of Science 16:1–20, 2011), we put agnostic science in a wider historical context of philosophy of mathematics. Secondly, the parallel to Tukey’s “exploratory data analysis” will be discussed. Thirdly, it will be argued that what is new is the mutually interdependent dynamics of data (on which Napoletani et al. focus) and of computational modeling—which puts science closer to engineering and vice versa.     

The Art of Living with ICTs: The Ethics–Aesthetics of Vulnerability Coping and Its Implications for Understanding and Evaluating ICT Cultures

This essay shows that a sharp distinction between ethics and aesthetics is unfruitful for thinking about how to live well with technologies, and in particular for understanding and evaluating how we cope with human existential vulnerability, which is crucially mediated by the development and use of technologies such as electronic ICTs. It is argued that vulnerability coping is a matter of ethics and art: it requires developing a kind of art and techne in the sense that it always involves technologies and specific styles of experiencing and dealing with vulnerability, which depend on social and cultural context. It is suggested that we try to find better, perhaps less modern styles of coping with our vulnerability, recognize limits to our attempts to “design” our new forms, and explore what kinds of technologies we need for this project.     

The Deluge of Spurious Correlations in Big Data

Very large databases are a major opportunity for science and data analytics is a remarkable new field of investigation in computer science. The effectiveness of these tools is used to support a “philosophy” against the scientific method as developed throughout history. According to this view, computer-discovered correlations should replace understanding and guide prediction and action. Consequently, there will be no need to give scientific meaning to phenomena, by proposing, say, causal relations, since regularities in very large databases are enough: “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”. The “end of science” is proclaimed. Using classical results from ergodic theory, Ramsey theory and algorithmic information theory, we show that this “philosophy” is wrong. For example, we prove that very large databases have to contain arbitrary correlations. These correlations appear only due to the size, not the nature, of data. They can be found in “randomly” generated, large enough databases, which—as we will prove—implies that most correlations are spurious. Too much information tends to behave like very little information. The scientific method can be enriched by computer mining in immense databases, but not replaced by it.     

对医疗领域中的认知不公正论证的反思

卡瑞尔和基德认为弗里克提出的"认知不公正"概念在医疗领域中也存在,她们论证了这一领域的证言不正义和阐释不正义.然而本文认为,医疗领域与认知不公正问题的典型领域存在显著差异,其差异主要在于专业知识的不对称,病人证言依赖于知识语境和医生能力.因而用认知不公正的概念来表述这些问题会一定程度掩盖其中更为深层的两类知识之间的交互...     

“Who” is a “Topical Measuring” Postphenomenologist and How Does One Get That Way?

Gert Goeminne’s paper is primarily concerned with “the politics of sustainable technology,” but for good reasons he does not start with this topic. He knows that technology studies as he conceives it must clear a space for itself in a philosophical atmosphere that discourages its pursuit. He therefore begins with a critique of this objectivistic and technocratically defined atmosphere, before moving on to embrace a postphenomenology of technological multistabilities, and then further to introduce what he calls (in an adaptation of Rudolf Boehm) the “topical measure” of technoscientific life. The problem I raise is not about Goeminne’s aims, with which I mostly agree, but with his presentation of how to achieve them. I argue that if one were actually to follow his advice—that is, start with critique, move on to postphenomenology, and end with “political” evaluation of technoscientific life, the project would be doomed to failure. For in our world, no one Understands this pluralizing vision. According to the understanding we actually live through and speak from, some of postphenomenology’s multiple disclosures already arrive in our experience with significantly greater ontological power than others, and sincerity about topical measure notwithstanding, the very identification of something as an interest or “value,” especially if it allegedly comes from a “layperson,” already condemns it to secondary status.     

Perception: Embodiment and Beyond

In this commentary on Don Ihde’s paper “Stretching the in-between: embodiment and beyond” I argue that perceptions and observations are based on tacit frames and these frames are expressed through pre-reflexive intuitions thus giving meaning to the perceived content of observations. However, if the objective or given information in perception is incomplete or missing our brain and nervous system will intuitively and unconsciously fill in the missing information in order to act—these particular pieces of added information may not be relevant to the decoding of the given content of perception at all.     

Creative Strategies Employed in Modelling: A Case Study

This paper examines creative strategies employed inscientific modelling. It is argued that being creativepresents not a discrete event, but rather an ongoingeffort consisting of many individual `creative acts'.These take place over extended periods of time andcan be carried out by different people, working ondifferent aspects of the same project. The example ofextended extragalactic radio sources shows that, inorder to model a complicated phenomenon in itsentirety, the modelling task is split up into smallerproblems that result in several sub-models. This is away of using cognitive resources efficiently and in away which overcomes their limitations. Another aspectof modelling that requires creativity is theemployment of visualisation in order to reassemble,i.e. recreate the unity of, the various sub-models bymeans of visualisation. This illustrates how thecreative effort required to deal with the complexityof the complicated phenomenon of radio sources ischannelled in order to use cognitive resourcesefficiently and to stay within their capacity.     

“菌”字的早期含义探析——兼论《墨子》中的“菌”字

先秦时期即已出现的“菌”字至今仍被广泛使用。该字在先秦文献中多次出现,其义项不囿于菌类一种。《墨子》的《迎敌祠》和《旗帜》篇皆含“菌”字,注家对其含义、字形和在句中的位置意见不一。文章通过梳理注家的意见和先秦用例并结合语境,认为《迎敌祠》篇中“客菌”和“涂菌”之“菌”当释为翳蔽之意;前一“菌”字非“圉”之误,而后一“菌”字亦非“固”之误,且应与“涂”字断开,置于下文“令”字之后并与之连用。《旗帜》篇中“菌旗”之“菌”非“茜”之误,而应释为食用菌类。     

Science Is Not Always “Self-Correcting”

Some prominent scientists and philosophers have stated openly that moral and political considerations should influence whether we accept or promulgate scientific theories. This widespread view has significantly influenced the development, and public perception, of intelligence research. Theories related to group differences in intelligence are often rejected a priori on explicitly moral grounds. Thus the idea, frequently expressed by commentators on science, that science is “self-correcting”—that hypotheses are simply abandoned when they are undermined by empirical evidence—may not be correct in all contexts. In this paper, documentation spanning from the early 1970s to the present is collected, which reveals the influence of scientists’ moral and political commitments on the study of intelligence. It is suggested that misrepresenting findings in science to achieve desirable social goals will ultimately harm both science and society.     

“压舱石”术语义商补

航运史上,空船往往必须加载压舱石,但加载压舱石的并不只有空船,《现代汉语词典》(第7版)“压舱石”释语中的释义成分“空船”宜改为“船只”。船用固体压舱物构成一个概念系统,其中“压舱石”和“压载铁(压舱铁)”的术语义在语义特征、使用语境和术语色彩上都有显著差异,“压舱石”释语中的释义成分“铸铁”宜删去。     

The God Concept: Aristotle and the Philosophical Tradition

Before beginning a paper on metaphysics, it is wise to acknowledge the paper’s own “metaphysical” assumptions. In what follows, we must bear in mind that the history of philosophy is as interpretively diverse as it is long. We will begin with the premise that Metaphysics is indeed a foundational science. We will posit that Aristotle’s corpus is unified; that is, that Aristotle can be read as a “systematic” philosopher. Moreover, we will assume that the history of philosophy is itself a unity. If we posit such, “philosophy” can be read as a comprehensible continuity: a certainly contestable position. We must bear in mind that similitude is decidedly not identity; however, similitude does imply a certain conceptual correlation, one which, when pressed, may yield interesting, if not unexpected, results. Thus, we will travel at lightning speed through what took a snail’s pace to develop, “mapping,” so to speak, the structure of the unmoved mover of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1941) onto the traditional historical divisions of the history of philosophy. We will begin with Aristotle himself in the Ancient period, move to Averroes (the Ibn-Rushd of this paper) in the Medieval period, focus on Descartes and Spinoza as Modern thinkers and, finally, end in Heidegger and Sartre in Contemporary philosophy. This is philosophy with a capital “P,” which may or may not be the reader’s preferred position, let alone the writer’s. But, for our purposes here, it is, nonetheless, inevitable.     

计算语言学中的重要术语——词向量

过去几年,自然语言处理(NLP)技术飞速发展,文本表征成了计算语言学的核心。其中,分布式词向量表征在语义表达方面展现出巨大的潜力与应用效果。文章从语言学理论基础出发,介绍了计算语言学的重要术语——词向量。探讨了词向量的两种表示方式:离散式与分布式;介绍了词向量在语义变迁等历时语言学领域的应用。在此基础上,指出词向量语义计算法存在的局限性,并总结了两种词义消歧方法:无监督与基于知识库。最后,文章提出大规模知识库与词向量的结合可能是未来文本表征研究的重要方向之一。     

"小说"及其亚文类名称的英译探究

“小说”及其亚文类名称的英译是一个复杂的问题,误译的现象在期刊和辞书中都并不鲜见。英语中的fiction与novel的含义并不相同,二者与汉语中的“小说”概念也均不一致,需根据情况来选择准确的译词。作为泛指,“小说”应当译作fiction,而不是novel,因为novel指的是长篇小说。在小说亚文类的划分上,英语文学界和中国文学界皆尚存在不同的意见。就当今汉语小说的实际情况而言,应当划分为四种亚文类:长篇小说、中篇小说、短篇小说和微篇小说。其中最后一种亚文类的命名歧出纷纭,而以“小小说”和“微型小说”最为通行,但最合理的命名则是“微篇小说”。“中篇小说”和“微篇小说”各自具有多种译名,而其合理性各有差别,经过辨析,可以甄选出最合适的英语词来作为译名。     

Whose Agency Now?

I agree with my readers on the necessary alliance of personal agency and collective agency. My point is to prioritize the former. The reasons to prioritize the latter were excellent, and it was undoubtedly a sound decision to start with this scenario: political and institutional improvement of the collectives, enlightened by progressive social sciences. My argument for suggesting a different priority—toward personal microactions and their emergent effects—relies on the opinion that we are stuck in a sustainability crisis due to our current approach. In the question “whose agency now?”, my stress is on “now”.     

About the Confusion Between the Course of Time and the Arrow of Time

A conclusion drawn after a conference devoted (in 1995) to the “arrow of time” was the following: “Indeed, it seems not a very great exaggeration to say that the main problem with “the problem of the direction of time” is to figure out exactly what the problem is supposed to be !” What does that mean? That more than 130 years after the work of Ludwig Boltzmann on the interpretation of irreversibility of physical phenomena, and that one century after Einstein’s formulation of Special Relativity, we are still not sure what we mean when we talk of “time” or “arrow of time”. We shall try to show that one source of this difficulty is our tendency to confuse, at least verbally, time and becoming, i.e. the course of time and the arrow of time, two concepts that the formalisms of modern physics are careful to distinguish.     

“中深湖”是一个错误的术语

近年来,“中深湖”一词出现于国内部分地学类和石油类科技期刊中,根据所在文献的上下文推断,“中深湖”应属于地学中的沉积学范畴,对应于深湖(或半深湖和深湖)。“中深湖”本身含义不清,现有文献均未给出其定义,沉积学教科书上也没有出现过“中深湖”一词。因此,“中深湖”是一个错误的术语,不应继续使用。可根据资料条件和研究精度不同,规范使用“深湖”和“半深湖”这两个沉积学术语。     

Understanding Scientific Inquiries of Galileo’s Formulation for the Law of Free Falling Motion

The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the role of abstraction and idealization in Galileo’s scientific inquiries into the law of free falling motion, and their importance in the history of science. Because there is no consensus on the use of the terms “abstraction” and “idealization” in the literature, it is necessary to distinguish between them at the outset. This paper will argue (1) for the importance of abstraction and idealization in physics and the theories and laws of physics constructed with abduction from observations and (2) that these theoretical laws of physics should be tested with deduction and induction thorough quasi-idealized entities rather than empirical results in the everyday world. Galileo’s work is linked to thought experiments in natural science. Galileo, using thought experiments based on idealization, persuaded others that what had been proven true for a ball on an inclined plane would be equally true for a ball falling through a vacuum.     

表示“酸奶制品”概念的俄语术语汉译方法刍议

术语之所以称为术语,通常是针对语词所在的系统而言的,离开具体的系统,语词的术语特征则无从谈起。在一般情况下,翻译这类词语时不存在多大困难,但当这些词语(术语)在同一文本或同一语境中使用时,问题就会凸显出来。文章分析了表示“酸奶制品”概念的一组俄语术语在同一文本中汉译的具体问题,并探讨了术语的几种翻译方法。     

文物保护术语setting析理及中文名探讨

setting是西方文物保护界使用较频繁的专业术语,但由于东西方文化以及语言文字之间的差异,其中文名一直以来难以准确认定。因此,有必要从英文语境以及概念凝练过程研究setting,析理其内在底蕴和含义,以探讨中文语境下的贴切译词。setting通常多与人类的主观活动相关,不仅限于表达“环境”之义,以复合名词“背景环境”作为术语setting的中文译词,可以较大程度地还原setting的多层次含义。