Form Of Indeterminacy Research Articles

An epistemic theory of the criminal process, Part I: Measurement and control

Abstract The criminal process can be seen as a system of classification, akin to a search engine. I consider the impact on it of poor measurements of the rates of false positives and false negatives. With ordinal rather than interval measurements, we lose some but not all control. I identify a novel form of indeterminacy, ‘directional aimlessness’, that leads to a behaviour of ‘shoving’. This can take a form, ‘naked shoving’, that looks purposeful but isn’t. I empirically establish the presence of naked shoving in the USA. This methodological work comprises Part I of a novel theory of the criminal process. In Part II, I use it to mathematize Herbert Packer’s influential ‘two models’ theory in criminology, both a form of validation and a way of giving an abstract theory traction in the real world. We acquire a general ‘epistemic’ alternative to economic, organizational, legal or political forms of analysis and I use it to critique Richard Posner’s law and economics. Given the lack of purpose, I conclude that policymaking in the criminal process is usually a form of ritual and, now that we have the capacity for interval measurements, contemplate the end of the old order.

Statutory Interpretation: How Legal Reasoning and Linguistics Interact

The relationship between law and language has been widely discussed as early as in 1963 when Mellinkoff published the well-known book ‘The Language of the Law’ in the US. The linguistic analysis presented in this paper is an attempt to study legal interpretation from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, it is intended to demonstrate actual disputes (mostly US cases) that require interpreting statutes as how legal reasoning and linguistics interact. Starting with a brief account of linguistic indeterminacy and different forms of indeterminacy in legal contexts, the author will then focus on various approaches provided by legal scholars and linguists when it comes to uncertainty in construing law. Finally, a Polish case study will be presented to exemplify how linguistic analysis, along with legal argumentation, can practically contribute to the effectiveness of legal drafting and interpretation.

Visual experience in the predictive brain is univocal, but indeterminate

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience (Clark, 2015). Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic (Block, 2018; Holton, 2016).While Clark (2018) proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that (like us) models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed.

A Chance for Cinema-Writing in Electronic Literature

Computational cinema, the digital manipulation of pixels, frames, shots and sequences, is a catch-all term for the many ways digital technology can affect cinema as a system of expression. If a movie scene calls for a snowstorm, CGI can be employed to create an idealized snowstorm. Computation in this sense is used to efficiently control contingencies (weather) and direct the intentions of “the writing” or preconceived idea. But computation can also create new contingencies that add to the camera’s already complex presentation of the world. Multimedia hypertext and interactive cinema, generative and recombinant video, datamoshing and databending all introduce forms of indeterminacy into digital cinema. As digital writing becomes even more cinematic and immersive, it is important to revisit the roots of cinema art and seek its relation both to writing and the world. The ideal of “cinema-writing,” or cinécriture in the French cinema context, is one that takes the machine seriously as a tool to bring the world into thought and thought out onto the world. Cinema and writing together, as imagined by the art’s earliest practitioners and theorists, is a way to harness the camera’s unique indexicality; to extend its spatio-temporal reach and direct its signification towards narrative, but also to benefit from its dispersed realism, its opacity and its potential to escape thought and narrative closure altogether. In this paper, I explore affiliations between cinema art and electronic literature, with a particular focus on computation as an extension of cinema-writing. Through examples of cinematic electronic literature, as well as film and video art, I will present strategies for a computational cinema that welcomes chance operations into the process of signification; that seeks an “outside” within (and beside) narrative composition and authorial intent.

« Un meilleur exemple est une photographie » (CP 2.320). De la valeur de la photographie comme exemple dans les écrits de C. S. Peirce sur le signe.1

Cet article prolonge une discussion antérieure sur la place de la photographie dans la réflexion sémiotique de Charles S. Peirce, pour préciser dans ce cadre la fonction de l’image photographique comme exemple pour la théorie sémiotique, plutôt que comme objet théorique à part entière. En se basant sur plusieurs textes des années 1890, on montre que Peirce se sert de l’exemple photographique pour illustrer des points théoriques – comme la distinction entre icône et index – plutôt qu’il ne formule une théorie de l’image photographique – comme index, en particulier. Cette pratique de l’exemple photographique est ensuite interrogée dans sa double relation à un contexte historique – celui de la popularisation de la photographie vers 1890-1900 – et à la notion fréquemment invoquée dans la sémiotique peircienne de “savoir collatéral”, connaissance présupposée pour le fonctionnement correct des signes. La dernière partie de l’article propose de réinterroger la valeur d’exemplarité et la notion de connaissance collatérale dans le contexte de la photographie numérique, où certains commentateurs ont vu une mutation radicale de la sémiotique de l’image photographique. Est introduite ici à titre d’hypothèse la notion symétrique de “doute collatéral”, pour tenter de rendre compte d’un certain obscurcissement de la compréhension commune du fonctionnement technique de l’image photographique. Une courte postface indique que cette hypothèse reste à l’état de conjecture et fait état de quelques développements récents dans la discussion sur la vision peircienne de la photographie.

Peirce and the specification of borderline vagueness

Scholarship on borderline vagueness pinpoints Russell's 1923 essay titled “Vagueness” as the starting point for rigorous analysis. The importance of Russell's work over and above discussions of indeterminacy in antiquity and in the modern period is that Russell isolated borderline vagueness from indeterminacies that do not threaten classical logic. This paper argues that historical propriety concerning the analysis of borderline vagueness belongs to Peirce since he was the first to show that borderline vagueness is distinct from other forms of indeterminacy (e.g., generality, unspecificity, and uninformativeness) and that the application of vague predicates to borderline cases involves an intrinsic uncertainty.

Indeterminacy, Incompleteness, Indecision, and Other Semantic Phenomena

This paper explores the relationships between Davidson's indeterminacy of interpretation thesis and two semantic properties of sentences that have come to be recognized recently, namely semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision. More specifically, I will examine what the indeterminacy thesis entails for sentences of the form ‘By sentence S (or word w), agent A means that m’ and ‘Agent A believes that p.’ My primary goal is to shed light on the indeterminacy thesis and its consequences. I will distinguish two kinds of indeterminacy that have very different sources and very different consequences. But this does not purport to be an exhaustive study: there may well be other forms of indeterminacy that this paper does not address.I will first explain the phenomena of semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision, and then explore their relationships with the indeterminacy thesis.

The butterfly effect of small open economies

The rational expectations equilibrium of a small open economy can be subject to indeterminacy if foreign monetary policy does not satisfy the Taylor principle. We study the implications of foreign induced indeterminacy in the two-country version of the sticky-price small open economy model. Our main finding is that ‘smallness’ is a property of the unique rational expectations equilibrium of the large economy, and not a general property of the small open economy model. If the large economy fails to anchor expectations, shocks to the small economy can affect the large one. This form of indeterminacy gives rise to a ‘butterfly effect’. Additional assumptions are required to preserve the ‘smallness’ of the small economy.

Triangulation, Objectivity and the Ambiguity Problem

Davidson claims that a creature that has spent its entire life in isolation cannot have thoughts. His two reasons for this claim are that (i) interaction with another creature (what he calls "triangulation") is required to locate the cause of the creature's responses, and that (ii) linguistic communication is necessary to acquire the concept of objective truth, which is itself required in order to have thoughts. I argue that, at best, these two reasons imply that in order to have thoughts a creature must be capableof participating in triangulation, not that it must have already participated in triangulation. I then argue that triangulation doesn't solve the ambiguity problem; that is, it doesn't entail that a being's thoughts and utterances are about distal objects rather than proximal patterns of stimulation. Fortunately, ambiguity, like other forms of indeterminacy, doesn't entail that we cannot have thoughts.

Study of the Wada fractal boundary and indeterminate crisis

By using the generalized cell mapping digraph (GCMD) method, we study bifurcations governing the escape of periodically forced oscillators in a potential well, in which a chaotic saddle plays an extremely important role. In this paper, we find the chaotic saddle and we demonstrate that the chaotic saddle is embedded in a strange fractal boundary which has the Wada property, that any point on the boundary of that basin is also simultaneously on the boundary of at least two other basins. The chaotic saddle in the Wada fractal boundary, by colliding with a chaotic attractor, leads to a chaotic boundary crisis with a global indeterminate outcome which presents an extreme form of indeterminacy in a dynamical system. We also investigate the origin and evolution of the chaotic saddle in the Wada fractal boundary, particularly concentrating on its discontinuous bifurcations (metamorphoses). We demonstrate that the chaotic saddle in the Wada fractal boundary is created by the collision between two chaotic saddles in different fractal boundaries. After a final escape bifurcation, there only exists the attractor at infinity; a chaotic saddle with a beautiful pattern is left behind in phase space.

The economics of indeterminacy in overlapping generations models

Recent research indicates that there are robust examples of overlapping generations economies in which there are indeterminate equilibria without fiat money and equilibria with more than one dimension of indeterminacy. This paper presents simple examples of a stationary, pure exchange overlapping generations economy with one good in each period and a representative consumer, who lives for three periods, in each generation. These examples exhibit every possible form of indeterminacy and instability. Furthermore, the parameters of the principal example agree with empirical evidence. We use our examples as case studies for analyzing the problems involved in computing the equilibria of such economies.