Interpretive Assumptions Research Articles

One More Time

John Reichert's reply to Mark Roskill seems to me to be decisive in its main point, and I will only elaborate on it here. It is true, as Roskill contends, that one's reading of a line in Samson Agonistes (or any other work) is constrained by the context of the preceding and surrounding lines. What Roskill does not see is that the context is in place by virtue of a prior interpretive act which is itself vulnerable to challenge. That is, it is open to anyone who is told that the construing of a line is determined by the shape of a previous passage to disagree with the specification of that shape, and so to expand the area of interpretive dispute. If Nothing is here for tears . has been read in the light of Manoa's fatherly concern, a counterreading might proceed by calling that concern into question; of course, any such calling into question would itself proceed under the aegis of some interpretive assumption and would thus be challengeable in its turn. There is no end to this scenario (no bottom line), but that doesn't mean that everything is always in dispute (were that the case assertion would be impossible) but that everything is in principle disputable (a matter of interpretation), although for business to be done at all, there must be some things that are not in dispute at the moment.

Sensitivity Analysis of Household Structure In Medieval Serbian Censuses

The author provides an analysis of data on the family and household obtained from fourteenth-century Serbian monastery charters. The effect of different interpretive assumptions of household boundaries and male marital status on the analysis of household structure is examined. Differences in household and kinship organization between ethnic and occupational subgroups of the population are investigated (ANNOTATION)

But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish's essay, Normal Circumstances . . .and Other Special Cases (Critical Inquiry 4 [Summer 1978]: 625-44), is so agile and compelling that it may seem unduly quarrelsome to raise questions about it. But it presents a picture of the way we understand both events and texts that one would not, I presume, want to accept unless there were no conceivable escape. The essay suggests that literary texts and what they contain change; that two readers with different interpretive assumptions do not, indeed cannot, read the same text even if they are reading things called, say, Samson Agonistes, consisting of the same words in the same order; that meaning results from the interplay of our verbal and mental categories and situations alone and is not constrained by the language used; that there is no difference between direct and indirect speech acts; that the illocutionary force of any utterance is determined entirely by the context in which it is uttered.

The Social Origins of Some Early Americans: Rejoinder

Both Mildred Campbell's Social Origins of Some Early Americans' and my own recent reconsideration' deal with a single central problem: the interpretation of the evidence in two sets of seventeenth-century servant registrations for the social origins of those registered. Both papers acknowledge that the records pose some problems, yet both of us have made inferences and drawn conclusions from the evidence. All of our inferences are based on interpretive assumptions. The main purpose of this note is to make the assumptions entailed by each interpretation explicit, and to offer some evidence that bears on the relative plausibility of the different assumptions involved. The most difficult problem posed by the data results from the absence of any recorded occupations for large numbers of men in both sets of registrations. Several answers to the question why the occupations were not recorded have been suggested, but to date none has been universally accepted. Postponing the resolution of this question for the moment, it is possible to consider the different conclusions the data yield concerning the social and occupational groups from which the men without recorded occupations came. Two extreme assumptions can be used to establish the ranges within which any other allocation of these men will fall. One is that all the men without

Two interpretations of quantum mechanics.—I

We are going to analyse the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and examine the consequences of a class of assumptions which form a crucial part of this theory but are not usually discussed explicitly. The assumptions we are referring to could be described as «metaphysical assumptions». It might seem that physical theories should not use ideas with this name but we will try to show that every physical theory appears to incorporate some assumptions of this kind. In practice the metaphysical assumptions which a theory does use seem to be chosen by imposing a number of requirements two of which could be roughly described as «simplicity» and «believability». But we will show that the metaphysical assumptions of the Copenhagen interpretation generate a collection of difficulties and as a result do not appear to fulfil these conditions. In the second paper of this series another interpretation of quantum mechanics will be proposed which is free of the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation.

Anticipated choice, attention, and halo effect

An experiment was conducted to clarify the interpretation of a finding by O’Neal and Mills that the anticipation of making choices about other persons increases the intercorrelation of traits attributed to those persons. An attention interpretation of their finding assumes that greater attention was paid to the choice stimuli and that increased attention increased the intercorrelation of traits. Although the O’Neal-Mills finding was obtained, no support was found for either of the assumptions of the attention interpretation. Ss did not spend longer ranking the choice stimuli, and a successful manipulation of attention did not increase the intercorrelation of the rankings. It was concluded that a desire for certainty about the prospective choice provides the best explanation of the influence of anticipated choice on the halo effect.

Testimonios, discurso experto y comisiones de la verdad: el contexto de la denuncia

This text analyses Truth Commissions as a political mechanism engaging with two main questions: one, the central role of testimonies in providing both ethical and political legitimacy to truth commissions and information regarding the violation of human rights; two, the work of professionals from law and the social sciences in providing scientific legitimacy and in their position as ‘privileged’ witnesses of the truth-telling process. Throughout the analysis of a specific case —the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission— I discuss the possibilities of scientific knowledge to produce a more complete understanding of “the violence” and the need to question certain interpretative assumptions regarding the political agency of certain populations, in this case, of the Andean rural communities.

The interpretation of sociometric status scores in the classroom

SUMMARYSeveral interpretative assumptions are often made implicitly when using the results from sociometric choice-situations in education. It is often tacitly presupposed, for instance, that the sociometric status score is (a) relatively unaffected by primary preference method; (b) relatively unaffected by choice aspect (criterion); (c) relatively constant over time; (d) accompanied by individual awareness of the own relative sociometric situation; (e) correlated with measures of general adjustment and efficiency of the single individual; and (f) possible to interpret similarly in different countries.—These assumptions are discussed and confronted with data obtained in an investigation of Swedish school children.

Thematic Apperception Test: interpretive assumptions and related empirical evidence.

Thematic Apperception Test: interpretive assumptions and related empirical evidence.