Notion Of Coherence Research Articles

Cohering Culture on Calle Ocho: The Pause and Flow of Latinidad

The term latinidad invokes a pan-Latino/a solidarity which is at once intriguing and problematic. In this article, I explore latinidad as a situational coherence of place-specific social relations. In other words, latinidad is a contingent and cultural event. When culture is defined in this mutable, rather than static, fashion, the notion of situational coherence, decomposition, and recomposition becomes central. Thus culture, and latinidad as a cultural event, involves a dynamic interplay between flow and pause. This is an interplay which is mirrored at a broader level in my discussion of globalization, as well as more narrowly in the role of city streets from which the examples to illustrate the pause and flow of latinidad are drawn. Using examples from Miami, I suggest that solidarity amongst Latinos/as materializes—or fails to do so—in ways that illuminate an understanding of identity, place, and belonging.

Computation, Coherence, and Ethical Reasoning

Theories of moral, and more generally, practical reasoning sometimes draw on the notion of coherence. Admirably, Paul Thagard has attempted to give a computationally detailed account of the kind of...

Probabilistic Measures of Coherence and the Problem of Belief Individuation

Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as to whether the set is coherent tout court) depends on how beliefs (or propositions) that represent the set are individuated. Indeed, logically equivalent belief sets that represent the same information set can be given drastically different degrees of coherence. This feature clashes with our natural and reasonable expectation that the coherence degree of a belief set does not change unless the believer adds essentially new information to the set or drops old information from it; or, to put it simply, that the believer cannot raise or lower the degree of coherence by purely logical reasoning. None of the accounts in question can adequately deal with coherence once logical inferences get into the picture. Toward the end of the paper, another notion of coherence that takes into account not only the contents but also the origins (or sources) of the relevant beliefs is considered. It is argued that this notion of coherence is of dubious significance, and that it does not help solve the problem of belief individuation.

Teoría de la coherencia central: una revisión de los supuestos teóricos

ResumenLa teoría de coherencia central (Frith, 1989) ha tenido un gran impacto en el estudio del autismo. Aunque esta teoría ha sido acertada en explicar aspectos del autismo que otras teorías no pueden explicar, la teoría de coherencia central sufre de una desventaja teórica importante, a saber, la imprecisión de la definición del concepto de coherencia central. El objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre diversos aspectos del concepto de la coherencia central. Un aspecto de los que se trata en este artículo se refiere a la premisa de que el sesgo atencional en autismo hacia aspectos locales es el resultado de una dificultad en la capacidad de integrar la información. En segundo lugar, este artículo cuestiona la noción de la coherencia central como mecanismo central responsable de proporcionar coherencia perceptiva y conceptual en dominios visuales y verbales.

Ways in which coherence is confirmation conducive

Recent works in epistemology show that the claim that coherence is truth conducive – in the sense that, given suitable ceteris paribus conditions, more coherent sets of statements are always more probable – is dubious and possibly false. From this, it does not follows that coherence is a useless notion in epistemology and philosophy of science. Dietrich and Moretti (Philosophy of science 72(3): 403–424, 2005) have proposed a formal of account of how coherence is confirmation conducive—that is, of how the coherence of a set of statements facilitates the confirmation of such statements. This account is grounded in two confirmation transmission properties that are satisfied by some of the measures of coherence recently proposed in the literature. These properties explicate everyday and scientific uses of coherence. In his paper, I review the main findings of Dietrich and Moretti (2005) and define two evidence-gathering properties that are satisfied by the same measures of coherence and constitute further ways in which coherence is confirmation conducive. At least one of these properties vindicates important applications of the notion of coherence in everyday life and in science.

Global Poverty and Desert

Several reasons are offered to explain why global poverty is of no serious moral concern for the affluent of developed countries. Often it is claimed that there are no morally salient connections between our actions and their poverty. In the first part of this article I argue that there are important morally salient connections between the affluent of developed countries and those in poverty. Considerations of desert and (fair) entitlement can bring this into better view. I argue that there are significant problems with the notion of desert that we typically invoke to defend our holdings. When we try to reconstruct a coherent notion of desert, we find we must be committed to a principle of (fair) equality of opportunity, so we must care about people's starting positions and desert-generating processes, in order for any claims of desert to defensibly gain moral recognition.

Hydrological forecasting uncertainty assessment: Incoherence of the GLUE methodology

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the incoherence, in terms of Bayesian inference, of the generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) approach, introduced by Beven and Binley in 1992. This results into a reduced capacity of the technique to extract information, in other words to “learn”, from observations. The paper also discusses the implications of this reduced learning capacity for parameter estimation and hydrological forecasting uncertainty assessment, which has led to the definition of the “equifinality” principle. The notions of coherence for learning and prediction processes as well as the value of a statistical experiment are introduced. These concepts are useful in showing that the GLUE methodology defines a statistical inference process, which is inconsistent and incoherent.

Montreal-Glasgow

Edited by Bill Marshall. University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 2005. xiv+262 pp. Pb £15.00. This well-edited volume deals with the culture (in the broadest sense) of two great cities and is divided into several sections: Architecture, History, Literature, Theatre, Film and Television, and Exchanges. The approach is largely but not exclusively comparative. Holly Kinnear shows how personalities involved with both cities were responsible for the impact made on their urban landscapes by the Beaux-Arts movement, and François Dufaux underlines the high proportion of rental accommodation in the shape of multi-family tenement-type buildings to be found in both cities, but notes a number of differences in their architectural conceptions. Alena Prochazka discusses the extent to which major new buildings in Montreal conform to the established character of the city's built environment. Iain Stevenson studies the Canadian Pacific service of passenger liners that linked the two cities for much of the twentieth century, illustrating the chapter with several stunning poster images. The Scottish presence in Montreal is explored in two chapters by Gillian Leitch and Paul-André Linteau, and Harold Bérubé compares major commemorations of their history, during the crises of depression or war, by the two cities as well as by Toronto. The fine arts are represented by Alexandria Pierce's study of Lord Strathcona's art collection in nineteenth-century Montreal. Sébastien Socqué highlights the importance of the writer and politican, André Laurendeau, in integrating Montreal's cosmopolitan and exceptional character into a coherent notion of French Canada. As for literature, Maureen E. Waters explores the Gothic in the urban landscape of the two cities, although her text reads like the synopsis of a much longer work. Jacques Cardinal provides a dense interpretation of Jacques Ferron's novel, Les Confitures de coings, highlighting the political dimension of the work. Jean-François Chassay compares Gaétan Soucy's L'Immaculée Conception (1994) and Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers (1999), but the two novels seem too distant, in every sense, to lead to significant insights. Bill Findlay demonstrates how Glasgow audiences were particularly receptive to translations into vernacular Scots, by Martin Bowman and Findlay himself, of plays by Michel Tremblay, because of the continuing tradition of variety theatre in the city. David Hutchison studies the manner in which television drama with a Glasgow context portrays working-class, but rarely middle-class, experience and hence in some sense betrays the complexity of modern Scottish, especially Glaswegian, life. Pierre Véronneau, in a notably well-written text, contrasts the approaches to Montreal of two of French Canada's most significant film directors, Denys Arcand and Charles Binamé, and Bill Marshall's contribution is a well-realized comparison of the work for the cinema of Marc-André Forcier and Peter Mullan. The book concludes with Mark Rowbotham's study of Prestwick's Freeport and Montreal-Mirabel's foreign trade zone, a feature of the two cities likely to be little known outside business circles, and Michel Sarra-Bournet's overview of Montreal's cultural institutions, their history and probable future directions. This is, all in all, a varied and stimulating volume.

Scholastik und Seelsorge in den Predigten der SammlungParadisus Anime Intelligentis

The article investigates to what extent the university debates of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had an impact on het content of contemporary vernacular sermons. The focus is on the collection Paradisus anime intelligentis, a set of more than sixty, mainly Dominican, sermons from various authors, written around 1300 and brought together in the first part of the fourteenth century. Of these sermons, all of which deal with the issue of how human beings can have knowledge of the divine essence, thirty-one were written by Meister Eckhart. As is shown in the course of the investigation, the results of academic debates were used to corroborate and exemplify the theological views expressed in the sermons, yet without engagement in the philosophical and theological debates themselves. Another striking point is that concerning the crucial issue of the role of the agent intellect. In different sermons, the conflicting views of Thomas Aquinas and Dietrich of Freiberg are represented, notwithstanding the fact that the collection was designed as a unity. Obviously, for the compiler of the ‘Paradisus anime intelligentis’, the notion of philosophical coherence played a role different from the employed in university circles.

Accountability, acknowledgement and the ethics of “quilting” in Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Summary This paper is primarily concerned with accountability and acknowledgement, and their relationship to one another, in Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull (1998). Arguing that both accountability and acknowledgement become ethically problematic in Krog's transposition of one form of textual practice to another (for example, her transposing of testimony and of academic non‐fictional texts into fictional narrative or poetry), the paper proposes that two very different ethical problems arise in Country of My Skull because of an elision of textual and generic frames that ultimately erases traces to textual “origins”: whether that origin be the testimonies given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, or other textual materials used by Krog in the making of this text. The ethical consequence of this muddying of genres and textual frames is twofold: first, the appropriation of individual testimonial voices and, second, plagiarism ‐ two very different ethical transgressions which, nevertheless, bear consideration alongside one another since the two may be seen to emerge from the same textual practice as Krog's; what she refers to as “quilting”. While Krog sees textual quilting as allowing for a multivocal text that does not present a singular or coherent notion of national truth, I will argue that it also allows Krog to transpose one form of textuality into a different generic frame altogether. While this is not in and of itself problematic, the ethical consequences of the transposition, reinterpretation, and transformation of one textual object to another require careful consideration. The paper ultimately suggests that fictional and poetic texts need to acknowledge and be accountable to the original texts that they transpose and transform by providing the reader with a clear and interpretable trace‐back to that original.

Possibility theory: Conditional independence

The subtle notion of conditioning is controversial in several contexts, for example in possibility theory where, in fact, different definitions have been introduced. We refer to a general axiomatic definition of conditional possibility and then we deal with “partial assessments” on (not necessarily structured) domains containing only elements of interest. We study a notion of coherence, which assures the extendability of an assessment as a conditional possibility and we introduce a procedure for checking coherence. Moreover, we propose a definition of independence for conditional possibility, which avoids some counterintuitive situations, and we study its main properties in order to compare it with other definitions introduced in literature. Then, we check which properties among the graphoid ones are satisfied: this allows to compare our definition with other independence notions given in the context of other uncertainty formalisms. This analysis is relevant for graphical models in order to single out and visualize dependence relations among random variables.

The Canadian Hockey Association Merger and the Emergence of the Amateur Sport Enterprise

The purpose of this article is to understand the nature of large-scale organizational change within amateur sport through the analysis of a merger between two hockey organizations. This study expands upon the research on Canadian national sport organizations established by Kikulis, Slack, and Hinings (1992) by identifying a new archetype—the Amateur Sport Enterprise. In particular, the study presents a case analysis of the 1994 merger between the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association and Hockey Canada to form the Canadian Hockey Association . The results of the qualitative case study revealed that, contrary to previous notions of archetype coherence, aspects of competing archetypes might coexist within an organizational form or, more specifically, within particular elements of an organizational form. The characteristics of the Amateur Sport Enterprise archetype are discussed and implications for future sport management research are addressed.

Bodily Negation: Carl Schmitt on the Meaning of Meaning

The critique most commonly leveled at the decisionist theories of the jurist and political thinker Carl Schmitt accuses him of an aestheticizing formalism that serves primarily to protect the political status quo. To endorse the purely formal structure of decision without regard for the specificity of its content means, so the argument runs, to abandon humanity to its present corrupt conditions, since a political theory devoid of a substantive, normative thrust cannot hope to produce a coherent notion of progressive change.' Such accusations cast Schmitt in the role of the political romantic-a role that would have been an anathema to Schmitt himself, whose early work includes an extended polemic against the political impotence of nineteenth-century Romantic occasionalism, and its arbitrary assignation of subjective meaning to the reified forms of an increasingly mechanized world.2 In the course of this polemic, Schmitt attempts to demonstrate that Romanticism must be understood in its historical concreteness as a

Coherence Between Theories

This paper explores the conceptual dimension in theory acceptance, throws light on the notion of coherence between theories, and emphasizes the role of coherence between theories in theory acceptance. It is important, however, to recognize that the empirical-conceptual distinction, like most other distinctions in philosophy, is only pragmatic because purely empirical or conceptual notions in science are rare. That is, the term ‘conceptual’ is actually used in the sense of ‘mostly conceptual’, and the term ‘empirical’ signifies what is predominantly empirical. Yet it is useful in many contexts to speak of conceptual and empirical merits of theories separately. Among the commonly discussed conceptual merits of a theory are internal consistency, simplicity, comprehensiveness, and coherence with existing theories. Empirical merits include accommodating known evidence and passing experimental tests. The focus of this paper is coherence between theories.

"Selling Lifestyles, not Homes": Growth and Politics in Forsyth County, Georgia

Forsyth County, Georgia, was one of the fastest growing counties in the nation during the 1990s. This paper examines how it benefited from the general Atlanta boom yet grew through differentiating itself both from the central city and neighboring suburban counties. The irony of rapid development is that issues such as pollution and heavy traffic have made Forsyth's 'go-it-alone' attitude progressively more untenable, while the county is now increasingly indistinguishable from much of the rest of Atlanta. Framed within David Harvey's notion of structured coherence, this paper argues that Forsyth provides an excellent example of intra-urban competition amid the uneven development of a metropolitan region.

Bovens and Hartmann on Coherence

In 'Solving the Riddle of Coherence' (2003), Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann present a new and ambitious probabilistic theory of coherence. This note argues that their theory sits badly with some pre-theoretical convictions regarding the notion of coherence. We start by outlining the theory, then state two intuitive counterexamples to it, and finally describe a general method for generating such counterexamples. Call any finite set of propositions one has acquired through consulting information sources an information set. It is assumed that one has been informed about each item in an information set by a separate source, that the sources are independent of one another, and that they are equally reliable to a degree r E (o, 1), where r = 1 indicates full reliability and r = o full unreliability (so the sources are assumed to be neither fully reliable nor fully unreliable). Given an information set S = {R1, . . ., Rn} and a probability distribution pt ) over the elements of S, let 'ai' stand for the sum of the probabilities of all conjunctions of n i elements of S and the negations of the remaining i elements of S. So, for instance, if S = {R1, R2}, then aO = p(Rl / R2), al = p(Rl A mR2) + p('R / R2) and a2 = p('Rl / 'R2). In contrast to other recent probabilistic theories of coherence, Bovens and Hartmann do not attempt to define a measure that determines the absolute degree of coherence for any information set. Rather their approach is a comparative one, central to which is the two-place relation of being no less coherent than, '> '. For any two information sets S = {R1, ..., Rm}) S = {R 1) ) R n}) this relation is defined as follows:

Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth (review)

Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth. Edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli. Translated by Kenneth Chalmers and Mary Whitall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. [xiv, 456 p. ISBN 0-22644592-7. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Originally published in 1988 in Italian as volume 6 of the Storia dett'opera italiana, this welcome and useful book is the second from the original series to appear in English translation. other, Opera Production and its Resources, was published in Italian in 1987 and in English in 1998. These two selections from the original series seem to represent a decision to provide translations of items of interest to academics, students, and others attracted to substantive writing about opera where Italian scholarship provides insight not readily available in English. Although variable in quality, these essays will appeal to all serious students of Italian opera. Written by different authors, each of the six chapters does not center on a single, easily articulated theme. Indeed the title of the book fails to provide a coherent notion of its contents. They combine, however, to form a reasonably unified collection of essays addressing various aspects of the aesthetics, meaning, reception, and diffusion of Italian opera primarily within its native culture. These aspects are essential to understanding Italian opera fully, yet they can be rather difficult to access by those who were not raised in an Italian context, let alone those who struggle with the language. first half of the volume includes three chapters, the first on treatises and other writings on opera, the second on dramaturgy, and the third on poetic structures and their relationships to musical composition. These topics form the most useful and closely united part of the book. editors have included bibliographic notes at the end of each of these chapters that guide the user into more detailed writings. essays coupled with the notes serve as excellent introductions to the individual topics. first chapter, Poetics and Polemics, by Renato di Benedetto, provides an overview of polemical writing on opera primarily by Italians in Italy beginning in the late sixteenth century and extending into the twentieth. Criticisms by non-Italians are addressed only when there was a direct connection to the thinking and writing on the Italian peninsula. For example, di Benedetto refers to the well-known preface to Gluck's Alceste pointing out that one of its most celebrated passages repeats almost word for word a concept expressed before by Francesco Algarotti in his Saggio sopra l'opera in musica (p. 25). Di Benedetto notes that all of the arguments for and against opera begin with the question of its aspirations. Can, or even should, opera aspire to assume the role of legitimate heir to ancient tragedy and restorer of the mythical, lost unity of text, music, and action? (p. 3). As time passed, the precise nature of the query evolved, yet the question of what opera should be or become, and comparisons to other art forms, frequently of the past, persisted. Such polemical writing stands in contrast to contemporary descriptions by authors who seem content with opera as itself. Of course, the arguments ultimately underscore the cultural, intellectual, and even political investment in Italian opera. It is hard to imagine that such a struggle would even occur without considerable cultural and political capital in play. Immediately following the discussion of polemics, Carl Dahlhaus brings his considerable intellect to bear on The Dramaturgy of Italian Opera. This is a notable exception to the rest of the volume, which could be characterized as Italian opera as viewed by Italians. Appearing in the original volume in Italian translation from the original German and translated directly from the German for this volume, Dahlhaus provides a logical oudine in considering the dramaturgy of the genre (or perhaps better stated, genres) beginning with a discussion of what operatic dramaturgy is. …

Reply to comment on “Complete electromagnetic coherence in the space–frequency domain”

We emphasize that the visibility of interference fringes is not an appropriate characteristic for the electromagnetic degree of coherence. Our definition is consistent with the notions of complete coherence. All points put forward in the Comment were already noted in our previous publication [Opt. Express11, 1137 (2003)].

Lower previsions induced by multi-valued mappings

We discuss how lower previsions induced by multi-valued mappings fit into the framework of the behavioural theory of imprecise probabilities, and show how the notions of coherence and natural extension from that theory can be used to prove and generalise existing results in an elegant and straightforward manner. This provides a clear example for their explanatory and unifying power.

Beyond complicity: coherence, queer theory, and the rhetoric of the “gay Christian movement”

This essay argues that Soulforce, one of the largest organizations working for the inclusion of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people in society and in Christian churches, is complicit with evangelical rhetoric. By accepting the choice vs. nonchoice binary as the only option for “homosexual” experience, Soulforce essentializes “homosexual” identity. Using the methods of textual analysis and rhetorical criticism, this essay extends Mark Lawrence McPhail's notions of complicity and coherence, read through queer theory, in order to analyze Soulforce's rhetoric. Through blindly accepting that sexuality is either chosen or not, Soulforce allows evangelicals to set the parameters for discussions on sexuality. Queer theory helps to destabilize this binary opposition, and McPhail provides a broad lens with which to understand the rhetoric. This essay concludes that elements of queer theory may help to reveal ways Soulforce can move from complicity to coherence.